COLUMN ONE : Disaster, the Mother of Invention : Entrepreneurs scramble to satisfy the craving for safety. Selling steel-canopied beds, portable commodes and other exotic products has gotten a little easier since the quake.

Now for the latest in California living: You start, say, with the stone-coated steel roof--a defense against the ravages of quakes, brush fires and Santa Ana winds reaching, oh, about 120 m.p.h. Under the floors you install the patented temblor-resistant foundation system, lest the Big One rattle your home into the nearest fissure.

Flying glass? No problem when you coat the windows with high-tech, shatter-resistant clear plastic, strong enough to handle not only earthquakes, but Molotov cocktails and drive-by shootings.

Inside your home, you can gird for disaster with an array of specialty products. Secure that Ming vase--you may need it to afford all of this--with specially formulated anti-quake goop; just smear a little between base and tabletop. Now you can sleep soundly in your 800-pound, steel-girdered earthquake canopy bed. The next time Los Angeles is lurching and quivering like a rumba dancer, you might even snooze through it, unless you choose to be alerted with the newly developed seismic-alarm wall clock--patent pending.

What better reassurance after the devastating Northridge earthquake than to know that the entrepreneurs are out there ready to serve? For whatever ills it might have wrought, the quake has also sent a powerful tremor through one of the nation’s growing cottage industries: the manufacture and sale of disaster-related products.

Never mind that some products are gimmicky or impractical, or that some of the best-intentioned devices never reach the market. The greater effect is a nation more prepared than ever to face the forces of nature, bolstered by untold thousands of tinkerers and promoters for whom calamity is the mother of invention.

With every titanic earthquake, fire, flood or tornado comes a new spike on the sales charts of the one-pound collapsible portable commode, or the automatic natural gas shut-off valve, or the temporary, inflatable dam--the purported equivalent of 1,000 sandbags.

New ideas are ever-emerging. Forget about building a better mousetrap. Far better, perhaps, to perfect that insulated, water-cooled, motor-ventilated family safety capsule, the only place to be when the roads are closed and the house is gone and the wall of fire comes blowing through.

“We’re working with the inventors on that one,” said Alan Tratner, president of the nonprofit Inventor’s Workshop International Education Foundation, a Canoga Park-based organization that helps usher new products to market. “Every time there is something of major significance in the news, we get an influx of ideas. The dream is well alive in America that if you have a great idea, you can make a million dollars.”

Not many disaster products have made millionaires, but the impulse to produce such products is nearly as old as ruination itself, Tratner noted. Milestones in the litany of preparedness include the European castle moat, the storm cellars of the more recent American Midwest, the more ominous bomb shelters of the nuclear era 1950s and the household smoke alarm.

“I remember reading about the Great Chicago Fire (of 1871),” Tratner said, “and I think people were coming up with . . . (fire) alarm devices. I think whenever there has been a disaster--in this country and abroad--people have come up with disaster-related ideas.”

For the most part, disaster gadgets represent low-volume trade because their appeal is often regional--confined to quake-prone areas, for example--and many consumers are unwilling to buy products they might not use, according to some experts.

But today, social and economic forces are giving momentum to sales. The personal safety market is booming, fueled by rising crime and new advertising venues, such as cable television channels devoted exclusively to health, fitness or the weather, said Barry Mason, chairman of the Chicago-based American Marketing Assn., which tracks retailing trends.

“As we see the exploding number of cable channels and alternative (advertising) vehicles, products can be pinpointed to market segments as never before, in a cost-effective way,” Mason said. “And as we move more into a world of electronic media, people are constantly bombarded by the hazards . . . they see on the news.”

Add to all that a sudden ripple of the earth--say, a 6.8-magnitude jolt that brings down homes and freeway bridges--and voila! There is a demand for products where no demand existed before.

A case in point is the earthquake bed. One model, assembled of heavy iron pipes tested to withstand 80 tons of downward force, was an unmitigated flop when it debuted nearly two years ago. Inventor Curly Jon Ward, a race car builder, invested $150,000 to make 35 beds, then hired a marketing expert, mailed out 350 videos and arranged an 800 number to await the onslaught of buyers.

