Word: inventor
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...enthusiastic ISC salesman told him the idea was brilliant--just what every inventor wants to hear--and pressured him to sign up before someone else came up with the same concept. Mahaffey quickly ponied up $625, borrowed from family and friends, for the patent search. "They told me everything out there was based on radio transmissions," he recalls. "I had an original idea, and I had to hurry to protect it. My father had invented the pop-top soda can but couldn't afford to follow through. He still regrets it. I didn't want that to happen...
...treatment of Mahaffey wasn't illegal. However, experts say it is among the nicer things that happen to naive inventors who rely on any one of the dozen or so major players in the industry. Richard Apley, director of the Independent Inventor Programs for the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, says flatly that the majority of companies now advertising these inventor services, which generate about $200 million a year, are scams. "They offer a service of sorts but don't really do what they say they will do," says Apley. Nearly every one of their patent searches comes back with...
...Patent No. 4,591,071 for the "squirt gun," as it is listed in official government records, more than 200 million Super Soakers have been sold. Revenue estimates for the gun range as high as $400 million. "Lonnie is the American success story," says Dick Apley, director of independent inventor programs for the U.S. Patent Office...
History books already include passages about Johnson's success as an African-American inventor, showing his work next to the everyday inventions of other black scientists and engineers who are relative unknowns: the man who invented refrigerated trucks, the woman who developed a machine for hair permanents or the man who patented the automatic traffic signal. Officials from the Patent Office, which reports that only 6% of patent applications come from blacks, hail Johnson as a role model and cite his Super Soaker to capture the imagination of schoolchildren...
Reinventing the book? It's not the kind of thing you'd expect to find preoccupying even the most eccentric inventor's mind. Yet Xerox PARC (it stands for Palo Alto Research Center) is the kind of place that prides itself on overturning assumptions. For one, there are no lone nuts tinkering away in silent labs. Teamwork takes priority here--and as history suggests, there's nothing more powerful than the feedback effect of inventors riffing off one another's work...