Famous Inventor Profiles-John Logie Baird

Throughout history there have been several individuals who have achieved fame and in some cases fortune by pursuing ideas they have had for new products. Some of these inventors have come across their creations by accident, and some of them saw a problem in their day-to-day lives that inspired them to create a solution. While there are many famous inventors, it’s important to remember that not all inventors achieve fame. However, for those individuals who have created products that fill a long-existing need, notoriety is one of the possible outcomes.

One of the most famous inventors in history is John Logie Baird, the Scottish engineer and the inventor of the world’s first practical television system. Baird also invented the first fully electronic color television tube. Although his electromechanical system was eventually displaced by purely electronic systems, Baird’s early successes have earned him a special place in the invention of the television.

In his first attempts to develop a working television, Baird experimented with an invention created by Paul Nipkow. The latter had invented a scanning disk system in 1884, called the Nipkow disk; this has been since called the “master television patent.” In early 1923, Baird moved to the south coast of England and rented a workshop in the town of Hastings. He build what would become the world’s first working television set using an odd collection of items including an old hat box, a pair of scissors, a few bicycle light lenses, a used tea chest, sealing wax, and darning needles. In February of the following year, he demonstrated to the Radio Times that a semi-mechanical analogue television system was possible by transmitting moving silhouette images. In July of the same year, he received a 1000-volt electric shock, though fortunately he survived with only a burned hand as an injury. His landlord, as a result, asked him to quit his workshop.

In his new laboratory on October 2, 1925, Baird successfully transmitted the first television picture with a greyscale image: the head of a ventriloquist’s dummy in a 30-line vertically scanned image, at five pictures per second was the first image. Baird went downstairs and found an office worker to see what a human face would look like, and 20-year-old William Edward Taynton became the first person to be televised in full tonal range. Understandably excited, Baird visited the Daily Express to promote his invention; the news editor was terrified and asked his staff to get rid of the “lunatic.” Baird repeated the transmission weeks later, on January 26, 1926 for the Royal Institution and a reporter from The Times. By this time Baird had improved the scan rate to 12.5 frames per second.

He moved on to develop the technology and on July 3, 1928, Baird demonstrated the world’s first color transmission, using scanning discs at the transmitting and receiving ends with three spirals containing filters of a different primary color. Prior to that, he transmitted a long-distance television signal over 438 miles in 1927. Baird went on to set up the Baird Television Development Company, which made the first transatlantic television transmission in 1928 from London to Hartsdale, New York. Baird’s invention would go on to provide the first program for the BBC, and Baird would also establish France’s first television company with Bernard Natan.

After mechanical televisions fell out of favor, Baird made several contributions to the field of electronic televisions. In 1939 he showed color television using a cathode ray tube with a fitted disk of color filters and in 1941 he patented and demonstrated a system of three-dimensional television. He also went on to develop an early video recording device, and helped to develop the field of fiber-optics, radio, infrared, and radar. Overall, Baird has been remembered for having a particular talent at invention; not all of his inventions were successful (he tried to create diamonds by heating graphite in his 20s and shorted out Glasgow’s electricity supply, for example), but Baird has achieved legendary status both in the UK and worldwide for the sheer volume of products and inventions he developed.

If you have an idea for a new invention, there are a number of different ways to pursue developing the idea. You can follow the traditional process of patenting your own invention and marketing and licensing it yourself or you can contact a company that specializes in new product development, who can take your idea and build prototypes and reach out to businesses that may be interested in adding your idea to their product line. Inventing is always a risk, and very few inventions are successful, but working with a reputable company may be extremely helpful, as the experienced employees of these companies could have a better understanding of what it takes to make a product successful.

Do you have an invention idea?  Click here to confidentially submit your idea. 

Inventionland in the Media

Inventionland, America’s largest invention factory at over 61,000 square feet has attracted attention from a variety of sources. The facility houses 16 unique themed sets where Davison “creationeers” work to develop new products, packaging, and marketing strategies. Featuring a pirate ship, a race track, and a giant robot head among other creative settings, Inventionland is George Davison’s response to the challenge of keeping his new product development staff inspired and motivated.

One result of the unconventional office design is that Inventionland has been featured on multiple media outlets. In 2008, approximately two years after the factory opened, Inventionland was featured in the 2008 Ripley’s Believe it or Not annual publication, “The Remarkable Revealed.” The book called Inventionland a “Tree-mendous Office,” referring to the tree house office space used by Davison’s founder and CEO, George Davison. A representative from Ripley’s said about Inventionland, "Honestly, I felt a little like Alice shortly after she fell down the rabbit hole. I was positively blown away." The book is available through stores and online.