Not a single sale followed. One bed found its way to Wertz Brothers Inc. on the Westside, where it sat as a floor sample for nearly 18 months--until the Northridge temblor. Only then did a seismically motivated consumer take it home, at the quake sale price of $699.

“We just wanted to get it out of here,” conceded store controller John Lundgren. “It’s kind of ugly.”

A different design, constructed of black steel beams and trusses rising to a central apex, has been more in demand at the Brass Bed Factory in Northridge, just two miles from January’s epicenter. After a year of unpromising sales--zero in 1993--at least five of the 800-pound behemoths, designed by managing partner Gary Waagenaar, have sold in rapid succession, commanding $2,500 for king-size and $2,000 for queen, said general manager Michael Calka.

A key selling point--or maybe the only selling point--is that an entire roof could collapse on it, and the bed would endure.

“It’s a complete steel canopy,” Calka said. “It almost looks like a bridge, as far as the trusses.”

Less formidable quake products are moving more briskly. A small Monrovia company called Trevco has had to double its full-time work force, from two employees to four, to handle the sudden clamoring for Quake Hold, a reusable, putty-like substance that keeps vases, TVs and other objects from toppling.

A 2.6-ounce packet--enough to secure “30 or 40 wine glasses”--retails for $5.99, said founder and inventor Dran May-Reese.

“It’s just unbelievable,” she said of the demand. “When we’d sell to a dealer, the (standard) order used to be 36 units. We’re now getting orders from that same dealer for 1,000 units at a time.”

Marianne Simpson, 49, a Thousand Oaks resident who has collected more than 100 dachshund figurines, gave the reusable goop--specially formulated by a hired chemist--glowing reviews after the Northridge temblor put cracks in her home and left her husband’s office a shambles. Not a single dog was overturned.

“It’s fantastic,” she said.

Another entrepreneur, Richard M. Diaz, is making a similar retailing splash with his one-pound portable toilet, patented four years ago. The biodegradable, polymer-lined commode measures 10 inches by 10 inches by 2 1/4 inches when folded, and expands to a nearly perfect cube. Diaz touts it as cheap ($10 apiece), sanitary and easy to lug to those uncomfortable places where water lines are ruptured or evacuees are crowded together in makeshift camps.

“Our motto is: ‘It’s ready to go when you are,’ ” the 48-year-old inventor said. “With this thing, you just sit down and pull up a magazine and you’re home.”

Sales were “a couple hundred dollars” in the entire week before the quake, according to Diaz, who launched the company from his garage in Patton, a tiny town near Redlands. But with his promotional faxes filling the phone lines, and more stores placing orders all the time, the personal privy is a hot commodity. “Since the earthquake, we’re probably averaging $1,000 a day, and growing,” he said.

Astute promoters were firing up the marketing engines right after the shaking stopped.

Sellers of a protective transparent film for windows called a news conference to demonstrate how the laminated plastic, known as Armorcoat, keeps glass from flying during earthquakes, hurricanes or even drive-by shootings--although the bullets do come through. The plan was for Bob Kerr, owner of Window Tints Etc. of Redondo Beach, to take a baseball bat to a coated window as the media chronicled the dramatic result.

Unfortunately, no one showed up.

But by employing ads, phone solicitations and word of mouth, retailers were managing to get out the message. Sales of the coating--billed as the latest advance in a technology imported years ago from Europe--were running 200% above normal, and perhaps still rising. (The coating made a tenfold sales gain in Florida after Hurricane Andrew, one distributor said.)

“A million and a half square feet of glass did blow out . . . from the quake itself,” Kerr said. “But whoever had Armorcoat on their windows didn’t get hurt--I know that for a fact.”

State agencies, such as the California Department of Consumer Affairs, do not pretest such products to assess their effectiveness, but so far state and city of Los Angeles consumer affairs offices have received no significant complaints about quake-related merchandise, according to spokesmen.

