Thinkers and Tinkerers : There’s nothing out there that can’t be improved. But inventors face long odds in the marketplace.
When Jerry Iggulden appeared on national television recently to plug his latest invention, it must have gone over with TV sponsors about as well as billboard graffiti.
His high-tech creation--brand-named Com mercial-Free--automatically skips over commercials when you record programs on your VCR.
“It’s not exactly what you’d call a cure for a disease,” points out Iggulden, 44, founder of Encino-based Invention Management Associates Inc., “except that it can save the world from a few minutes of boredom.”
With Commercial-Free (expected to enter the market this spring) and another invention called Custom Control (which can simplify remote controls and other household devices by allowing users to add, remove or position buttons for only the functions they desire), Iggulden will become one of those rare inventors--only one in 10, the experts say--whose products even reach assembly lines.
He’s an exception among the countless Valley-area inventors and would-be inventors who cling to their day jobs while chasing dreams and schemes of building better mousetraps or brighter light bulbs. They are not exactly blazing the kinds of trails left by America’s Edisons, Bells, Fords and Wrights at the turn of the century.
“Where do inventions come from?” asks Alan Arthur Tratner, president of the educational foundation Inventors Workshop International. “Serendipity. A bolt out of the blue. A light going on in the middle of the night.”
Inside his modest Canoga Park house--where he and his budding inventor wife, Stephanie, organize workshop activities, including a bimonthly magazine (The Lightbulb Journal)--Tratner speaks forcefully, like the lecturer he is. (He’ll speak on marketing and protecting inventions from 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday at the Learning Tree University in Chatsworth.)
“Inventing entrepreneurship made us the envy of the Free World,” Tratner says, sitting at his home-office desk cluttered with colorful items and children’s toys invented by members of his group. A wall sign reads “Don’t Just Sit There; Invent Something,” symbolic of his 23 years as an inventors’ advocate.
“It created the standard of living and technology that we have,” he continues, “flourishing under the free-enterprise system and protected by our government and the constitutional things we have--the patent laws and all that. . . .”
Then, his voice rising, he asks:
“Why is it that most people who get pumped out of our schools nowadays don’t know the first thing about entrepreneurship or inventing? They’re trained basically to go into companies and work for someone else , not themselves!”
One of Tratner’s pupils--Jan Ferris of North Hills--swims against that tide, wearing hats as inventor and psychologist after working as an art director for motion pictures and a designer for films such as “Bladerunner” and “Dune.”
She has fashioned futuristic, high-tech jewelry bearing plexiglass cells of colorful, swirling fluids, as well as a no-fuss, no-muss lunch bag that enables users to eat from its heavy-duty plastic surface, then dispose of it.
But she prides herself on pursuing a pastime dominated by men.
“Women inventors aren’t out there in force the way they should be,” she says, “because women are socialized to be feminine rather than mechanical.”
She says creativity has gone slack across America, and she largely blames schools.
“Our teachers should give the kids boxes of gadgets and let them make whatever they want out of them,” says the “thirtysomething” Ferris, who has completed her doctoral degree in counseling psychology at USC.
“And don’t give them coloring books and don’t tell them to stay inside the lines!” she says. “If you do, you’ve sapped their creativity. Give them a blank sheet of paper and the freedom to draw on it whatever they feel like drawing!”
For most inventors, the rewards come not so much from winning but trying.
Bill Rainwater, 79, of Glendale says he has invented products (none, he concedes, has been a commercial success) that serve him as an outdoorsman and traveler: a camping tent that needs no vertical poles, a car bed that drapes over front and back seat.
He, too, sits near a sign that reads “Don’t Just Sit There; Invent Something” as he shows a visitor one of his creations--a note pad he nicknamed “Launch Pad.” It has a plastic slide that pulls out so you can rest your writing hand on it comfortably when you reach the bottom of each page.
Tracy E. Miller, 32, of Thousand Oaks is working with a Canoga Park manufacturer to crank out a product labeled Hookers, which slides snugly like a two-inch sock onto an arm of eye wear so you can hook it onto a shirt pocket or collar when not in use.
Evelyn Rosenkrantz, 72, of Sherman Oaks specializes in bathroom items, notably a device she hopes to market: the Aroma System, which spews a fragrance automatically when a toilet is flushed, freshening the air.
“I’m happiest when I invent,” says Rosenkrantz, adding that her creative drive has rebounded sharply from a depression she suffered three years ago, when her husband died.
