Word: inventors
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...business of building empires; he is in the business of building dreams. And for him, as for Hughes, it is necessary to reproduce his fancy only once in reality to achieve fulfillment. Indeed, after seeing Francis Coppola's marvelous Tucker, one believes that if the inventor had been forced to replicate his car endlessly on a production line, promote it and warrant it and tweak it around to create a little novelty each new model year, Tucker might have ended up running on empty, one of those corporate windbags booming the virtues of an individualism he has long since mislaid...
...doubt about it, Tucker was Coppola's kind of guy, a figure no more able to contain himself within the bounds of realism than the director is. Or suitable for representation by realistic means. Tucker was an expressionistic character in search of an auteur. A self-educated backyard inventor, he designed a high-speed armored car that the Army deemed impractical and a gun turret that it learned to love during World War II. Tucker used the prototype of the armored car (according to the film) to make ice-cream runs with his kids. The reputation he gained from...
...make a slight burrrp noise when resealed, are suddenly being shown and sold in all sorts of nontraditional places: on the job, in day-care centers, even at tailgate parties. In the past Tupperware was pushed exclusively at living-room gatherings of housewives, a successful marketing strategy devised by Inventor Earl Tupper not long after he dreamed up the product in the 1940s. But as more and more women joined the work force, the party calmed down and eventually had to move. From 1982 through 1985, Tupperware's sales dropped 13.3%, to $762 million. Then last year the company, based...
...pump's inventor, Richard Wampler, 39, a California physician, took his inspiration from pumps he saw in deep wells ten years ago in Egypt. The pump's spinning motion and the resulting continuous flow of blood from the heart represent a departure from the natural pulsating action that most other devices try to mimic. Some researchers at first feared that the whirling blades would destroy blood cells and that the body would be unable to tolerate the nonpulsating blood flow. So far, the problem has not materialized. Another potential drawback: small as the pump is, it may be too large...
Sony officials probably knew they were in trouble years ago, when consumers began to use the terms VHS and VCR interchangeably. The company had made a crucial mistake. While at first Sony kept its Beta technology mostly to itself, JVC, the Japanese inventor of VHS, shared its secret with a raft of other firms. As a result, the market was overwhelmed by the sheer volume of the VHS machines being produced. In just the first year of VHS, Sony lost 40% of the VCR business to the upstart competition. By 1987 VHS accounted for more than...