The financial stakes for homeowners are often substantial. The window laminate must be professionally applied and runs $300 for a 10-foot-by-10-foot section of glass. The average price of a stone-coated steel roof is about $7,200 even when there is no obtrusive existing roof to drive up the cost.

On the other hand, the expense brings a level of security that was unavailable a few decades ago. With steel-roof construction--imported from New Zealand around 1980--a proud homeowner can expect security even when 120-m.p.h. winds are hurling wayward tiles from the neighbor’s roof like so many ceramic missiles, according to James F. McMullen, a consultant for the Steel Roofing Manufacturers Assn.

A steel roof is guaranteed for 50 years. Except under the harshest conditions, it is impervious to quake or fire. When brush fires ravaged Laguna Beach last fall, four steel-roofed homes collapsed in the eye of the firestorm, where nothing endured, McMullen said. But on the periphery, he said, a dozen steel-roofed homes held up like battleships--even on one block where all the other houses burned down.

“They’re fire-resistant, obviously--they’re steel,” the consultant said. “The people that put on this kind of roof . . . are the people who want a roof that’s going to be on for the rest of your life.”

Northridge resident Jill Brown, who bought one after her home burned down a few years ago, saw the quake split some of her neighbors’ roofs in half. Her own house was pandemonium--flying dishes, bookshelves, cabinets, TVs.

But the roof?

“I don’t think it even moved,” she said. “It really helped hold our house together.”

Other products are still in the pipeline, under development for future catastrophes. As many as 50,000 to 100,000 amateur Edisons and professional tinkerers are probably out there at some stage of creating some disaster-aversion gadget--either for earthquakes or floods or blizzards or some other calamity, said Franklin Bartels, head of the newly founded Independent Inventors Assn. of Northern California.

The concepts almost assuredly include breakthroughs and ill-fated contrivances alike. There are portable emergency elevators designed to descend the outer walls of high-rises, hurricane shut-off valves for offshore oil platforms, doorway flood barriers, earthquake indicator lights and fog-spewing firefighting devices.

Franz deGruet, an inventor and artist who calls his Los Angeles company deGruet (“deGruet is a problem solving organization”), has devised a system he labels Ultraspace for temporarily rebuilding quake-damaged highway bridges. The system employs what he calls “a lightweight, high-strength, tubularly derived, honeycomb-type structure,” a series of bow-shaped rods laid over a metal honeycomb base.

Since conceiving the design seven years ago, deGruet has built model after model, but has yet to test the technology or bring it before state highway officials. For $50 million, give or take, it might have saved billions of dollars in lost commuter hours by providing instant bridges after the Northridge quake, he figures.

“Most people think it’s a crazy idea--that it won’t work--but that’s wrong,” deGruet said. “The earthquake definitely came too soon.”

Long Beach inventor Ernest Rinard, 70, has invested about $7,000 in his earthquake clock, which features dangling brass tubes that function much like wind chimes. For whom do those bells toll? For anyone who must be told that the ground is shaking--and who would also fork over the suggested retail price, $80.

The seven existing models occupy boxes in Rinard’s home.

Tratner, the Inventor’s Workshop president, is at work on his own brainstorm--an emergency “nightstick” incorporating an alarm and a light, and useful for breaking through doorways or clubbing would-be attackers. Tratner talked with admiration about other newfangled devices on the way--with luck, before the next cataclysm.

“Somebody came up with a Swiss Army-type disaster tool,” he remembered, describing how it opens into a sledgehammer/hatchet/crowbar capable of smashing through glass or prying open obstructed doors.

There are also designs for various types of all-purpose disaster suits, “kind of like modern armor,” containing helmets, air filters, emergency water supplies and headlamps. One of those would be just the thing to keep next to the quake bed, the type of product that anyone in Los Angeles might appreciate.

“Even if you slept in the nude, you could have it right there--just get in and there you go,” Tratner said. “I think the suit might be one of the better solutions to come out of these disasters.”