Bidding Farewell to National Inventor’s Month

If you are ever in Washington DC, visit one of the 10 Smithsonian museums. The Smithsonian Information Center in the Castle is centrally located at 1000 Jefferson Dr., SW, Washington, D.C. Ten of the Smithsonian museums in Washington, D.C., span an area from 3rd to 14th Streets between Constitution Avenue and Independence Avenue, approximately 1 mile (1.6 km). Most have free admission too! A great adventure for curious adults and kids. Maybe it will inspire the next inventor to take action.

Bidding Farewell to National Inventor’s Month

Writing & Inventing

Last week I retreated to a cabin in the High Sierra, with my co-writer Patricia Harrelson, to work on The Right Sisters. It was an energetic, productive, and at times, comical experience.

We immersed ourselves in the lives of eight women inventors, reviewing transcriptions of our interviews with them, researching and fact checking key points, talking in depth about the common and unique themes among them, and eventually reading and revising the drafts we have written of their chapters. What occurred to me as we worked was how similar the writing process is to the inventing process.

The are both creative endeavors that require deep and meaningful attention and action. Patricia and I talked at length about each inventor. We hiked to the river and to a giant rock pile, notebooks in hand so we could record the insights that came to us. We stretched our bodies in yoga poses and our understanding of each woman deepened. I remember the talking, thinking, walking, and stretching that went into developing KleenSlate and my erasers and paddles.



A little humor is essential to both processes. Our cabin was funky. It was very old and tilted on the foundation, so we slept and wrote on an angle. A skunk family had nested under the cabin all winter, so that during the heat of midday a pungent scent wafted through the floorboards. At night, we had a regular visitor, a critter who made a rukus in the little kitchen, nibbling on fruit we'd left on the table and knocking pans off the stove. These discomforts seemed to feed our process rather than detract from it. We giggled at our cockeyed computers sitting on the table and shone flashlights into the kitchen at night trying to "catch" the critter in its beam.



We never caught sight of him, but we caught much more. The essence and flavor of the women inventors who have so wholeheartedly shared their stories with us. It is going to be a GREAT BOOK!

Fun Facts from Everyday Edisons

Everyday, human beings deal with problems. Inventors see problems and their minds click into action to seek a solution.

For example, Benjamin Franklin invented bifocals because he hated wearing two pairs of glasses.

Everyday Edisons, the award winning PBS series, documents this problem solving process by closely following inventors as they develop an invention. For the past couple of years, I've had the privilege of participating in the casting calls for Everyday Edisons. What a privilege it is to hear from people across the country who have inventive minds.

The program developers know that inventors find inspiration in hearing about other inventors. Not only have they created an awesome television program, they also have a newsletter that includes inventor updates and casting calls.

Here are a few fun facts I gleaned from the most recent newsletter:

Melting ice cream inspired the invention of the outboard motor. It was a lovely August day and Ole Evinrude was rowing his boat to his favorite island picnic spot. As he rowed, he watched his ice cream melt and wished he had a faster way to get to the island. At that moment, the idea for the outboard motor was born!

The Band-Aid was invented by a Johnson & Johnson employee whose wife had cut herself. Earl Dickson's wife was rather accident prone, so he set out to develop a bandage that she could apply without help. He placed a small piece of gauze in the center of a small piece of surgical tape, and what we know today as the Band-Aid band-aid was born!

My favorite invention story is one that I think epitomizes the thinking of so many inventors, that is the desire to make the world a better place:

British-born Tim Berners-Lee is the inventor of the World Wide Web, but he never made a cent on this invention which revolutionized the computer world. In 1989, he envisioned a way to link documents on the Internet using "hypertext" so "surfers" could jump from one document to another through highlighted words. Berners-Lee decided not to patent his technology because he feared that if he did, use of the Web would be too expensive and would therefore not become used worldwide. He passed up a fortune so the world could learn and communicate.

To learn more about inventors, tune into Everyday Edisons AND go to their website and subscribe to the newsletter.

Saving the World One Invention at a Time

Inventing is as old as human kind. When we were kids, we learned about the impact of the wheel on the growth and development of human life. While the wheel had dramatic effects for humans, smaller inventions were similarly significant.

