Why Didn’t I Think of That? Flavored Buns and Other Fortunes
Every “why doesn’t someone…” is a door. This week, we go knocking.
I walk through the world muttering “why didn’t I think of that?”
The garden watering can with one side that sprinkles and the other that streams. Brilliant. As a gardener, I love when new inventions marry two ideas and make things simple.
The pacifier with a thermometer in it.
The suitcase with wheels. We put a man on the moon in 1969, and it was 1970 before a luggage executive named Bernard Sadow thought to put wheels on a suitcase. It took until 1987, when an airline pilot named Robert Plath built the upright Rollaboard, for the bag we all drag through airports to finally exist. For generations, everybody just carried the thing.
Every time, the same thought:
I could be retired with millions by now.
The secretary with a blender
In 1951, Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother working as an executive secretary at a Texas bank. She mixed water-based paint in her kitchen blender, matched it to the color of the bank’s stationery, and quietly painted over her typing mistakes.
She called it Mistake Out. You know it as Liquid Paper. In 1979, she sold the company to Gillette for $47.5 million.
A typo. A blender. A kitchen. That’s the whole origin story.
Nobody gave her permission. She got tired of a problem and decided she was the one who would fix it.
What’s in my idea drawer
I took one idea all the way to market: HOOFiTZ®. The rest are still waiting their turn. Here are three.
The head bed. A mattress with a removable oval that comes out when you want to sleep on your stomach, like a massage table. When you’re not using it, you put the piece back in. Vents could go out each side or the top of the mattress so it breathes. Ingenious.
I’m not going to build it, so consider it a gift. When I looked it up, I found off-the-bed head holders and mattresses with parts cut out for recovering from injuries. There are a few old patents too, like a 1990s mattress with a V-shaped face cutout and an insert to fill it. Close, but not mine, and the ones I found have all expired. So the field is wide open. Somebody, please, run with it (Tempur Sealy, Serta Simmons, King Koil, Hypnos, Mlily, Sleemon, Drucci, Restonic, Liezi, Zinus, DreamCloud?).
Flavored buns. If they make all these new flavors of potato chips, why can’t we make hamburger and hotdog buns that taste like ketchup, or mustard and relish, or BBQ?
Think about it. Chips come in dill pickle, ketchup, cucumber, sour cream and onion — endless flavors. The bun is the one part of the cookout nobody has bothered to flavor. Why not? It would save on the condiment mess… I am surprised Heinz or Wonder Bread has not taken it and run with it!
The Christmas song. Write a song for Christmas, put bells in it, and if it’s a hit, it plays every December for the rest of your life.
Don’t believe me? In 1939, a Montgomery Ward copywriter named Robert L. May was asked to write a Christmas booklet the store could give away. His wife was dying of cancer while he wrote it. The store handed out 2.4 million copies of his story about a reindeer with a shiny red nose. In 1947, the company’s president gave May the copyright, free and clear. His brother-in-law, Johnny Marks, turned it into a song. Gene Autry recorded it in 1949, and Rudolph has been flying every December since.
Copyright lasts your whole lifetime plus seventy years. That’s a present your great-grandchildren could still be unwrapping.
Laugh if you like. Every gadget on the store shelf was somebody’s crazy idea once.
Where ideas come from
Mine never arrive when I’m trying. They show up while I’m doing the dishes. Driving. In the shower. Sometimes in dreams.
Science backs that up. Researchers at UC Santa Barbara gave people a creative problem, then a break. The ones who spent the break on an easy, mind-wandering task came back with better ideas than the people who rested, skipped the break, or did something demanding. (Baird et al., “Inspired by Distraction,” Psychological Science, 2012)
The dishes aren’t wasting your time. They’re giving your ideas room to meet.
When one shows up
Catch it. “I wish…” and “why doesn’t someone…” are two of the sweetest phrases in the language. When you hear yourself say one, notice it. Most will be silly. That’s how you find the good one.
Look it up. Search Google Patents and the store shelves. If someone beat you to it, you just saved yourself a year. If something close exists but nobody’s selling your version, like my head bed, pay attention. And an expired patent means anyone is free to use that design.
Make it real. Sketch it. Build an ugly version out of whatever’s in the garage. Describe it to one person you trust.
Protect it before you show it off. A provisional patent application, which you can file yourself, gives you a year of “patent pending” to see if your idea has legs. If you qualify as a micro entity, the government filing fee is $65. Skip the old trick of mailing yourself a sealed envelope; it gives you no protection at all. And don’t post your idea publicly before you file, because in many countries that can end your chance at a patent. This isn’t legal advice, so look into your own situation.
This week’s thought experiment
This week, listen for two little phrases:
“I wish…”
and
“Why doesn’t someone…”
You’ll hear them in the kitchen, in the car, in a waiting room, in line at the store. Don’t do anything about them. Just notice how often they show up, and where.
By Sunday, one of them may still be knocking.
You never know where the next Liquid Paper is hiding. It might be in your kitchen right now, while you’re doing the dishes.
What’s the thing you keep wishing existed, and what if you’re the one who’s supposed to make it?
— Dame Eileen
Also on The Sunday Dame: The Life You Can’t See From Where You’re Standing · Frake This! · The Surge · Keep the People in the Boat
