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Why do some inventions succeed, and others fail? What does a 17-year-old’s
idea have that a 70-year-old’s doesn’t? Every day, patent offices around
the world are deluged with thousands of descriptions of inventions and,
every day, hundreds are accepted and filed. Most never get anywhere. They
just gather dust.

So try to spot the winners among these six: a fork-lift truck that steers
with wheels under the ‘fork’ instead of under the back of the truck; a pencil-slim
induction motor that is far smaller than standard models; a building system
using timber logs that are usually pulped or destroyed; a cut-price device
for wrapping plastic around bales of silage on farms automatically; a filter
bag that extracts clean water from infected sources simply and cheaply;
and an electric motor driven by the static electricity produced by wiring
two cats together and rubbing their backs.

You probably spotted that the cats didn’t make it. The idea came from
Thomas Edison, probably the greatest inventor the world has known, in one
of his earliest experiments as a child: he was obsessed with electricity
– and not too worried about cats. He went on to file over a thousand patents,
from an improved stock ticker (to give stock market investors a constant
update on share prices) to the phonograph, from the light bulb to dolls
that say ‘Ma-ma’. Clearly, you shouldn’t judge someone on one failed idea
.

The other ideas, which come from modern inventors, have been judged
to be outstanding inventions, however. Over the past two years, they have
all won awards in the annual Toshiba Year of Invention scheme, a national
competition launched in 1988 that now attracts more than 4000 entries. But
of the five, two have failed to find commercial success, two have achieved
it and one is hovering on the brink. So what makes an invention successful?

‘Probably the most important factor,’ says Peter Weaver, a freelance
consultant who is also innovations adviser to the London Enterprise Agency,
‘is the personality of the individual, and his determination to succeed.
(The overwhelming majority of inventors are male.) His ability to concentrate
on making it succeed is important too. The ideal inventor has brilliant
ideas and is also an embryonic managing director. But the chances of that
are not great.’

One of the biggest obstacles is that many companies are not interested
in new ideas; they would rather refine the old ones. Though some larger
companies do basic research, says Weaver, ‘very few now have people sitting
there, hoping that beautiful thoughts will come to them. It used to be like
that when I was with GEC, following blue-sky leads; but now it is very much
following on.’

Take the case of George Kidd, a 71-year-old retired electronics engineer
living in Edinburgh who worked for 35 years at Ferranti Aerospace. ‘I don’t
think of myself as an inventor, though the Queen does,’ he says, referring
to his official patent notice, the Letters Patent. Kidd was a prizewinner
in last year’s competition. About 10 years ago he received a patent on his
‘pencil-slim’ induction motor and spent the intervening period building
a prototype. Kidd was convinced that induction motors could be made smaller
by turning their conventional design inside out. Instead of the windings
of the stator inducing current and motion in the rotor from the outside,
Kidd wanted to stick the stator inside a cylindrical rotor. Working on the
idea in his garage, where he has ‘a lathe and a wee milling machine’, Kidd
designed a motor that is about 10 times as powerful as existing motors of
comparable diameters. It is just 25 millimetres in diameter and 200 millimetres
long but can generate almost 400 watts at 12 000 revolutions per minute.
The only added expense, he says, is an extra ball bearing at one end to
steady the front of the stator.

Kidd saw applications for his motor in conveyor belts and cleaning narrow
pipes – especially the latter, as standard induction motor systems are too
big for pipes less than 150 millimetres in diameter. The present solution
is to use mechanical systems, whose control cables tend to tangle. Kidd
says his motor can be used in pipes with a diameter of just 40 millimetres.
At the awards ceremony, he said: ‘I know there is a market for my motor
and I know my design can be used in places that other motors cannot reach.
The production process is not difficult.’

But, 18 months later, that enthusiasm has dimmed. ‘My motor hasn’t reached
the market, and doesn’t show any prospects,’ he says glumly. The patent
is now 10 years old, and could remain in force for another 10 if Kidd keeps
making annual payments of about £200 to renew it. But he is considering
letting it lapse after this year. That would mean that any company could
use the innovation without his permission, and without paying him a penny.
‘After the competition, I had 200 inquiries from people who were keen to
use it,’ he says. ‘But only two companies were willing to look at it seriously.’
One never contacted him again. The other said that a market survey suggested
that the motor would be too expensive to be competitive.

