Skip to main contentEverybody's got a big idea.
Seventy-eight years ago this week, Philo Farnsworth patented a gizmo called a television set. Fast-forward to the present and it's all about iPhones and high-tech, gold-medal-winning Speedos. And (almost) as long as there have been inventions in America, there have been patents to protect them. If the government considers your idea new and useful, and you can prove that nobody else has created it, you can patent it—a process that often takes years to complete and costs thousands of dollars in fees.
Turns out, Oregonians are big patenters. Oregon has the third highest per capita number of patents in the nation (only surpassed by those mad scientists in Idaho and Vermont), according to the Intellectual Property Owners Association's 2008 "IP Record" report. Many of the patents are held by big companies (Portland semiconductor king Intel got 1,864 patents in 2007 alone). But there are a remarkable number of everyday people who just plain knew they had come up with a better, er, mousetrap.
So, what the hell are all those locals up to, anyway? WW slogged through page after page of U.S. patents pending or granted to Portlanders in 2007 and 2008 (nearly 25,000 Portland patents have been added to the U.S. Patent Office's databases over the past three decades) and contacted the creators of a handful of gadgets we found the most intriguing—or whose names and descriptions we found totally unintelligible. We found out that some have made the production of new ideas their livelihood; others just stumbled over their big idea on vacation. We found inventors who want to save lives or change the world, and others who just want to help make your poker game run more smoothly. But one thing is for certain: They all want to tell you how their gadget works.
FIREFIGHTING NOZZLE FOR PROJECTING FOG CLOUD
Inventor: Eugene Ivy
Day job: Part-time maintenance man for Alco Property in downtown Portland.
His favorite invention ever: Coffee. And gunpowder.
How his invention could affect our lives: According to Ivy, "It is strictly for the safety of the firefighters—everybody goes home."
What the actual patent says: "Rotating in opposite directions creates a thrust vortex between the two nozzles. This vortex adds a push to the fog cloud."
Clad from cap and jacket to studded bracelet in his company's red International Fog Incorporated gear, Portlander Eugene Ivy could easily be mistaken for a NASCAR fan. Instead, Ivy's obsession is with fire hoses. His nozzle, named "First Attack," helps snuff out blazes better than your average hose.
A 58-year-old Texas native and former firefighter, Ivy moved to Portland 15 years ago. He says he's already sold more than 70 nozzles in Texas and Louisiana, and he's busy doing fog nozzle test performances for Oregon and Washington fire departments. Priced at an average of $1,500 a pop, Ivy's fog nozzles are no small investment, but he thinks they're a lifesaver.
Ivy says a blazing supermarket fire sparked his idea 22 years ago: "The roof looked like a piece of bacon, and there were firemen on it cutting holes to gain access ahead of the fire," he says. "As I watched, I thought there's bound to be a better way."
Soon, Ivy began drawing designs on restaurant napkins and waking up at night to scribble down ideas in his basement machine shop. The result: a fog nozzle with a rotor that projects a 30-foot shield of micron-sized water particles—keeping firefighters a safe distance away from a blaze. Compared with a regular stream of water, dense fog leaves no room for oxygen. The fire's heat converts fog particles to steam faster—cooling and squelching out fires at an increased rate.
"[The nozzle] is one-of-a-kind," agrees 28-year firefighting veteran and Washington State Patrol Fire Training Academy instructor Ralph Omlid. He says his department wants to buy Ivy's nozzle but hasn't budgeted for it yet. "When I met Ivy [last year] he was a little short on his science," Omlid says. "He's got it now. His nozzle is ideal for contained fires and even liquid and gas fires."
Ivy also says the "First Attack" nozzle's design makes the hose manageable enough for a single firefighter to control it without the hose doing that "pushback" dance you might remember from movies like Backdraft.
John Column, the chief of the 14-man Grays Harbor Fire Dept. District 8 in Pacific Beach, Wash., says that firefighters are required to have three people on a team to enter a building, but a lone firefighter is allowed to tackle a blaze on his own from the outside, which is easier to do with Ivy's fog nozzle. " love 'em," says Column, whose department bought four nozzles. "They save us time and keep my men safer."
Although Ivy won't say how much cash he has put into his invention, he says his wife Bonnie has supported him through the trial-and-error process. "We've got our lives in this," he says.
To show his appreciation, Ivy bought her what he calls her own "First Attack"—a diamond- and ruby-studded pendant he designed himself…in the shape of a fog nozzle.
