In Virginia: A Convention for Inventions

By Gregory Jaynes

There was a gathering of inventors the other day in Arlington, Va., a convention of men and women whose most often expressed desire was to make a million dollars--never $800,000, never $1.2 million, but a flat, cool mil. They said it again and again, and if you were not money hungry when you went into the affair, by the time you got out you found yourself thinking of the balance, or lack of it, in the old checking account.

"Inventors are all alike," said Jacob Rabinow, a man with 218 patents. "They all have a million-dollar idea, which is a good place to start."

"I'm finally a millionaire," said Calvin McCracken, adding that he had been a millionaire several times before, only to plow his money into other ideas, some of which were not successful enough to a sustain his membership | in the world of megaDEG wealth. McCracken said he would probably sock his funds into yet another notion, as he always has. (Next time you go to the cinema, as you pass those hot dogs turning on those tubular rollers, think of McCracken. He made a million.)

"I knew a man trying to raise $50,000 for a game called Pong," said Lawrence J. Udell, an inventor and the president of the National Congress of Inventor Organizations. "I said why would people play a game on TV when they could watch TV? Well, Pong became Atari, and he sold out for millions and millions and millions. You, too, with your idea can become independently wealthy. Inventing is the last opportunity an individual has to become a millionaire."

To an idealess visitor beginning to feel dead broke, Udell charged, "We created creativity! We are the most creative society the world has ever known!"

What all this was was the twelfth annual National Inventors Conference, sponsored by the Patent and Trademark Office, the National Council of Patent Law Associations, and the Bureau of National Affairs. It was held in one of those futuristic hotels--the Marriott Crystal Gateway--and in the Patent and Trademark building. Seventy of the nation's inventors paid $75 apiece to attend workshops (Inventing in Today's World, Funding a New Idea) and to take part in an exposition of inventions. A touching sidelight was a tour of the patent offices.

An elderly woman, whose patents on three kitchen gadgets ("Slices vegetables so thin there was a little old lady in Atlantic City who made a tomato last all summer long!") have expired, inquired of Patent Examiner Elizabeth J. Curtin, "What if the building burns down?"

"You're safe," replied Curtin. "Everything is on microfilm somewhere in a cave in Pennsylvania."

Later, happening across a computer screen, the knot of inventors being guided by Examiner Curtin asked if she could summon up their names. Roughly 4.4 million patents have been issued, and they are slowly being fed, the latest ones first, into the Patent Office's new computers. So the inventors whose patents go back a few years, and these were the ones with Examiner Curtin, were not yet in the system. It seemed to hurt them not to get authentic Government computer proof of their achievements. "If I gave you the name of the product, could you bring it up?" one man implored. "Try underwater drainage or coral cavity evacuation.' Alas, it did not show.

From Gerald J. Mossinghoff, commissioner of Patents and Trademarks, the inventors learned that about 100,000 patents are applied for each year and that about 66,000 are granted. Of these, 23% go to independent American inventors, 30% to foreigners, either independents or corporations, and the rest to large American corporations (independent inventors call the people in research and development for large corporations "captured inventors").

Commissioner Mossinghoff recalled that when he was a patent attorney in St. Louis, a fellow came into his office saying he wanted to patent a portable organ. Mossinghoff told the inventor he had better have a lawyer in Washington search the records before he went to much expense. The man said he had searched the records himself. "Find anything relevant?" Mossinghoff asked. "Yeah, but don't worry," the man said, pulling the Government records out of his briefcase. The commissioner's listeners were given to believe that security at the Patent Office has since been tidied up.

"See this?" said Ed Young, a thewy man from Ohio. He had fished a 9-volt battery from his pocket. "How do you tell whether it's charged or dead?" Young's notionless interlocutor did not know. So the Ohioan pushed a thingumajig on the battery and a BB-size red light lit up. "It cost 1-c- to add that feature," said Young, "and one day it will blow Duracell out of the water." Then Young fetched from another pocket plastic chopsticks connected at one end by some plastic latticework. Any dummy can use the chopsticks with elan, it turned out.

Among the other inventions on display was the Chameleon, a pentagon-shaped garment with a zippered tube in the middle, the idea of a Texan with a Texas-style name: Rock Ridgeway. Ridgeway convincingly demonstrated that the Chameleon can be worn as a cape, a gown, a skirt, an empire dress, a hooded parka, a sack dress, a jumpsuit, pants or a skirt, or used as a hauling bag, a pillow or a purse. You had to be there.

Daniela Spackova, a Czechoslovak, a dog groomer and a New Yorker, had a better roach trap--the result, she said, of being embarrassed one night when the rascals showed themselves in front of visitors. "It come in here. It get shocked. It fall down here. You throw it out."

And Lloyd Lund's son Glenn explained his father's variable angle and tilt razor by saying that you do not come straight down on a tomato with a knife because you will "squash it." You slice a tomato, just as this new razor slices whiskers. Then Lloyd came up and said, "Did Glenn explain the tomato deal? Then you know you have to slice instead of shear. That's all you need to know."

The bottom line, said Donna Williams, a Greek from Ohio, is the bottom line. "Money and marketing," she said. "That's why I'm here. You do something you know will work, but you can't get anybody to let go of that money to set you up." Williams had invented a doohickey that looked like a hat pouncer--a pouncer with plenums and baffles and whirligigs.

It is, she explained, a crepe machine, capable of making eight crepes a minute. It will make you an Oriental crepe, a Mediterranean crepe, a crepe Reuben, 30 different kinds of crepes in all. She wants to become the McDonald's of the crepe industry--"People get tired of hamburgers"--but she cannot find the money.

As has already been subtly put, money was all the word at this conference. Workshops on money and marketing were the best attended and, to all but one speaker, the foremost advice was to find a rich partner. "Have a rich Aunt Susie," advised a banker, a venture capitalist. "Let me tell you there is no better source of capital than being born into the right family, nothing better."

"Ninety-five percent of all successful inventions are financed by friends and neighbors," said Inventor McCracken. "Friends and neighbors." The dissident on this line of logic was Inventor Rabinow, who said, "Be prepared to lose your friends and neighbors. There are two empty golden thrones in heaven still waiting for the first two partners who died and still liked each other. I hate partnerships." Rabinow's suggestion was simply, "Don't spend more time than you can afford to spend because you will lose it."

Some tinkerers in the audience murmured, "So what else is new?" and some, at the end of the conference, left saying they had enjoyed themselves but they had not learned anything. Some said the best part was finding out that so many other inventors are constitutionally like themselves. Inventing is nothing more than making life a little easier, getting rid of petty annoyances. Marketing, however, is another thing entirely. "Marketing is atypical of the inventor's temperament," said John Zeitlow Jr. of Massachusetts, who evidently has not researched his Edison.

Thomas Alva Edison, possessor of 1,093 patents, advertised with as much genius as he invented. The flyer for the early phonograph had a likeness of Uncle Sam, and the copy said, "Uncle Sam takes off his hat." Edison called the phonograph the Triumph. He made a million. --By Gregory Jaynes