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From time to time, I have conceived of ideas that were never implemented or patented. Often, I thought the idea was obvious to me and would be obvious to others. One of the tests as to whether an idea is patentable is whether it would be "obvious to one of ordinary skill in the art." Obvious solutions are not patentable. It is always difficult to assess whether your idea is obvious or not - I have generally erred on the side of thinking my ideas were obvious. I have listed here a few of the ideas that I dismissed and later found out some else had patented them.
I have also listed some ideas that I think are "novel" (e.g., previously unpublished), possibly useful, maybe nonobvious but, for various reasons (including silliness), I may not pursue patents for. You saw them published here, possibly first. |
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Gee, I thought of that...
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| Faced with the perrenial problem of eliminating insects that find their way into the house as doors are opened at night, I designed a method of capturing bugs and other flying insects without squashing them on the wall with a fly swatter. I call this the BugSucker. My prototype was a wall-outlet powered vacuum cleaner, which I still use. It was patented by someone else after I had been using the technique for several years as US Patent number 4,074,458 |
| I was building a secure communications system at Bell Labs and conceived of a way to prevent someone from opening one of the devices and retrieving cryptographic keys. "Obvious!" I thought. Several years later, IBM patented the technique in US Patent number 4,860,351 |
| If you have ever tried to fill a large hole in plasterboard, you know you need some sort of backing to get the "mud" to adhere to. I use a piece of plasterboard behind the wall with a rubberband and a popsicle stick to hold everything together while construction adhesive cures. According the the HGTV 2005 National Hardware Show, someone has begun to commercialize this idea with a plastic backing... |
| There are others - I'll add them as I remember them |
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Other random ideas
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Robo-Goat:
Roomba and RoboVac are commercial products that automatically travel around a home, sweeping or cleaning the floors. There is a commercial product that does the same for cutting grass, but it is limited to the size of lawn that it can cut, mainly due to the amount of power required to cut grass and the size batteries that are feasible. Goats and other ruminating animals eat grass, but it would be difficult for the average homeowner to (a) induce the animal to eat all the grass and only the grass and (b) confine the animal to specific areas, e.g., their yard. Robo-Goat is a self-propelled, moving tether around which the goat can move freely, in areas that the user designates by pre-programmed routes. Since Robo-Goat does not provide the power to actually cut the grass (the goat does this) and will generally move very slowly, it requires very little power, conceivably powered by nightly recharges or solar cells. It could also return the goat to an enclosure at night or during inclement weather. (May 6, 2005) |
| Cereal Sieve:
Broken bits of cereal and ground down cereal settle to the bottom of a box of cereal and invariably create an undesirable sludge when mixed with milk in a bowl. External filters and seives exist, but require (a) an explicit filtering process and (b) multiple steps to separate the desired cereal from the dust. The Cereal Sieve is a special cereal container that has a sieve at the botton with a chamber below it to capture the dust and small pieces. The sieve is partially obstructed on one end of the box, allowing cereal to be poured out of the box without allowing the debris to exit the chamber. (May 6, 2005) |
| Obviousness is sometimes hard to evaluate. If there is a long-standing problem that a lot of people have been working on, and you come up with a new, previously unpublished way to solve the problem, whether or not you think the answer is obvious, it may not be obvious to others. If your answer were obvious, why didn't everyone else think of it. Maybe they did and found it wasn't workable, but if you find a way to make the idea work, it might be an invention worthy of a patent.
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