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR TISSUE SEALING
Inventor: Chelsea Shields-Bahney
Day job: Ph.D. candidate, Oregon Health & Science University, School
of Medicine.
Her favorite invention ever: The bicycle.
How her invention could affect our lives: Her "natural stapling" method could speed up cancer surgeries and cut down healing time.
What the actual patent says: "…wherein tissue reaction corresponds to a boiling point of tissue fluid…."
After meeting Chelsea Shields-Bahney, you'll never look at a hair crimper the same way again. "Actually, it's more like a hair-straightening iron," explains the blond, freckle-nosed Ph.D. candidate, flattening the palm of one hand against the other. "The two jaws come together to send energy through the tissue...melting the collagen fibers [in the flesh] in between." Huh? She's talking about a sealing method for which she holds a pending patent, which uses radio frequency energy trapped between two plates to suture a wound with heat. Usually, doctors use staples or stitches to connect or repair tissue inside a body. But stitches are time-consuming and expensive. And staples can tear or create air leaks in delicate lung tissue and cause infections in bacteria-filled places like the bowels or liver—hot spots for cancer. And that's not good.
In 2003, Shields-Bahney and her colleagues at a Colorado medical-equipment company figured out another way to hold people together. The company already made a gadget called LigaSure that used heat energy to cauterize blood vessels. Her team invented a toothbrush-sized tool to tackle bigger and different types of tissue. They experimented on slaughterhouse discards like pig intestines, using different levels of energy and pressure until they found the best method to make a "natural staple." "I love to cook," she says. "I equated what I was doing in the lab to stuff in the kitchen...[like] how I'd push down with a spatula on a grilled cheese sandwich to get it to stick together."
"We [already] have good methods of sealing.... There are very few times that we find our [titanium] staples leave us lacking," says a skeptical Dr. Dan Herzig, an assistant professor at OHSU, who specializes in colo-rectal surgery. "But if something is better, cheaper, faster…if [i]the data shows that, we'll use it."
Shields-Bahney, 29, moved to Portland in 2005 to work in the Department of Orthopedics at OHSU. She says her former company hasn't yet released her tissue-sealer system, which she estimates might cost a hospital upward of $20,000. "It's probably around 10 years away…. I'll never see any money from it," she laughs.
But she may be filling out her next patent application a lot sooner than that. These days she works in a cluttered Pill Hill lab filled with gas canisters, refrigerators and an inflatable shark she called her team's "mascot." She's busy using adult bone-marrow stem cells to "grow" new cartilage: "Instead [of a metal or plastic joint replacement], we'd be able to heal the diseased cartilage by giving you a new chunk that's grown out of your own cells before you ever needed a joint replacement." She's working on patenting a new photopolymer liquid that would help harden the "cartilage Jell-O" once doctors injected it into a joint. "I'm a former ski racer," she says, grinning. "I'm personally motivated this time."
FOOTOPIA
Inventor: John Condon
Day job: Owner of Proto-Tech, manufacturer of medical research equipment in Portland.
His favorite invention ever: Aquaponics—the symbiotic cultivation of plants and aquatic animals in a recirculating environment.
How his invention could affect our lives: It's like a hot tub for unmarried Mormons.
What the actual patent says: "A foot spa…which can accommodate more than one user at once so that a shared experience and relaxing social setting is provided."
Are you into sex but too shy to invite your date into a hot tub? With the Footopia multi-user foot spa, you can experience all the warmth and comfort of a Jacuzzi while keeping your erogenous zones covered. Pull up a chair, take off your socks and get ready for a spa treatment both soothing and chaste. At $1,995, being naked up to your knees never felt so good.
The concept is simple enough. A heater and a pump—hidden in a wooden cabinet made from a used wine barrel—push water through a 30-gallon resin tub, all around your aching trotters. Inventor John Condon—who also owns a medical research equipment manufacturing company—says his aha moment came when he and his family encountered hot springs while hiking in Washington's Olympic Mountains.
"It was too hot to climb in," remembers Condon, "so we just dipped our feet. And I thought, hey, this is pretty nice. So I built a backyard version."
What makes the 44-year-old Milwaukie resident's backyard hot spring unique (and thus patent-worthy) is its multi-user status: Up to seven people can soak at one time. Although there are already numerous patents for foot spas, none of the current models can accommodate more than one person. That's the point, says Condon. "These foot spas are meant to be shared. It brings people together." Admittedly, the spa's hefty price tag is out of most people's reach. Condon has sold about 100 foot spas since he started making them in 2005.
