Trio Ready for Beating of Paths to Their Doors

It’s the driving force behind almost every inventor: Build a better mousetrap and the world will beat a path to your door. And, as three Orange County inventors recently have discovered, successful inventions don’t have to be electronic or computer-related to be successful.

Money can be made with something as simple as a good idea for picking up pins and paper clips before they choke your vacuum cleaner or pierce your foot.

One local inventor hopes to make it big with a shaving mirror.

And Robert Spiller, 49, a computer software designer by trade, followed the unwritten credo of inventors and built what he believes is truly a better mousetrap--one that catches the rodents alive and encases them in a plastic box, saving the squeamish from the necessity of looking at or handling a dead mouse.

When Spiller and his wife moved to Laguna Hills in 1980, the inventor said, the “previous tenants” of the land his house was built on--field mice--were reluctant to give up the property. Spiller placed traditional spring-type mousetraps around his house but found they weren’t too effective--the mice kept stealing the bait.

And, Spiller said, “the traps wouldn’t always kill the animal. Sometimes I’d come into a room and find an injured mouse dragging a trap behind it.” Glue boards, which combined with snap traps make up 98% of the sales in the mousetrap market, are even more gruesome. “A horrible lingering death” for the mouse, Spiller said. “All in all, it was pretty revolting.”

Reasoning that the primary purpose of a mousetrap was to rid a building of a mouse, not necessarily to rid the world of a mouse, Spiller decided that what he wanted was a trap that captured the creature and provided easy transport off the premises.

He spent about 2 1/2 years perfecting his initial design, testing prototypes in the “laboratory” of his mouse-infested garage. With his traps, Spiller said, he caught three to four mice a night--a much better yield than from the snap traps he had been using.

Despite his wife’s initial skepticism over the time he spent tinkering on his trap, Spiller ultimately created an approximately one-inch wide tapered rectangular plastic box with a hinged door. The floor of the trap, he said, is basically a see-saw.

Once an unwary mouse smells the bait and takes several steps into the trap, the mouse’s weight tilts the floor, and the door slams down. The mouse is unharmed and can then be removed from the house for deposit elsewhere.

With the design perfected, Spiller applied for a patent in 1983. While the patent was pending, he mailed several prototype traps and a 15-page outline of his product’s attributes to the Woodstream Corp. of Lititz, Pa. Woodstream manufactures the Victor brand snap-type traps and the Havahart line of live-capture traps for larger animals.

Spiller’s trap was subjected to a battery of tests by the company to see if it was as foolproof as its inventor claimed and to see, Spiller said, “whether the issue of humaneness was really relevant in the marketplace.”

Enough consumers surveyed by the company said they would indeed pay more money for a live-capture trap to convince Woodstream of its marketability--and Spiller was home free.

“Simplicity is beautiful,” said Joseph Bumsted, Woodstream’s vice president in charge of pest control. “(The trap) looked like it would work, and we proceeded in a positive manner from that point forward.”

Nationally marketed under the Havahart brand name, Spiller’s trap will be carried by Ace Hardware stores and several hardware distributors, Bumsted said. In addition, Woodstream is negotiating distribution terms with a major discount drugstore chain, he said.

West Coast buyers can expect to see Spiller’s traps on store shelves by late 1986. Woodstream, Bumsted said, expects sales of the trap to be in the “hundreds of thousands.”

But humaneness does have its cost--two Havahart traps retail for $2.98, contrasted with two Victor snap traps for 89 cents.

Spiller said that his royalty on the product--based on a percentage of net sales--would garner him approximately $15,000 for every million traps sold.

Spiller said he is not content to rest on his laurels, though. He has designed and is marketing a computer program which plays gin rummy.

Bck in 1982, Jon and Cheryl Good’s four sons--there’s a fifth now--were depressed because their parents’ invention put them out of a job.

Good, 31, and his wife are professional janitors. One of the problems they continually encountered in vacuuming large office buildings was the vast number of paper clips and staples on the floors.

Their vacuum cleaners wouldn’t suck up the pieces of metal, so the Goods pressed their sons into service. Armed with Styrofoam cups and fired up by the promise of a penny per paper clip (or staple), the boys foraged while mom and dad cleaned. But the kids couldn’t always help out, and there was many a time that the Goods were forced to stoop and retrieve the irritating bits of metal themselves.

