Four Mothers of Invention

Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin set the pace and Americans have been inventing ever since. Last year we set a record.

*

“In 1992 we received 185,446 applications and issued 109,728 patents, the highest number in history,” says Oscar Mastin at the U.S. Patent Office.

More than 25% of the patents went to independent inventors--individuals working in their basements, attics or garages. And what were they working on?

Nothing grandiose, says Stephen Gnass of Los Angeles, who founded the annual Invention Convention in 1987. “For the most part, independent inventors are fixing problems with existing products that they see in everyday life.”

Home-based inventors, he says, tend to be mechanical, have very little business experience and can become obsessed with projects. This may drive their families crazy, but inventors are usually very happy, adds Gnass.

“They are making little tiny corrections in life that will help us all.”

Here are the stories of four Southern California inventors.

*

It was during Southern California’s record-breaking drought of 1991 that Mario Marinaccio of Chatsworth got his idea for a household water meter.

“We were all doing our part--I let my grass die trying to conserve water,” he recalls. “Then the city said every household needed to cut usage by 10%. The problem wasn’t in cutting back--it was in figuring out how much we were using in the first place.”

He made one attempt to lug the metal lid off his outdoor DWP meter and beam a flashlight through the spider webs to the dusty dials that measured use not in gallons but in water units.

“Ridiculous,” says Marinaccio, who knew he could do better. And he did, coming up with the WaterMate, which monitors household use in gallons, liters, cubic feet and water units. It costs less than $60, is easy to install and looks handsome enough that it won first place from the GE Plastics Professional Design Competition.

“It took us two years to finalize,” says Marinaccio, who worked with electronics engineer Jim Johnson and tool and die maker Ron Lukas.

Customers are finding uses Marinaccio hadn’t foreseen, such as measuring ground water in greenhouses and monitoring individual units of a single-meter apartment building. Car washes use the meter and even wineries buy it to measure wine. The WaterMate now comes in several models and Marinaccio is already thinking of spinoff functions such as a control for watering trees or shrubbery.

The meter was a new direction, but not a change in philosophy for Marinaccio, 52, a specialist in industrial security systems. “I’ve built products all my life,” he says. “I was always a fixer.”

Born in Italy, and raised in Buffalo, N.Y., he served in the Air Force, and then, 28 years ago, he and his wife, Marianna, settled in Southern California. He got a job with a company that made card keys to open doors and has been developing and marketing security access control products ever since.

He started his own company, WaterMate Technology Corp., in Northridge, to manufacture the home meter. “One of the problems with being an inventor is that you have to find something to do with products after you invent them,” he says.

Marinaccio sees himself as an instinctive problem-solver. “If I decide to invent a product--like something helpful for my car--nothing happens. But if you tell me you’re having a problem crawling behind the Christmas tree to turn the lights on (as his wife did), I’ll build you a remote switch.”

The Marinaccios’ two-story Spanish stucco house includes Mario’s large workshop. But before he sits down at a sketch board or computer (“I have an enormous amount of software for graphics and visual stuff”), he works the problem out mentally, which may take weeks.

“If I get enthused about an idea, it doesn’t leave my mind until I get the bugs worked out. My wife and I can be out to dinner with a group and I’ll get that glazed look and she’ll say, ‘Mario’s away somewhere.’ ”

*

Londi Palmisano perches on the edge of what appears to be a mod ottoman in her West Los Angeles living room and begins to ease backward, draping herself over the cushion into a relaxed backbend.

“You go down slowly, to find your center of balance,” she says, arching her back and stretching her arms over her head.

“The idea is to let go of your body without using any muscles. It’s a passive stretch and there is no other way to do it. The first time you try it, you see how inflexible your spine really is.”

The object that allows Palmisano to perfect this liberating stretch is an invention she has been working on for more than three years--a cushioned top on an oval-shaped base with balance bars on either end. She has named it the Archer. “I was a massage therapist for 12 years. I know from working with people that all of us have stress and tension in our bodies, and most of us put it in our neck, back and shoulders,” she says.

“I had it visually in my head for a long time--a way to bend backward without using muscles.”

Palmisano’s hometown is New Orleans, but she has moved around a lot, and lived in Los Angeles several times. A couple of years ago in Austin, Tex., she got serious about her project.

“What I always envisioned was something like a piece of furniture, with a slick design,” she says, “so it would be right there and you wouldn’t have to drag it out of the closet.”

Conferring with a woodworker about massage tables, she mentioned her backbend idea, and he built a crude prototype. She nailed some fabric over the frame and painted it with white shoe polish. It was ugly, she says, but the idea was right.

She took the project to a woodworker who built fine furniture, and the result was her graceful prototype--a whitewashed maple plywood frame with forest green upholstery. She learned she should log every step of her work in a notebook and have each entry signed by witnesses. (The U.S. patent system is based on “first to invent,” rather than “first to file,” and documenting the conception is considered good groundwork for patent filing.)

The first entry in her notebook is “self-induced, gravity-assisted, intersegmental traction machine,” which describes her invention. Palmisano, 49, can’t afford to hire a patent attorney and doesn’t want to use the complicated do-it-yourself patenting papers that are available. She plans to patent her invention when she can.

At this stage, she has two choices: Get into business and manufacture the Archer herself or license the prototype to a company that will make and sell the product, paying her a royalty.

She moved back to Los Angeles four months ago and is doing temporary secretarial work while she tries to get the Archer into production. She’s encouraged that NordicTrack, a fitness equipment manufacturer, is evaluating it.