"People have been gathering around hot water and dipping themselves in it for thousands of years," muses Richelle Corbo of Common Ground Wellness Center, a local clothing-optional hot-tubbing joint. "These foot spas could be a great first step for people with body-image issues."
Sure. Perhaps more importantly, it's tougher to pee in than a hot tub. Take a demo soak at Condon's Ashiyu Patio Foot Spas, 8015 SE 13th Ave., 232-0920.
MULTIPLAYER GAMING BUTTON
Inventor: Jeff Klein
Day job: Sells medical insurance to the self-employed.
His favorite invention ever: The LED light.
How his invention could affect our lives: It'll streamline your home poker games.
What the actual patent says: "A multiplayer gaming button for tracking dealer position and betting schedules."
As an inventor, Jeff Klein values simplicity. It runs in the family: His grandfather pioneered the concept of pocketed springs in mattresses, and his dad developed ergonomic designs for speaker stands. So when Jeff faced a logistical problem playing home games of Texas Hold 'Em poker, he did what came naturally: He invented a solution.
The problem? Too much equipment, and none of it fit in a case of poker chips. At most home games, players were using three separate devices to keep track of the blind time, the bet clock and the rotating dealer.
"Most of the time we ended up using people's cell phones and kitchen timers," says Klein, sitting beneath a fake palm tree in the stoplight-yellow workshop in his comfortable West Hills home. "That was cumbersome, and quite often it just didn't work."
The solution? The DB Dealer Button. The button—which has already been licensed by the World Poker Tour—includes an adjustable blind timer and a 30-second bet clock for slow players. It's like a stopwatch for the fiscally irresponsible. The best part? The circular token's profile is slimmer than a deck of cards, so it fits in a case with your poker chips.
Texas Hold 'Em involves a series of forced bets, or blinds. Without them, a game of poker could go on for hours. Until now, keeping track of the blind time has been the bane of professional and amateur poker players alike. Timers had been outsize, overcomplicated and often unreliable. Not so with Klein's invention, which retails for between $13.95 and $23.95 (find it online at dbdealer.com). Since 2005, he has moved about 15,000 buttons and proudly reports he's in the black this year.
The DB Dealer has been getting a lot of hype, including being featured on the website for the 2007 blockbuster Ocean's Thirteen. That's both good news and bad news for Klein, 40. On one hand, his product seems to be gaining currency among hardcore poker players. On the other hand, Warner Brothers never asked his permission or even contacted him about using the DB Dealer Button design on their Ocean's site. Is he currently in talks with the movie studio about a settlement? Bet on it.
FOLDABLE CLIPBOARD
Inventor: Ginevra Liptan
Day job: Resident at Good Samaritan Hospital.
Her favorite invention ever: The Internet.
How her invention could affect our lives: Helps on-the-go professionals stay organized; minimizes intern abuse.
What the actual patent says: "Non-limiting examples of alternative hinges include butt hinges, knife hinges, and piano hinges."
Last month Ginevra Liptan received an offer for her two-year-old folding-clipboard company. The bid, from a medical book publishing company, would've eliminated all of the 33-year-old doctor's debt, but leave her with minimal profit. "I did not put my blood, sweat, tears—vomit—into this invention to break even!" responded this sassy mother of a 10-month-old baby.
She's got a point. Although Liptan still has some nagging medical-school loans, her invention is already a success. In just two years of mostly Internet sales (whitecoatclipboard.com), 2,000 of her newfangled clipboards have been sold to medical students and doctors around the country at $29.95 each.
The clipboard's genius is simple: one sheet of specially layered vinyl, manufactured to never crease, bridges two pieces of plastic reinforced by a hinge. Liptan's foldable design lets doctors carry around a writing surface in their lab coat pocket—and helps them avoid using interns' backs as impromptu desks.
Liptan put the project into action in 2006 after an evening of swilling wine with another medical student morphed into a discussion on how to stay organized during rounds. After the idea of a foldable clipboard surfaced, she couldn't get it out of her head. She began by finding the best hinge.
"I became a hinge geek," says Liptan, who specializes in internal medicine at Good Sam in Northwest Portland, "obsessing over hinges for three months…I admired hinges at hardware stores and people's houses." After trying 15 types, Liptan ended up designing her own hinge, one that wouldn't interfere with a user's hands while writing. The process was an "emotional suck," according to Liptan, but once her patent was issued in 2007, she had the market cornered.