One day in October, 1982, Cheryl Good said, she found two car speaker magnets. As she walked out in the yard of the couple’s Garden Grove home to show the magnets to her husband, she passed a metal file cabinet and the powerful magnet clanged against it.

“I looked at her,” Good said, “and she looked at me, and I knew my days of bending over to pick up paper clips were over.”

Next time, instead of using the kids, the Goods tried out small magnets behind the intake area of the vacuum cleaner.

Other companies manufacture magnetic attachments that are bolted onto the front of the intake area of a vacuum, but the Goods originated the idea of putting the magnets behind and underneath.

“It worked like a charm,” Jon Good said. “Many people wouldn’t think it would work back there but when I started vacuuming, the metal objects were thrown right back to the magnets. I found so much stuff I couldn’t believe it.”

Four years and $40,000 later, the Goods are the proud owners of a coveted utility patent for their Metal Vac Magnetic Vacuum Attachments.

The patent cost $8,000--depriving the couple of a 10th-wedding-anniversary vacation to Hawaii, Cheryl said.

But while a design patent protects only the specific design of a product, a utility patent means that the Goods have sole ownership of the idea of putting magnets underneath a vacuum cleaner for the next 17 years--no one else can introduce a magnet that installs on the underside and behind the intake area, regardless of its design.

Like Spiller’s mousetrap, the Goods’ invention is simple--a circular bracket is bolted onto the underside of the vacuum. After vacuuming, the magnet is popped out of the bracket, cleaned off and snapped back into place.

But the effort has been worth the cost, the Goods said. Marketing of the Metal Vac is in full swing with the Goods officially introducing the magnets to the public at a trade show for professional janitors in Las Vegas this month.

The couple also have filmed a television commercial that will run on Channel 6 in San Diego, touting the magnets as a safety feature in homes with small children. And, Jon Good said, the family has signed a distribution agreement with Western Pacific Associates, an Anaheim distributor, that will be worth at least $4,000 a month for at least the next three months for the Goods.

The attachments are already used, Jon Good said, by the Best Western and Hilton Hotel chains for room cleaning.

The magnets, which fit all Hoover and Eureka upright vacuums, retail for $9.95 and are available in Southern California at Fedco Department stores or from the Metal Vac offices in Corona del Mar. Good, still a janitor, said that his sons--despite their jobs’ being made obsolete by Mom and Dad’s invention--”really talk up the product at school.”

Yugoslavia-born Zlatko Zadro was enjoying cocktails with some friends when he heard the words that changed his life. If someone could invent a mirror that did not fog in the shower, one of Zadro’s friends said, that man would make millions.

While Zadro, 35, is a long way from being a millionaire, he has created Z’Fogless Shower Mirror which, he said, is larger in size than other competing shower mirrors and does not require soap or chemicals to keep the surface of the mirror from fogging up.

“A tremendous amount of men shave in the shower,” Zadro said. “The mirror makes the unpleasant task of shaving more pleasant.” By shaving in the shower, Zadro said he saves 10 minutes preparing for work in the morning, and “you don’t have your wife yelling at you for leaving the sink dirty with beard in it.”

Zadro spent many months perfecting his mirror, eliminating things he could not use in the design like electricity and chemicals. His first prototype blew up on him, showering him with water. Finally, he hit on a method of siphoning off some of the hot water in the shower and circulating it behind the mirror, thereby keeping the mirror fogless by having it the same temperature as the shower.

He tested his perfected invention at 6 a.m. one Sunday morning about a year ago, Zadro said, and woke up everyone in the house with his jubilant yelling and screaming.

Twenty prototypes were sent to Zadro’s friends for use in their showers while he applied for a patent.

The patent is still pending, but Zadro has forged ahead, spending $300,000 earned in his previous career as a computer salesman to establish Zadro Products in Fountain Valley.

While developing other products, Zadro and the five employees of his company are working to establish national distribution channels for the mirror. In his first month of shipping, Zadro said, he sent off 500 mirrors. Now in his third month of deliveries, he said orders have been increasing at a rate of 300% a month.

Zadro said that in Northern California, the mirrors--which retail for $29.95--are being carried by the J.C. Penney department store chain. In Southern California, they can be found at Holiday Hardware stores, he said, and in the Eastern United States at Abraham & Straus, a division of Federated Department Stores Inc. based in Cincinnati.

There is one drawback to the invention, though. “I have a lot of problems shaving the old way when I’m out of town,” Zadro said.