First Class
orthotote Every business traveler knows the drill: You’re running through the
airport or train station with your ticket clutched in your hand. As you weave in and around
the other travelers, you can feel the strap of your travel bag slowly moving closer to that
point where it slips off your shoulder. What a pain.
I always thought the solution was to work out more and have bigger shoulders. David
Finkelstein had another idea. Finkelstein’s shoulders also couldn’t hold the strap of his
travel bag. This inconvenience turned into an invention, and ultimately, a new career for
Finkelstein, a businessman who never dreamed that at age 61 he’d be an inventor.
Finkelstein looked at the problem and realized he needed to reverse the pull of
gravity, which was pulling the bag down the slope of his shoulder. He devised an attachment for a shoulder strap that would reverse the downward angle of the shoulder. In
mid-2005, test runs complete, the Orthotote was finally ready for its debut. Finkelstein is
proud of his product, which, he says, “Won’t change the whole world, only yours.”
No question, getting Orthotote to market has been a haul, but luckily the Orthotote
makes the heavy task a little bit easier. ORTHOTOTE.COM
GADGET
NATION
If you don’t have an idea for a gadget, then
you’re probably married to someone who does.
Each year more and more Americans file patents. Garage inventors are everywhere. These
entrepreneurs see a problem and come up with
a unique way to solve it. But having an idea
and then taking it to market can be a bumpy
journey. It’s a path filled with wrong turns,
dead ends and lots of bumps in the road, but
that doesn’t stop true inventors. No matter
how often their brother-in-law makes fun of an
idea, they keep moving forward, chasing the
American Dream.
In my book Gadget Nation: A Journey
re-pillable card
A magazine article can change your life. Or
at least it changed John Higgins’ life. Higgins
read an article that said all men need to have
an aspirin nearby in case they develop chest
pains. Higgins took the advice to heart and
placed aspirin bottles everywhere—by the
bedside, at work, in the car and so on. Then he
realized it made more sense to carry the aspirin
somewhere on his person. But where? His
wallet seemed like a smart place, but when you
wrap up an aspirin and put it in a wallet, it’s
either crushed to dust or creates an uncomfortable bulge. Higgins concluded that wallets are
designed to hold money and credit cards, so
he made a pill holder similar to a credit card. It
worked, but it didn’t make money.
Luckily for Higgins, the story doesn’t end
here. Another article, this one about his inven-
tion, found its way to Bayer of Mexico. They
make aspirin, but they also make Levitra—
another pill some men might want to
carry in their wallet. Bayer ordered
200,000 at first, and now orders mil-
lions. Higgins didn’t intend his Re-
Pillable Card for erectile dysfunction
pills, but he’s not complaining.
REPILLABLE.COM
brightfeet A knock on the head was what pulled the trigger for Doug
Vick’s shot at fame and fortune. Vick got up in the middle of the night for a
glass of water. He turned on the kitchen lights, drank his water, turned off
the lights and proceeded into his very dark bedroom. Being a considerate
husband, Vick didn’t turn on any bedroom lights. He tried to climb into bed
without waking his wife, Barbra. He almost accomplished his mission, until
he slammed his head into one of the posts of his four-poster bed. Barbra
woke up and Vick saw the light. Or, more specifically, he saw the need for
slippers with headlights. He tried several designs and settled on LED lights
that only come on when the room is dark and someone is wearing the slippers. Vick decided to call his invention BrightFeet. He knows there’s a need
for his slippers, and he expects success, not de-feet. BRIGHTFEETSLIPPERS.COM