A new horizontal version of the clipboard, laughingly called "The 2.0" by Liptan's husband Jamie, is now being made in China. "I call her 'the crazy clipboard lady,'" he confesses.
SPERM QUALITY ASSAY
Inventor: Peter Sutovsky
Day job: Associate professor of reproductive physiology and clinical obstetrics & gynecology at the University of Missouri-Columbia, former staff scientist at OHSU (1997-2001).
His favorite invention ever: The wheel.
How his invention could affect our lives: It can limit the number of false-negative tests for human male infertility; could theoretically boost the U.S. pork industry's sales by producing more piglets per litter.
What the actual patent says: "The present invention relates to male infertility, and in particular to assays for predicting fertility in animals including human and bovines."
Wanna know if you're shootin' blanks? Peter Sutovsky, 41, has the answer to your male fertility queries. He says his patented process to measure the protein ubiquitin in sperm is a more accurate way to find out whether you're infertile than the method currently used in fertility clinics across the nation. "I can detect sperm cells that are defective even if they don't look defective," says the doc, who first applied for a patent for his process in 2001 as a staff scientist at OHSU. "Oftentimes the sperm cells that are bad look perfectly normal, and it gives you a false positive [on a fertility test]."
The current fertility test for men is pretty basic: Look at a semen sample under a microscope to see how many sperm are present, how many are moving and how many look "normal." But Sutovsky's test uses chemicals to identify an actual protein—ubiquitin—found on the surface of sick spermatozoa. He says his test, which can be run through a lab machine called a flow cytometer, is faster and "takes out the guesswork."
"It definitely has a sound biological basis," says John Hesla, a reproductive endocrinologist and infertility specialist at Portland's Oregon Reproductive Medicine.
"[The test] could be potentially useful in selecting sperm for in vitro fertilization. I don't think it would replace a standard semen analysis but could complement it.... New ideas have to survive the test of clinical trials in order to see how useful they are in the way we practice medicine."
Sutovsky, who grew up in Slovakia, considers his ubiquitin process as useful for animals as for people. "You test semen to see whether you should use it for insemination in cows and sows or dispose of it," says Sutovsky, who was getting ready for the Midwest Boar Stud Managers Conference in St. Louis when WW spoke with him. He and his colleagues theorized that they could produce two more piglets per litter when they used "good" semen found with the ubiquitin test than squiggly-wigglies that were considered fertile using normal tests.
Although Sutovsky's assay is already being used in experimental trials with animals as well as in projects his own lab has done in conjunction with participating fertility clinics, it's not yet available at your local hospital (or barnyard). That's OK, he's working on identifying a second biomarker that'll single out sperm duds to make his test even more of a sure thing. And has he been a subject in his own ubiquitin tests? "No, I've proven that I'm fertile," chuckles Sutovsky, the father of a 17-year-old son. "At least, I was 18 years ago."
WIRELESS PATIENT MONITORING SYSTEM
Inventor: Herb Weiner
Day Job: Principal software engineer for Beaverton medical-device manufacturer Welch Allyn.
His favorite invention ever: The computer, because "it has advanced mankind's ability to create and produce," Weiner says. "It's not a replacement of the human brain, but it's an extension of it."
How his invention could affect our lives: Helps people to move freely around the hospital while recovering from illness or injury without leaving them in a dangerous wi-fi dead zone.
What the actual patent says: "A wireless patient monitor is adapted to communicate with any one of plural medical telemetry networks, each having one or more central stations, where each network is configured to communicate via wireless communications."
Herb Weiner is a bearded, bespectacled 59-year-old who lives in Southeast Portland. He's got a lot of, well, "interests." He owns between 600 and 700 T-shirts, many of which he embroiders himself. He is a licensed pyrotechnician (dude, fireworks!). And his invention might save your life someday. See, when patients are recovering from surgery or serious illness in the hospital, it's good for them to get up and walk around—maybe saunter down the hospital halls trolling for lime Jell-O and hotties in hospital gowns—it speeds up the healing process. But it's pretty tough when those sickies have to be hooked up to monitors nonstop.
So, currently many hospitals have patients wear a wireless monitor, which allows them to safely totter around the hospital cord-free while their vital statistics (heart rate, pulse, blood pressure, etc.) are tracked at the nurses' central station.
This idea seems like a winner until you consider how often your cell phone drops calls and wireless internet connection cuts out—if a patient's wireless monitor cuts out, and then that person has a heart attack, that's bad. Medical staff lose all the vital information they need to do their jobs if a patient stumbles into a wireless dead zone.