“It’s on your mind all the time,” she says. “This is my passion and I’m going to do something with it.”

*

“I’ve always been a creative thinker,” says Harrison Kaufman. “I just like to think of better ways to do things.”

Kaufman, 26, is marketing his computer diskette holder called a PopPak. “It’s not my first invention, but it’s my biggest one,” he says. “I’m going for two big markets--office supplies and computers. We have high hopes for it.”

The idea was hatched when he was an architectural student at the California College of Arts and Crafts in San Francisco. He needed a carrier for pens and pencils, so he and a partner designed a plastic holder that folds flat and pops open into a compact stand-up container. Kaufman later bought out the partner and is marketing a whole line of PopPak products, including the one for diskettes.

When Kaufman was about 8, he designed a toothbrush with a self-contained supply of toothpaste.

“I was going to make life easier,” he says. “Then I discovered there were already seven patents on a toothbrush like that. You can’t just invent something. You have to know how to get it onto the shelf.”

He attributes his success to family support--parents and grandparents who “gave me the best encouragement and the best education possible.” Kaufman took courses at the Art Center College of Design, studied sculpture in France, spent a year at Oxford University studying economics, lived for a while in Japan where he learned origami. Last year he took some business classes at USC.

All this sharpened his skills. “I used to get paid by a marketing group just to walk the aisles of a grocery store and invent new niche products,” says Kaufman. “For instance, I would look at coffee filters, and then tea bags, and ask why don’t you make little tea bags with coffee in them?

“I have a lot of different companies I am involved in. I have three patents--fully licensed, numbered and everything--and a lot of pending patents. I’ve got trademark people who specialize in that, people who litigate for me and people who file my patents, and an agent in Washington who does my (patent) searches for me.

Despite all this, it has taken four years to get the PopPak into distribution. “You have to focus and stay with it,” says Kaufman.

He licensed the product to a Los Angeles manufacturing company called Color Rings Notebooks Inc.

“He was just in college when he showed me the product, but he was very careful,” says the firm’s vice president, Steve Josephson. “I had to go into a room with no windows and sign a non-disclosure form. He knew the correct steps to take and I recognized it immediately as something useful.”

“People with laptops love this thing,” Josephson says. “If you use a portable and are always on the go, you have to use the 3.5-inch diskette and this is the only thing on the market that isn’t somewhat bulky. And for students, it fits into backpacks or purses.”

Kaufman, who’s also working on an environmentally correct detergent and a soft-drink line, thinks of himself as a “kind of Renaissance person” when it comes to inventing. “I’ve got the perfect mix of business and creative sides. I name it, I put it in an interesting package and I put it on the shelf. Whereas, I’ve met a lot of inventors who have so many things still sitting in their garage.”

*

“I know it’s a cliche, but necessity really is the mother of invention,” says preschool teacher Giselle Nagy of Reseda. “Whenever you have a problem, there’s an invention lurking there somewhere.”

For Nagy, 31, the problem was simple: Her car, an aging Chevy Malibu, didn’t have a drink holder. “I needed something to hold coffee on my way to work in the morning. And when I leave the gym, I usually have water or juice. I wanted something versatile that could hold a can or bottle or coffee cup with a handle. The ones I found were either too big or too small.”

Her solution--an accessory she invented and named the Helping Hand--is currently being shipped to stores across the country. “I’m a creative person,” she says. “I’ve always been interested in art, and I’m also mechanical. As a kid, I could always fix my own bicycle.”

The journey from garage prototype to the retail shelf took six years, she says. “You almost have to be obsessed.”

She started at the drawing board by designing a plastic container with a flexible rim that could accommodate any size beverage holder and had a slot for a mug handle.

Then she shopped building-supply stores and hobby shops, buying plastic “odds and ends.” With a hacksaw, X-acto knife and Krazy Glue, she created the cup holder she had in mind.

The next question was how to mount it. She didn’t like the models that attach to car doors or windows or to suction cups on the dashboard.

“I was looking all around on the dashboard for a spot that wouldn’t interfere with the operation of the vehicle. Then I saw the slot for the cigarette lighter--I’d taken my lighter out when I quit smoking.”

So she designed a molded plastic holder for mounting in the cigarette lighter, and it worked perfectly. That’s when she began to think about mass production. “All cars have lighters in a convenient spot, but most people don’t smoke anymore. It turns out there are more than a hundred million Americans who don’t use their lighters anymore--all these people driving around with unused lighters in their cars.”

With the help of a loan from her mother, Nagy hired a patent attorney associated with an invention-promotion firm. The cost was about $4,000, and Nagy doesn’t think it was worth the investment because the company didn’t do much to get her design licensed for manufacture. Her biggest help, she says, was David Pressman’s book “Patent It Yourself,” from Nolo Press in Berkeley. “One of the things he tells you is not to go with just any company. I wanted one with the financial resources and the capability to distribute nationally.”

Nagy also took on a business partner, Bari Slovis, a longtime friend and classmate from Cleveland High School whose specialty is market research.

Nagy and Slovis took the prototype to the 1990 Los Angeles Invention Convention and did a market survey. The overall response was positive, Slovis says. “We knew we had a hit product. The hard part was finding somebody who wanted to put a lot of money into the mold. It’s been a long, grueling process to get it to market.”

When they finally got a positive response from Allied Plastics of Gastonia, N.C., a national company, they were elated.

“This was one of my choice prospects responding to me,” says Nagy. Allied has already distributed the Helping Hand to Pep Boys and Target stores and will expand to other chains by the end of the year, she says.