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Barbie and Ken who?
I'm referring to the Barbie doll and
her commitment-phobic boyfriend, Ken, who called it quits in
February. Their publicist said, "They'll always remain the best of
friends." Yeah, I'm sure that's going to make die-hard fans of
Barbie and Ken feel better.
How is this relevant to our story,
or is your humble scribe just going off on a tangent again?
The dolls have something in common
with many of the popular inventions that people use every day,
because they were created by an individual inventor, Mattel
co-founder Ruth Handler).
Where do inventions come from? Are
the best products invented by individual inventors or by big
companies?
For many brand-new products, the
chances are good that they were created by individual inventors. But
products that are either high-tech or are variations of existing
products (think Diet Coke) were probably created in corporate labs.
Individual inventors often face
nearly insurmountable odds in the invention process because they
don't have existing brand names to capitalize on and they usually
don't have retail stores set up to carry their new inventions. Oh,
and there's that pesky little detail about paying for the cost of
inventing and marketing.
From board games such as Monopoly
and Trivial Pursuit, invented by two Canadians, to toys like Furby,
invented by Richard Levy, and Rubik's Cube, invented by Erno Rubik
of Hungary, it was the work of individual inventors that brought us
these products. The same goes for appliances like the George Foreman
Grill (sorry, but it was Michael Behm, not George Foreman)
and anything that comes from Ron Popeil, of Ronco fame.
Individual inventors create new
products in every imaginable industry, from hardware inventions like
the Black & Decker Workmate to sporting goods inventions like the
modern baseball glove, by Cardinals pitcher Bill Doak in 1920, and
the snowboard, by Jake Burton. In the case of Black & Decker, it was
Englishman Ron Hackman, an individual inventor, who invented the
Workmate and licensed it to the company.
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in this article] |
Think that TV and radio were
invented by RCA or Zenith? Think again, as it was 17-year-old Idaho
farm boy Philo Farnsworth who invented TV and Croatian immigrant
Nikola Tesla who invented radio.
The next time you drive somewhere in
the rain, you can thank Alabama's Mary Anderson for inventing
windshield wipers in 1903 or Robert Kearns for inventing
intermittent windshield wipers in 1964. Both were individual
inventors.
If you prefer flying, credit goes to
Wilbur and Orville for getting you there. If your plane doesn't make
it all the way to your destination, you'll be forever grateful to
Capt. Tom Baldwin and his brother, inventors of the parachute.
And we haven't even mentioned some
of the all-time great individual inventors, such as Leonardo da
Vinci, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, George Washington Carver or
Thomas Edison, who went on to create his own corporate lab.
Back to the original question of
this story: Who invents better products -- individual inventors or
corporations?
That would be impossible to answer
in one column, as we would have to compare the results of thousands
of individual inventors versus thousands of corporations. As
Invention Mysteries begins its third year of syndication, we will
continue to focus on the stories of the individual inventors.
[Paul Niemann]
Paul Niemann is the author of Invention Mysteries. He can be
reached at niemann7@aol.com.
© Copyright Paul Niemann 2005
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