Inventors

Ralph Baer is sometimes known as the father of video games. One of his early inventions, sold as the Magnavox Odyssey, was the first home video game system.

This year marks the 40th anniversary of the Odyssey, and this week is Ralph Baer’s 90th birthday. So it seemed like a good time to share this video from my interview and shoot with Ralph in which we discuss, among other things, why he’s still inventing at 90 years old.

At one point in our interview he expressed frustration that modern kids don’t read anymore because they’re too busy playing with their smartphones. So I asked him if he thinks kids play too many video games today. Did he accidentally unleash a monster with his invention? His answer:

Yeah. I did a bit. What I thought I unleashed was a family game. If you’ll stop to consider for a second, what’s the ping pong game? You can’t play ping pong with yourself. It was meant to be played by two people. And we had four-handed ping pong and hockey games early on, also. I always thought of it as a family game. And it just sort of degenerated into a one player type thing which was never in my mind.

One trend I’ve seen in my project is that inventions sometimes evolve into something the inventor never imagined. In this case, though, I think I see a pendulum swinging back in Baer’s direction with consoles like the Nintendo Wii, which put an emphasis on group play.

Anyway, Happy 90th Birthday, Ralph!

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Categories: Inventors, People

I took the last couple months off to have a baby, but now I’m back in the swing of things, so here’s the latest video from my Inventor Portraits series. This is Ernest Nussbaum, inventor of the Practicello.

The Practicello is a full height cello that breaks down to fit in carry-on luggage. It’s not intended to be good enough to play in a concert, but its just meant for cellists who want to practice while they travel without needing to pay for an extra seat on the airplane to bring their instrument. And since it doesn’t resonate as loudly as a cello with a full body, it’s not going to annoy the people in the hotel room next door.

Here are some more photos from our shoot:

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Categories: Inventors, People

It’s been way too long since I’ve posted one of these. This is my portrait of Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera. He was the 32nd inventor in my project. I shot him in October at Kodak’s headquarters in Rochester, just a couple weeks before President Obama awarded him the National Medal of Technology.

When he initially mentioned that the first digital camera held 30 pictures, I assumed that was due to the storage capacity of the digital tape. It was really interesting to hear that he picked 30 as an artificial limitation, and his explanation why.

Here are a couple photos from our shoot, as seen in the video:

Update: A few people have commented on the upholstery, so I thought I’d expound on that a little bit:

The only room made available to me for shooting at Kodak was the lobby, which wasn’t very inspiring. I talked my way into getting one more room to look at, a conference room that had slightly more visual interest: there were some cameras scattered around in displays, a conference table, a giant pot with huge sunflowers, and a few chairs. I tried to find a way to shoot in there that didn’t scream “conference room” and that probably hadn’t been done already, since I know they’ve used that room for media before. As soon as I saw this chair parked near a coffee table, I knew I had to use it. The pattern immediately reminded me of the Bayer pattern used in modern digital sensors. (It’s the checkerboard-like arrangement of red, green, and blue receptors — do a Google image search for “Bayer pattern” and you’ll see what I mean). I figured that most people wouldn’t notice the connection — Steve said he’d never heard anyone point it out before — but to me it was as relevant a prop as if I’d picked it out myself for the shoot because it speaks directly to the invention. Now every time I see it, I smile and wonder if there are any other people out there who see the connection, too. I think of it as a subtle inside joke for technically minded.

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

I’ve photographed 30 inventors for this project so far, but Brent Farley is among the most interesting. He’s certainly the most prolific. I normally start one of profile posts with an invention name and patent number, but Brent has so many inventions that I couldn’t pick just one. So before I say much more, why don’t I show you this video profile I made that sums him up pretty well:

Here are some of the photos I shot of Brent:

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: William Walsh
Invention: Convertible Pizza Box
Patent: No. 7,051,919
Brand Name: Greenbox

The Green Box is a brand of environmentally friendly food containers. The inaugural product, the Green Box Pizza, is made from 100% recycled materials and features several patented design elements. The top half is perforated to split up into 4 plates. The bottom half folds up into a container for storing leftovers.

Will says that back in college he and his housemates were watching football and eating pizza, and nobody was using plates. So he tore up a pizza box and handed out improvised plates. His housemates were amazed, but he dismissed it, assuming everybody did that. He says, “I thought it was standard operating procedure.” Ten years later, people were similarly amazed when he tore up a pizza box at a friend’s daughter’s birthday party. This time, with the wisdom of a business degree and a minor in mechanical engineering, he decided there might actually be a way to turn this practice into a business.