Mr. Davison and Inventionland were also featured in Entrepreneur online magazine in 2008. The article, titled “Creative Genius,” likens Inventionland to a “real amusement park,” and profiles the facility and its creator, calling the facility a “creative wonderland” and lauding Mr. Davison for building the unconventional space to “get his employees out of their cubicles and into a place that inspires creativity.”

Another popular publication to recognize Inventionland is The Wall Street Journal. The famous magazine named Inventionland as Workplace of the Week at the end of December 2011. The write-up called the creative location a “Workplace Wonderland,” and described the way in which different locations were intended to foster various types of ideas. The article also featured pictures of the spaces, including the pirate ship Discovery, complete with creationeers hard at work on deck.

PayScale, a career and salary search service, featured Inventionland in an article about non-monetary perks. According to the article’s author, non-monetary perks such as Inventionland’s creative and playful environment, “do far more than just help retain workers. They also promote productivity and engagement, foster workplace alignment, and help work teams bond.”

These are just a few of the mentions that Inventionland has received in the media; the Davison invention workplace has been featured internationally, as curiosity about the facility’s unique features and atmosphere increases. Groups wishing to visit Inventionland can request a one-hour tour via the Inventionland website: www.inventionland.com. Inventionland offers free tours to schools and similar community-based organizations, but companies and corporations can visit as well.

How to Invent a Soccer Product

If you are wondering how to invent a new soccer product, but worry that it will take too much time, be too difficult, or cost too much money there are ways to reduce these concerns. However, at the same time, new product development is something that is uncertain. It is quite a risk, much like everything in business. No company or invention can guarantee success. So when you are thinking about how to invent a new product, there are plenty of factors to consider.

For one, companies continue to be more innovative. Therefore, there are people coming up with new invention ideas every day and making prototypes as you think about how to invent your idea. That is why it is important to do research and make sure your invention idea is not already on the market. Even if there is a product like the one you came up with, there is always a demand for new or improved products from corporations or individuals with new product ideas.  These products should either solve a problem or improve something and be able to fit in with a certain company’s product line.

For example, if you are thinking about inventing a new soccer product, one of the most popular products to recently come out is the Jimmy Ball. The Jimmy Ball is a tool designed to help new soccer players develop skills. Traditionally, coaches have tossed the soccer ball carefully at their students’ feet in order to develop their sense of touch as well as skill with different volleys and strikes. While this system works, there are disadvantages, mainly in the fact that it requires someone to propel the ball at the player’s feet, so independent practice is not possible. There is also the issue that more than one player can’t easily be trained at the same time. The Jimmy Ball is a system that tethers a specially-designed ball to a harness at the shoulders. There are other tethered ball systems available, but the Jimmy Ball’s shoulder harness changes the dynamics of the ball’s movement, making for a greater variety of strikes and volleys that the player can attempt. The harness enables the ball’s movement from front to back and side to side, as well as the up, down, and outward motion provided by the player’s strikes. The cord that the ball is attached to is non-stretching, meaning that while it can move around the player to different positions, the distance the player can strike the ball is manageable. The product also has variations to make it suitable for different ages and different levels of proficiency. As the player continues to strike the ball, it moves more quickly and in more varied directions, which trains quick reflexes and instinctive technique. One of the most important aspects of training in soccer is the development of a player’s knowledge of how to strike the ball accurately, and what amount of force to apply to the ball to get the desired effect. The Jimmy Ball provides an innovation in the sense that the changes it makes to existing systems are sensible and straightforward enhancements.

Another soccer invention is the Sniper Net by PK Pro. The Sniper Net handles a number of problems that soccer players find themselves faced with in one solution. One of the issues players face is that, if the whole team isn’t available, practices are difficult. If a player is trying to practice on his or her own, it’s difficult to get in meaningful scoring practices to develop accuracy. Without a goal keeper available, many types of practice are impossible, limiting the usefulness of time spent. The Sniper Net has a system of highlighted seconds that give the player instant feedback on the accuracy of their shot. They also help the player to develop a feel for how to strike the ball to get the results they want. Its system covers up the area generally defended most easily by a goal keeper, meaning that a player will be able to develop a feeling for how to get around the obstacle. It is suitable for small groups, single players looking to practice, and even larger groups that don’t have an available goal keeper. It is cost-effective for trainers and coaches as well as for individual players, and it also has the benefit of knocking back stray soccer balls, to keep them out of the way, and to give the player the ability to accurately keep track of their successful strikes.

