People

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.”

E-mail This  Permalink  No Comments
Categories: People, Inventors

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

E-mail This  Permalink  No Comments
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:

E-mail This  Permalink  2 Comments
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

E-mail This  Permalink  No Comments
Categories: Inventors, People

I love the feel of this photo, with all the nondescript people in their nondescript clothes.

E-mail This  Permalink  1 Comment
Categories: People, Places

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

E-mail This  Permalink  1 Comment
Categories: Inventors, People, Video

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.

E-mail This  Permalink  2 Comments
Categories: Inventors, People

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

E-mail This  Permalink  No Comments
Categories: Inventors, People

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

E-mail This  Permalink  3 Comments
Categories: Inventors, People, Video

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):

E-mail This  Permalink  8 Comments
Categories: Inventors, People