Iggulden would have had no reason to create his TV-commercial eliminator for VCRs had it not been for a 72-year-old inventors’ advocate named Ted De Boer of Glendale.
As a U.S. government technician in 1944, De Boer worked in a Passaic, N.J., laboratory with a team that helped electronics pioneer Allen B. Du Mont convert a cathode-ray tube on a three-inch oscilloscope screen into what would become that revolutionary marvel, or monster, we take for granted today: television.
“The government,” De Boer recalls, “said to Allen B., ‘Can’t you make an oscilloscope with a screen about 12 inches so we can teach the military people and they can sit and see it?’ You see, until then, in downtown New York, only the bars had television--and the picture was only this big.” He holds a thumb and forefinger about three inches apart.
If inventors share anything besides long odds, it’s the ability to think outside the square.
Rainwater laughingly says an inventor needs “a warped mind,” while Miller, who’s also a woodworker and a furniture designer, points out that an inventor’s mind “has to be more visual.”
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Iggulden says it may help that he doesn’t have “a literal mind,” especially with regard to engineering and electronics.
“When I think about things, I see them conceptually and a lot less crisply,” says Iggulden, who would sate his childhood curiosity by taking apart and reassembling fishing reels and radios.
“The paradigm for me,” he adds, “is not one that’s quite as confined to a box as it is for an engineer, who’s trained to think in terms of formulas, laws and rules. I think more in terms of the art of what’s possible.”
Yet even as inventors plod forward--propelled by their own so-called “warped,” “visual” and un-”literal” minds--many flounder in commercial waters said to be infested with predators who vow to pitch ideas and make their inventor clients rich--for a price.
Often these promises become a vacuum and starry-eyed inventors see front money and ideas go up in smoke, says Assistant Dist. Atty. Tom Papageorge, whose consumer-fraud unit hears complaints from inventors about being ripped off.
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Shams against inventors haven’t reached epidemic proportions in Los Angeles County, Papageorge says, but they generate enough complaints to make them what he calls the “first cousin of talent-promoter schemes.”
For inventors and would-be inventors, there’s help in recognizing red flags. It comes from nonprofit support groups such as Tratner’s Inventors Workshop International, at least 1,000 members strong, and De Boer’s Glendale-based Inventors Assistance League, which he founded 31 years ago.
Although the two group’s services differ slightly, their organizers agree that an inventor can head off what Tratner calls “unscrupulous operators who are so clever that legally they can steal,” by obtaining references before he or she considers having a product refined or represented by a third party.
As Tratner and De Boer nurture clients’ creative energies, they help inventors grapple with questions that remain, to most, bothersome: What are their inventions’ chances of success? How should they test-market their invention? What’s involved in filing for a patent?
At Inventors Workshop International, Tratner says, “we do a free evaluation for members. We say, ‘Give us drawings, sketches, photos--whatever you’ve got.’ We look at it and say, ‘This is what you should do next. This is how to fine-tune it. It stinks! It’s good! Fix it!’ ”
For his part, De Boer contends that inventors waste time and money seeking patents before they evaluate a product’s marketability.
“Only 2% of the inventor’s problem is protection,” he says. “His idea accounts for 8%--and 90% is marketing. Nine out of 10 ideas do not have commercial value.”
Iggulden, a full-time inventor, stakes his future on making the world his marketplace because, as he puts it, “there are really no boundaries in term of companies looking for products--unique products that are protectable--that solve problems large numbers of people perceive.”
He’s at work on two more inventions--a sunscreen bottle equipped with a dial that tailors the ingredients to how much a user needs (depending on time of day and angle of the sun) and fax paper with a removable, opaque film that protects a document’s confidentiality.
As for Commercial-Free, which he hopes VCR makers will install at the factory, one can assume that it’s not likely to appear in a TV spot.
But then, maybe it will--as Iggulden, the un-literal thinker, reminds us.
“Our experience has been,” he says, “that if you pay television broadcasters enough, they’d do even that.”
Where and When What: Inventors Workshop: Marketing Your Ideas and Inventions. How to create a prototype of an invention, estimate a project’s costs and feasibility and sell and protect it. A lecture by Alan Arthur Tratner, president of Inventors Workshop International, Canoga Park. Location: Learning Tree University, 20920 Knapp St., Chatsworth. Hours: 9:30 a.m. to 2 p.m. Saturday. Price: $69. Call: (818) 882-5599.