Enter Weiner's invention. His improved wireless system, which a patient wears around their neck like a clunky white iPod, records a continuous stream of info and "detects where the EKG (electrocardiogram) has been disconnected and reconnected." Even if a wireless connection cuts out, his system will transmit all the vital stats once the connection has been restored and it alerts the central station when a patient's monitor loses connection.
Think of it like talking on a cell phone: You'll lose your conversation if you walk into a dead zone. But, with Weiner's system, you can retrieve all the gossipy details from the minutes that you were disconnected and play them back at your leisure. Cool.
Welch Allyn has invested $15-$20 million in Weiner's patent, and has a handful of engineers besides Weiner working on the product at the company's Beaverton lab. To test the system, the company set up several central stations that each monitors up to 60 patient simulators (devices that simulate the physiology of patients). They run the system through the ringer by simulating wireless dropout, patient wandering and other adverse situations.
More than 500 hospitals worldwide already use Weiner's system, which costs $100,000 for a small setup of six to eight monitors, including Oregon institutions like Tuality Community Hospital in Hillsboro and St. Charles Medical Center in Bend. "I think it's excellent. The number of false alarms seems to be less with this Welch Allyn system," says Linda Betko, director of Critical Care Services at St. Charles, which spent a couple million bucks to switch over to Weiner's system in 2004. "When you lay around in bed, problems happen."
SOUND-EMITTING TOPPLING GAME ELEMENT AND METHOD FOR PLAYING GAME
Inventor: Scott Brunton
Day job: Co-owner (with partner Duke Wolf) of Watch Your Step Productions, an Internet retail business for doggie-gift parodies.
Best invention ever: Television, especially the show Lost in Space.
How his invention could affect our lives: If it were a reality, it would be an educational and musical tool—and serve as inspiration to harebrained inventors everywhere.
Quote from issued patent: " Moreover, the game element preferably is weighted so as to have the heft of a standard domino."
Some inventors get points in our book for ingenuity; others for sheer insanity: Though known best for his trademarked "Monthly Doos" calendar, which features breathtaking landscapes with unsightly piles of dog poo in the foreground, 51-year-old Lake Oswego entrepreneur Scott Brunton also understands the risks and heartbreak of the trademarking and patent world. As he told WW: "If it has never been done before—you might just have something."
One of his best inventions has never seen a store shelf…yet: "Dominotes." The game, patented in 1998, was supposed to be a color-coded box full of dominoes, each color possessing a unique sound-emitting chip. According to the patent, a toppling Dominote would produce its unique color-coded sound. Brunton intended for consumers to buy a box of Dominotes with the intention of composing songs by positioning Dominotes in chosen orders.
Unfortunately, admits Brunton, "the patent attorney saw me coming—he knew sound chip technology was not yet where it needed to be to manufacture a cost-effective box of Dominotes, yet proceeded to charge me the $6,000 tab for drawing up a full patent." Brunton, who could be a posterboy for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, says he has been burned badly on many ventures due to his lack of business-savvy.
Instead, his big success is merely trademarked: The Monthly Doos calendar, which has a slightly disturbing cult following, will reach celebrate its 10-year anniversary in 2012."I love to tell people I make six figures a year off a poop calendar!" he says.
Now that sound chip technology has advanced, Brunton says he may manufacture a bargain Dominote. He thinks he might try to get cereal companies to pick up the idea, placing a Dominote in each box as a collectable prize. "Yeah, collect 'em all!" Brunton shouts excitedly.
Yet after his initial moment of enthusiasm, Brunton's handsome, Alec Baldwin-like features tranquilize. "There is only so much time in one day, and I have something else I am more excited about right now," he says. Intent on not getting burned again, WW is only allowed to release the title of Brunton's big new idea.
The patent process often takes four to five years and can cost $6,000 or more in filing and patent-lawyer fees. Patenting an idea, product or method bars others from making or selling your big idea for 20 years starting from the date you apply. That's why many inventors start selling their products while their invention is still "pending approval."
Every year the United States Patent and Trademark Office grants more than 150,000 patents for everything from handles and hinges to new plants, games and safer medical procedures.
Apparently Jeff Klein's grandfather never patented pocketed springs, so he missed making a fortune. However, Klein's grandfather is the reason Simmons Mattress Company could not patent pocketed springs—they had already been around for 10 years.
What's the most important Oregon invention? It's a tossup between the Phillips screw and the waffle-sole running shoe.
WWeek 2015