How to Invent a Cleaning Product

If you are wondering how to invent a new cleaning 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 cleaning product, one of the most popular products to recently come out is the new Lysol tool line. The products include sponges, scrubbing pads, kitchen wipes, and refillable sponge-and-reservoir tools that have Lysol’s disinfectant incorporated into them. The brilliant change in these products is that the sponges and other cleaning implements maintain antimicrobial properties over the course of a long period of daily cleaning tasks. One of the problems many individuals at home cleaning dishes and other surfaces have dealt with in the past is that, while the products they are using are expressly for cleaning, they often gather bacteria and other germs that cause them to become smelly. In addition, an environment for growing germs is hardly what a person would like to clean their counters with. Particularly in the case of parents, many are concerned with eliminating vectors for disease to spare their children the possibility of becoming sick. The products themselves have fibers that retain the Lysol disinfecting chemicals in such a way that they do not leech into dishwater or onto surfaces. This is an important specification, because the leeching away of the Lysol product would cause a shorter lifespan of the cleaning implement, and it would also potentially be a risk, since many of the chemicals Lysol uses can cause ill effects if consumed. By protecting the consumer not only from the germs that might live in a cleaning tool but also from the means of eliminating those germs, Lysol has created a product line that is extremely popular.

Another cleaning invention is the Shark Navigator Lift-Away Professional. While consumers have become more and more interested in cleaning products in the last several years, with parents one of the largest markets for these products, it is strange that there has not been substantive change in the technology of vacuum cleaners in many years. Particularly in homes that have wooden floors, the cleaning options are typically extremely old fashioned. The Shark Navigator allows the user to sweep and vacuum wood floors with a microfiber cloth that is positioned behind the suction nozzle. The system removes fine dust more thoroughly, even from between the crevices and cracks in hardwood floors. The system also allows the user to detach and use the motor separately, making it a more versatile tool, and comes with the Shark anti-allergen complete seal technology. This technology promises to eliminate 99.9% of allergy-causing particles. The product has been developed at an excellent time; many people with wood floors are no longer able to maintain the expense of hiring specialized companies for the purposes of keeping the finicky surfaces clean. Shark’s technology has always been considered top-of-the-line, with its products capturing a premium in the market.

Dyson is another company that has been noteworthy in the field of vacuum technology. The new products, which include the Dyson Multi-Floor and the Animal model, include multiple proprietary components that give the items a sleeker design. The products have maximum efficiency as vacuums and also include features that make them easier to use on a wider variety of surfaces. The Multi-Floor, for example, is easy to carry and features hand-held functionality which allows for individuals to easily clean once-onerous surfaces such as stair steps. The products also include improvements such as a trigger on the handle to turn the brush roll on and off, and foot-pressure on-off switches on the units themselves, which mean that the user does not have to bend over as much. The ball design allows for greater maneuverability. The Dyson product line innovations are additional proof that as consumers are increasingly maintaining their own houses, the market has moved to make that process as convenient and efficient as possible.

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: The Aerosol Can

It is easy to become discouraged by the challenges, risks, and possible setbacks you may encounter when you get an idea for an invention. 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 aerosol can is an example of an invention that took several years to perfect, and is a testament to the level of patience required of prospective inventors.

The concept of an aerosol spray most likely goes back as far as 1790; however, the first patent for an aerosol spray can was granted to Erik Rotheim in 1926, with a United States patent for the same invention approved in 1931. Rotheim sold the rights to a US company for 100,000 Norwegian kroner. In 1939, the first disposable spray can was invented and patented by Julian S. Kahn. The product remained mostly undeveloped, however; Kahn’s idea was to mix cream and a propellant from two sources to make whipped cream at home, which is not a true aerosol in that sense. It was not until 1941 that the first aerosol spray can was put to use by American inventors Lyle D. Goodhue and William N. Sullivan who are credited as the inventors of the modern spray can. Their patent was filed on October 3, 1941 and approved on October 5, 1943. Their design of a refillable spray can dubbed the “bug bomb” is the founding design premise for many popular commercial spray products. Pressurized by liquefied gas, the small, portable can allowed soldiers to defend against malaria-carrying mosquitos by spraying inside tents and airplanes during World War II; the pair were later the first recipients of the Eric Andreas Rotheim Gold Medal from the Federation of European Aerosol Associations in 1970.

By 1948, three companies were granted licenses to manufacture aerosols; of the three, two—Chase Products Company and Claire Manufacturing—still manufacture aerosols. Later refinements included the “crimp-on valve,” used to control the spray in low-pressure aerosols, which was developed in 1949 by a Bronx machine shop proprietor named Robert Abplanalp. Various propellants were used until chlorofluorocarbons were discovered to have the best properties for the various products; unfortunately, CFCs were later recognized as having negative effects on the ozone layer, which resulted in the Montreal Protocol of 1989, requiring the elimination of CFCs from all products. The most common replacements are mixtures of volatile hydrocarbons, such as propane, butane, and isobutene. The majority of propellants have the disadvantage of being highly flammable; in foodstuffs, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide are common propellants, while asthma inhalers and other medical aerosols use hydrofluoroalkanes (HFAs).

In addition to changes in the propellant used, over the years the cans themselves have been refined, with different materials coming into use as technology offers alternatives to bulky or inconvenient previous alternatives. A UK company has recently developed and patented a technology to generate more finely dispersed mists by using a disk of superhydrophobic material within a manual pump, in order to generate an aerosol-like result without the use of a propellant.

The invention and development of the aerosol can is an interesting story which proves that the development of a new product requires patience from the inventor. Like many products, the aerosol can depended on prior understandings of technology and adaptation of new materials, until it reached its most effective form. The understanding of the principles spurred several inventors forward, but it still took many years for the product to be viable.

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.