“I went to a local restaurant, I bought 50 or 100 pizza boxes — the guy thought I was out of my mind — and an exacto knife, and a straightedge ruler. I spent 3 or 4 days in my apartment creating different options, like different alternatives how I could utilize this base material to do something else… I came up with 4 or 5 different designs, and I took the best function from each design and came up with this current design.”

Now I’m hungry.

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: David Palmer
Invention: Massage Chair
Patent: No. 4,746,167

You’ve seen the offspring of David Palmer’s invention in shopping malls and convention centers around the world. In 1986, he debuted the first portable massage chair. It was heavy, and made of wood. It collapsed down to a “chair-in-a-box” for portability. The modern incarnation is much lighter, more comfortable, and even more portable.

Here’s David relaxing in an early version of the massage chair:

And in the modern version:

David explains why he’s in the massage field: “I’m focused on making touching a positive social value in our culture. It’s what I call the orphan sense. We’ve got five primary senses and of them the one that’s been ignored most — by academia in terms of research, by the media in general, by society in general — is definitely touch. Touch has the most negative associations attached to it and I’m out to change that because I think that touch is essential to our health and well-being, to our development as children, as infants, and it’s long overdue that we take the pathological aspects of touch and turn them into something positive. We’ve got a very pathological relationship as a culture to touch. And that’s mostly manifest in our relationship to sexuality in this culture. So I’m out to make touch something that is much more comfortable for people at large, and also something that people can utilize in their daily lives for their health and well-being. I think that massage is something that should be in every home, that family massage as it’s done in certain cultures, like the Japanese culture for example, is something that should be taught in every grade school as far as I’m concerned. That’s a basic life skill that people should have.”

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In conjunction with Time Magazine’s 50 Best Inventions of 2009 issue, they’ve featured a gallery of my inventor portraits on Time.com. This includes a couple of inventors I have not yet featured on this site.

Here is the gallery at Time.com: Inventors and their Inventions

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Categories: Inventors, People, Photo Essay

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Tami Galt
Invention: Folding wagon
Patent: No. 6,491,318
Brand Name: Fold-it & Go

Tami Galt is a mom, and her invention is sold in toy stores, but it wasn’t inspired by her kids. She was looking for an easy way to carry groceries at the market, and thought a little red wagon would be cute. Unfortunately a little red wagon wouldn’t fit in her car. So she came up with a collapsible wagon that stows away in a bag, and can easily be transported.

And here’s a video I made about Tami and her invention:

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Categories: Inventors, People, Video

Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Joe Carolan
Invention: Guidance system for rescue personnel
Patent: No. 7,196,614
Brand Name: Quick-Finders

Joe Carolan is a volunteer firefighter who has a solution for a serious problem: In a smoke-filled burning home, firefighters can’t see very well, and a stranger’s home is unfamiliar territory. Half of all home fires occur while people are asleep, and 64% of children who die in fires die in their bedrooms. So Joe invented Quick-Finders, a two-part system that helps firefighters quickly identify bedrooms. The first part is a sticker that goes outside the front door. It lets the firefighters know that your home has Quick-FInders. The second part is a reflector you stick to the baseboard on the hinged side of a bedroom door. When firefighters shine their flashlights through the smoke, they will see the reflectors (which are designed to catch light from any angle) shining back and know where the bedrooms are.

The Quick-Finders website: www.quick-finders.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Tom Roering
Invention: Amphibious recreation vehicle
Patent: No. 7,329,161
Brand Name: Wilcraft

Tom Roering is an ice fisherman who invented a cool product: a lightweight amphibious vehicle that is also an ice fishing shelter. It’s called the Wilcraft (“Wil” stands for water, ice, and land). If it falls through the ice, it floats. It has room enough for two people to comfortably fish together. It can be adapted as an ice rescue vehicle. And it fits on the back of a pickup truck. Take a look:

Photos of Tom and the Wilcraft. Each image can be enlarged by clicking:

The Wilcraft website: www.thewilcraft.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Art Fry
Invention: Repositionable stationery
Brand Name: Post-it Notes

As told on Post-it manufacturer 3M’s website, “The idea for repositionable notes struck Fry while singing in the church choir. His bookmark kept falling out of his hymnal, causing him to lose his page. So… Fry used a portion of his working hours to develop a solution to his problem. Now the world is singing the praises of his pet project: Post-it Notes.”

