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."