When figuring out how to invent your product, you may face some obstacles along the way. This can cause you to lose time, energy and money in trying to get off the ground with a product, especially if you do not know how to invent on your own.  If you face any obstacles or are having a hard time inventing a product alone, keep in mind that there are inventing companies that can help.  One of the biggest obstacles most inventors must overcome when pursuing an idea is being willing to trust someone with their idea.  Make sure to do your research and choose an inventing company that has experience with developing products and getting them on store shelves.  Also make sure that the company will sign a Confidentiality Agreement to ensure that your idea is safe.

Famous Inventions: Barcode

When you get an idea for an invention, it is easy to consider the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter and become discouraged. However, there are many stories of famous inventions that involved all of those setbacks and challenges—inventions that people can’t imagine living without today. While many products are the result of coming up with an idea first, and then developing it, many other projects are inspired by moments in everyday life. Some of the most famous inventions have even been invented entirely by accident. The bar code, a staple of the retail landscape, is an example of an invention that took many years to perfect.

In 1948 Bernard Silver overheard the president of a local food chain asking one of the deans at the Drexel Institute of Technology to research a system to automatically read product information during checkout. Silver told his friend Norman Joseph Woodland about what he had heard, and the two began to work on a variety of systems. Their first system used ultraviolet ink, which was functional, but the ink faded easily and had the additional disadvantage of being expensive. Woodland left Drexel, convinced that the system could be workable with further development. He moved into his father’s Florida apartment and formed the first barcode based on the system of Morse code; he drew the design on the sand of the beach. "I just extended the dots and dashes downwards and made narrow lines and wide lines out of them,” Woodland later explained. For reading the resulting symbols, he adapted technology from optical soundtracks in movies, using a lightbulb shining through the paper onto a photomultiplier tube. He later decided that the system would work better if it were printed as a circle instead of a line, allowing it to be scanned in any direction.

On October 20, 1949, Woodland and Silver filed a patent application for the designs as well as the systems used to read the codes. The patent was issued on October 7, 1952. The patent was purchased by Philco in 1962, and later sold to RCA. Sometime after the Silver-Woodland patent, in 1959 David Collins, who had just received his Master’s degree from MIT, began to work on addressing a problem he had noticed while working for the Pennsylvania Railroad: the need to automatically identify railroad cars. He developed a system of blue and yellow reflective stripes, which attached to the side of the car, encoding a six-digit company identifier and a four-digit car number. The KarTrack system, as he called it was tested until 1967, when the Association of American Railroads selected it as a standard across the entire North American fleet. However, the rash of bankruptcies in the early 1970s slowed the rollout and the system was found to be easily fooled by dirt in certain applications. The system was eventually adapted for other applications by the U.S. Post Office and others.

In 1966 the National Association of Food Chains held a meeting where they discussed the idea of automated checkout systems. Because RCA had purchased the rights to the original Woodland patent, they attended the meeting and initiated an internal project to develop a system based on the “bullseye” version of the code. In mid-1970, the NAFC established a committee for a Uniform Grocery Product Code, which set guidelines for barcode development and created a subcommittee to standardize the approach. In 1972 RCA began an eighteen-month test of the bullseye code; the codes were printed on adhesive paper which was attached by employees at the same time as price tags. The circular design of the code had a disadvantage however; during printing, presses sometimes smear ink in the direction that the paper is running, rendering the code unreadable. IBM, which employed Woodland, had already asked him to work on an alternative. His linear code was printed in the direction of the stripes, so extra ink was not a problem. On April 3, 1973 the IBM UPC was selected as the standard. The invention did not really take off until 1980, however. The first item officially scanned by a bar code machine was a packet of chewing gum in an Ohio supermarket in 1974.

Do you have an invention idea?  Click here to confidentially submit your idea.

Patenting an Invention for Camping

Patenting an invention is one of several ways for inventors to protect their intellectual property.  A patent is legal protection of a design, process or other patentable property that is novel. The protection lasts for a specified period, at the end of which the invention becomes part of the public domain. A patent gives the owner the right to exclude others from making, using, selling, trading or importing the invention or process that the patent holder has devised.