Dr Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist from the University of Oxford, recently published a paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that describes how one early invention enable humans to adapt to environmental change. He discovered tiny stone blades, less than 4cm long, in South Asia. The blades were probably inserted at the top of wooden shafts and used as spear-heads or arrow tips.They were light and portable and could be produced in large quantities.



Climate was changing rather drastically at this time, turning colder at the onset of the Ice Age, causing much of the landscape of South Asia to become quite inhospitable. Despite the challenging environment, the genetic findings of Dr. Petraglia’s study reveal that Asian populations actually increased during this period. He speculates that the tiny blade contributed to the survival of the hunter-gatherers because they allowed humans to hunt at a greater distance from their prey and thus with less risk.

While your invention may not enable the survival of the human race, don’t underestimate its usefulness in society. For instance, I know my paddles can save thousands of dollars in paper for individual schools. Multiply that by many, many schools and my invention has the potential to make a HUGE impact on the world.

Tell us how your invention will impact the world.

The Birth of an Idea- Part 2

Wanda Plimmer is the inventor of the Nursing Nest, a device that supports a nursing baby. Wanda is one of the inventors featured in The Right Sisters.

Wanda's idea for the nursing nest was born following an emergency C-Section to deliver her first child. She describes the conditions that prompted her invention this way: "My incision hurt, my lower back hurt, my shoulders hurt, and I had Carpel Tunnel from holding him up for so long. I was falling asleep sitting upright on the bed in the middle of the night, and twice I dropped him onto the bed. I couldn’t believe how unsafe I felt dealing with this tiny baby when I was exhausted and hurting."

Inventors often create out of a sense of frustration. Many people feel like there has to be a better way when frustrated, but inventors use that feeling as their source of inspiration.

Wanda was terribly frustrated after the birth of her son as she tried to nurse him. She turned to books and health care practitioners who explained that she could nurse laying down if she used blankets to prop her baby. But even though this helped a lot, she was still frustrated. Here is a excerpt from The Right Sisters describing her moment of inspiration and what she did about it.

The only problem was that for each feeding when I needed to reposition to the opposite breast, I had to shift all the blankets and pillows that I had arranged. One night about midnight as I was nursing Joel Walter, I had this sudden image of what I needed to make this work so much better. I got out of bed as soon as the baby fell asleep and went to the kitchen to find the electric carving knife. Then I grabbed a slab of foam that I happened to have. I didn’t know exactly what the end product was going to look like, but I had a good sense of the shape it needed to be. That night, I created the first prototype for the Nursing Nest.

The thing that distinguishes inventors from other dreamers is their pro-activity. When they imagine a solution; they get to work to make it happen as Wanda Plimmer did. Tell us how you were pro-active in bringing your idea to life.

The Birth of an Idea-Part 1

Folks are often curious about when, where, and how an inventor first gets an idea for an invention. That's one of the questions I asked the women inventors whom I interviewed for the the book I'm writing: The Right Sisters: Women Inventors Tell Their Stories. Their answers to these questions illustrate the creative mind at work on a very practical level.

I thought my blog readers might enjoy reading a few excerpts from The Right Sisters that zero in on the birth of an idea. Here is a short segment describing the moment when I got the idea to make my first invention:

My younger son Joe wanted to make a gift for his basketball coach. “Mom,” he said, “Can you help me make a dry-erase board with a diagram of the basketball court? And can we get some markers with erasers on the end? Coach is always erasing with his hands and then he wipes his hands on his pants and he’s covered with black smudges.” My fingers were also black at the end of the day as were my fellow teachers because we used our hands to erase rather than reach for the block eraser. I went on the Internet to look for a marker with an eraser, and I quickly discovered that there was a 1.8 billion dollar marker business, but not one company had designed an eraser to go on the end of the pen. Joe and I both had the same thought: A person wouldn’t buy a pencil without an eraser, so why buy a marker without an eraser? Right then I thought, “This is it! I’ll invent an eraser and I’ll take it to market.

Little did I know the challenges that lay ahead that would change my life forever. Best of all, that little eraser helped send Joe to college!








Stay tuned for more excerpts from The Right Sisters. And please if you have your own story about the birth of an idea, drop us a note in "Comments."