You can read the whole story of Post-it history at 3M.com.

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Pam Turner
Invention: Easy-to-thread sewing needle
Patent: Pending
Brand Name: Spiral Eye Needle

About 10 seconds after Pam Turner showed me how to thread her Spiral Eye Needles, I was an expert. It usually takes me longer to thread a needle than it does to sew a button, but it really is impressively easy with Pam’s invention.

Pam says she remembers her mother having problems threading needles when she was young. Her mom used to say, “We went to the moon, why can’t somebody fix the needle?” Pam decided that if nobody else was going to do it, she had to.

Pam used to actually make the needles herself, using a grinder in her home. But now she has a manufacturer, and business is taking off.

The Spiral Eye Needle website: www.spiraleyeneedles.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Jerry Ford
Invention: Automatic wheelchair brake device
Patent: No. 7,066,482
Brand Name: Safe-T-Chair

Elderly people with Alzheimer’s Disease or dementia sometimes forget to use the manual brakes on their wheelchairs, which then fall out from under them when they try to stand or sit. When this was brought to the attention of crop farmer Jerry Ford, he decided to do something about it. His invention is a rather clever automatic brake system for manual wheelchairs. It’s even designed in a way that still allows the wheelchair to fold up for transport.

I met with Jerry on his farm and learned more about his wheelchair brake system and its inspiration:

Here’s a better look at the photos in the video. Each of them can be enlarged by clicking:

The Jerry Ford Company website: www.jerryfordcompany.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Clint Fruitman
Invention: Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulator With Hot Or Cold Thermal Application
Patent: Application No. 11/025,615
Brand Name: The Painaway Pro

Clint Fruitman is a materials scientist and biomedical engineer who holds 15 patents from his years working in the plastics, semiconductor, jewelry, and pharmaceutical industries. All of this experience has come together in his latest invention, which makes it easy to administer the pain therapy technique called Transcutaneous Electrical Nerve Stimulation (more info about TENS at Wikipedia) and hot or cold therapy at the same time.

I’m trying something new with my inventor portraits. I’ve begun shooting video of the inventors I photograph and putting together a short film about each person. This is the first video in the series.

Being the first video of this type that I’ve ever done, I realized while editing what other important shots I should have gotten, questions I should have asked, microphone I should have used, etc. But I suspect that will always be the case to some extent. I have some really interesting inventors coming up for this project, and I think the videos are going to be a great new component.

Here’s a better look at the photos (click any one to enlarge):

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Michael Rosenberg
Invention: Media-Dispensing Apparatus and Method
Patent: Application No. 11/827,032
Brand Name: The Game Chamber

Michael Rosenberg’s kids have a lot of games for their Nintendo DS handheld system, at a cost of 30 or 40 bucks each. As kids will do, they sometimes let their bedrooms get messy, and games get lost or broken. Finally, out of frustration, Michael decided to invent a gadget that stores games in a way that ensures they don’t get lost: in order to remove a game from the Game Chamber, you have to put the one you’re using back in.

Here’s Michael with a Nintendo DS and his dog Busta (click any photo to enlarge):

I can’t imagine how a toy could get lost in this room:

And finally, here’s Michael in the plastic injection molding factory where the Game Chamber is made, standing among various molds for dozens of products made at the factory.

The current model Game Chamber holds 6 Nintendo DS games, but Michael is developing models that hold more games, and that come in different shapes and sizes appropriate for different age groups and different game systems.

The Game Chamber website: www.gamechamber.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Chris Garvey
Invention: Temperature Responsive Roof Vent
Patent: No. 7,127,855

Chris Garvey isn’t just an inventor. He’s also a patent attorney, so he’s endured the process that he takes his clients through. He invented a skylight that uses a mechanical system to open and close itself in response to changes in temperature, letting in fresh air. Look carefully at these photos and you’ll see that the prototype, currently installed in his home, is made partly out of a shower door:

Chris is also a pretty hard core libertarian, and was the libertarian candidate on the ballot for Governor of New York (in 1998) and also Attorney General (2006). He didn’t win, but he’s still hard at work, if the mountains of papers in his home office are any indicator:

One more photo of Chris in his office, plus one in his attic, beneath the skylight:

Chris’ website: Collard & Roe, PC

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Tony Pagoto
Invention: Personal Computer Wire Management System
Patent: No. 7,247,798
Brand Name: WireMate

Tony invented a system that keeps the overwhelming mess of unruly wires under your desk tidy.