Patents can be acquired for a wide variety of inventions, and today there are many ideas and innovations that make camping-related chores easier.  If you are in the process of inventing a new product for camping, take a look at some of these unique patents.

The Folding Camp Stove (U.S. Patent No. 7367332) is designed to take advantage of newer technology available, in order to create a more lightweight, compact cooking tool for campers to use. The inventors explain that while there are many portable stoves that have been invented in the past, there are drawbacks to the existing types, particularly among those types that are intended for a larger basis of service. The application explains, “While these larger, suitcase-style portable stoves work well for their intended purpose, there are some limitations to their use. Generally, the suitcase-style portable stoves require a separate table on which to rest, and must be level or near level on that table. In addition, although the suitcase-style portable stoves fold into a box configuration, they are still somewhat bulky for travel and storage. Care must be taken with the devices because there are often objects that extend outside the box configuration, such as gas line attachments or control knobs, which may need protection during storage and/or transport.” The folding camp stove incorporates a construction of lightweight materials, which makes it more readily carried on its own. However, the design of the stove is important as well. The stove is built into a clamshell configuration when folded, meaning that instead of a large rectangular “suitcase” that must be carefully carried separately, the folding stove provides a small, circular package that can be packed in with other items for carrying. The ability to collapse the stove comes in part from the clamshell shape, wherein each burner is set into a circular body, with pivoting hinges allowing the opening and folding of the elements. The burner elements are also designed such that, while symmetrical when the whole apparatus is unfolded, they are slightly offset so that they nest together when the stove is closed.

The Adjustable Fishing and Camping Chair (U.S. Patent No. 4772068) was approved for patent in September of 1988; while it is not precisely a recent invention, it provided for a need that existed long before the item. The chair is a collapsible seat which includes a means of adjusting the distance between the bottom of the chair and the surface on which it rests, which enables the chair to remain a safe seating arrangement even with the presence of an incline. The chair also has a means for selectively adjusting the front end of the chair accordingly. The frame of the chair is constructed of a lightweight material, such as aluminum, which makes it more highly portable than other adjustable chairs available on the market. The invention deals with an issue that long plagued campers and fishermen; namely the need to have seating available in all terrains. The adjustable chair provided means for the seat to be made stable in a variety of different inclined positions, and locking mechanisms for keeping the adjustments in place until the chair should be collapsed or until further adjustments need to be made. The chair’s lightweight materials, including the plastic strips that form a lattice-mesh to hold the sitter, make it ideal for the purposes of camping; being easy to carry and compact to store, it is an ideal item of camping furniture.

The Collapsible Camping Trailer (U.S. Patent No. 4165117) is an invention intended to not create a new item, but to improve on existing products. The application explains that “many multi-purpose units are described which may be utilized for transportation and or living space. In general these prior devices comprise a single unit not detachable from the frame, and they are typically quite bulky when in a traveling position. Furthermore, these prior art devices permit only limited space to transport materials or equipment inside. Additionally, many of these devices are quite complicated or unreliable to operate in changing the device from a collapsed to an expanded condition or the reverse.” The invention creates a new type of camping trailer that is easily collapsed both by mechanical means and by manually folding down the components; when traveling, the collapsed camper is able to carry and store several items, or a reasonable amount of gear, while also being easy to transport and efficient in size. When the user arrives at the campsite, a locking device releases four spring-loaded lifting devices located at the corners of the camper, while also unlocking the hinged roof. The roof is lifted up such that it forms equal angles against all of the walls. A brace slides in a channel and hydraulic pressure is used to push the walls outward to the fully open position, with brackets to lock them in place once they achieve that expanse.  When the trailer must be collapsed, the front and back walls need only to be given sufficient pressure to unlock the brace, which activates the fold-down of the roof. All sides of the structure can then be collapsed inward.

There are many aspiring inventors out there.  In order to spend their time and money wisely, it is crucial for them to understand when and how to patent, or whether you even need one at all.  Many people believe that patenting their idea right away is what they need to do and this is not always the best idea.  Smart inventors and reputable inventing companies know that it is best to leave the patenting towards the end of the inventing process, after the idea has been improved and perfected as much as possible.  Remember that you can also team up with an inventing company.    The experienced employees of these companies have a better understanding of what it takes to make your product successful and can be extremely helpful.