Tony’s a photogenic guy, but so is his living room. Even though it’s not related to his invention, I couldn’t resist setting up another photo:

While some people his age are heading into retirement, Tony and his partners, all over 60, are just getting their company off the ground. In his own words:

“Dreams and determination aren’t only for the young. My partners and I are ‘older guys.’ I am 64 and my partners Don and John are 64 and 68. I am President and do operations, Don does marketing/sales and John is our patent attorney/treasurer. We have known each other for over 50 years. They say never to go into business with friends and relatives, but we have done that and have benefited greatly from it. My Uncle Anthony and Cousin Stephen manufacture the WireMate for us here in the US. They also handle product inventory and order fulfillment for us. My uncle is 81 and has been an inspiration to me in terms of his vitality, support and belief in what we are doing. My son-in-law Eben is our webmaster. My neighbor Maria is our graphic artist and my neighbors David and Lorraine are our focus group. It has been an interesting trip. I have no doubt that the WireMate will sell millions of units/year as it finds its way into more and more homes and corporations.”

WireMate website: www.wiremate.com

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Julia Truchsess
Invention: Digital Picture Frame
Brand Name: Digi-Frame

After building a successful career inventing electronic toys including MicroJammers, Rhythm Rods, and Singing Bouncy Baby, Julia came up with the idea for digital picture frames in the late 90s. When the Digi-Frame debuted, larger companies were also launching similar products, but Digi-Frame was the “Rolls Royce of Frames” according to reviewers. The story of how Digi-Frame came to be, and why it’s no longer around, is a pretty interesting one, and Julia tells it in her own words after the photos. Here is Julia with one of Digi-Frame’s large models:

Julia in her home office with her husband:

And here’s Julia’s workspace, full of electronic stuff I don’t understand, and a display of dolls and toys featuring technology she invented:

What follows is Julia’s explanation of Digi-Frame’s history. The product no longer exists, but the original Digi-Frame website is preserved here. And now, Julia:

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Part of a continuing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: Brian Fried
Invention:Wrist Band Construction for Balloons
Patent: No. 6,938,275
Brand Name: Balloon-O-Band

Brian has invented several products for the home, but this one (modeled below by his daughter Alana) is for the outdoors. It makes the point that sometimes inventions can be simple.

Here’s what Brian has to say about his invention (along with artwork from the patent):

“My daughter Alana was the inspiration for the Balloon-O-Band. She lost 3 character balloons ($8 each x 3 = $24) at one kids show. Then we went to an amusement park and she was taking the balloon on and off between rides and I had to keep untying the ribbon, and I noticed that this was happening to parents and children all around me all the time. I couldn’t take it anymore, so like with many of my inventions, I needed to find a solution to keep our kids happy and parents keep their sanity and investment!”

Brian’s website: BalloonOBand.com

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The first in an ongoing series of inventor portraits.

Inventor: James Delaney
Invention: Trampoline Sensor MK II
Patent: Pending

James Delaney built his video game controller prototype out of a trampoline, LEGOs, and a few electronic components. Here is James with his invention. Scroll down to see video of the Trampoline Sensor MK II in action.

The trampoline is sensitive to even slight movements, and James has written a few programs to demonstrate its capabilities. For example, he demonstrates how it can be used to control a character walking, running, and jumping. It can be used to control a Space Invaders style game (lean to stear, and jump to shoot). It’s quite fun. Here’s a video of the trampoline in action:

Here’s what James had to say about the invention:

“My wife, Nyssa, asked me to get her a mini trampoline as a gift. After about a week of using it, she said it was getting boring. Then she asked if it could be hooked up to a video game. I figured that this would be easy. It turned out to be a little harder than I imagined. The biggest obstacle was finding one sensor that would be capable of detecting running, jumping, bouncing, leaning, and tapping on the rebounding surface. I tried many different sensors, including accelerometers and sonar sensors before deciding to make a sensor using potentiometers. The accelerometer would have been my second choice of sensor but it required too much signal processing to get usable data during trampoline use. The next problem was interpreting the data from the sensors during each of the states I wanted to detect. This was solved by hours of experimentation, calibration and analyzing data.”

James’ website: UnfocusedBrain.com

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