His idea was stalled by one of the most common reasons that inventions
fail: it was simply not cheaper than the established competition. Being
innovative is not enough. Sue Cotton, manager of the Design Council’s Notice
Board, which keeps a 600-strong mailing list of UK companies informed of
innovations, says: ‘You have to find out if the gap in the market is there
– and then that there’s a suitable gap between the market price and the
cost price.’

Sometimes the market is totally new, as appears to be the case with
Ibrahim Al-Khattat, who came to the UK in 1984 as a research associate in
mechanical engineering at the University of Manchester Institute of Science
and Technology, having been an assistant professor at the Jordanian University
of Science and Technology. (He also has a doctorate in mechanical engineering
from Stanford University, California.) But he gave that post up to develop
his invention, and now lives in Holywell in Wales, where his garden has
upset his local council because of the 20-metre bridge there, which looks
as if it was made from giant pieces of wooden Meccano. When he erected it
he didn’t have planning permission. But that was the best way he could think
of to show off his invention, which uses the narrow logs (50 to 200 millimetres
in diameter) that make up about 90 per cent of commercial forest and are
normally pulped or destroyed. The logs are stronger than standard sawn timber
because they retain their natural structure, and the bridge demonstrates
that strength.

Al-Khattat’s system links the logs with short pipe-like sockets, and
then ties them together with tensioned wire rope passed through the sockets.
He used computer-aided structural design methods to devise the system, which
he thinks could save millions of pounds in construction costs on roof supports
for brick buildings, for instance.

The use of natural rather than fabricated cylindrical structures, in
this case logs, convinced the Patent Office that his idea was unique. Al-Khattat
was granted UK and international patents in August this year.

Yet despite its prize last year, two grants worth a total of £38
500 from the Welsh Office, £6000 from his own pocket, and some funding
from local businesses, the invention has so far made no commercial progress.
As a result, Al-Khattat cannot say exactly how much cheaper it would be
than conventional products. He has set up his own company, EMIR, to help
market it, but says: ‘We are still looking for business partners who could
manufacture (the sockets) for us.’ Besides the bridge across his lawn, he
has also used the funding to build a conservatory in the garden. ‘If you
talk to the big boys and you can’t demonstrate that it works, they don’t
listen,’ he says. Al-Khattat added that the bridge was only skeletal: ‘Until
I put up the conservatory using this method . . . nobody believed it could
·É´Ç°ù°ì.’

Even so, the only real interest has been inquiries from a garden festival
in Germany and from two Canadian logging companies. But time is running
out. The demonstration structures have planning permission that lasts only
until March next year, when the local council says they must come down.
Clearly, academic qualifications and computers do not guarantee success
either.

Yet some products seem to slide into the marketplace and take a commanding
position at once. Take the case of David Furber’s silage-baling attachment
for agricultural equipment. In 1989, Furber was just 16 when he noticed
how much time his father, an agricultural contractor, spent wrapping up
a single bale of silage (a cropped grass used as animal feed) in plastic
sheeting. It was not so much the weight or size of the bales that was the
problem as the need to keep getting in and out of the cab to do the job.
Existing automatic balers used hydraulics, which made them expensive. Furber
resolved to design a cheaper automatic system and adopted the project for
his school GCSE examination in Design and Realisation. Within 10 months,
he had a prototype that ‘looked promising when we tried it in the yard on
a straw bale’.

His mechanical invention fits behind a tractor and automatically begins
and completes the wrapping of the preformed bales, which rotate on a turntable,
by gathering the plastic as it spools off a roll, cutting the end and tipping
the bales off. ‘We reckon it increases the number of bales you can wrap
up from 20 to 30 or 35 an hour,’ he says, ‘which is important when you’re
charging the farmer 70p per bale.’ What’s more, the device is not expensive.
The attachment costs just £485, not much on a machine that costs about
£7000; hydraulic balers cost an extra £3000.

But even Furber’s baler has not had an untroubled path to the market.
‘The typical reaction from companies was that they had seen it before and
it was a waste of time,’ says Stuart Bennett, a director of Product Register,
a Stafford-based marketing company that Furber approached for help in filing
his patent and picking potential manufacturers. Many, however, wanted the
idea for nothing. ‘In the agricultural industry, there are people who will
poach an idea as soon as they see it,’ says Ray Bennett, joint managing
director of Product Register. ‘A lot of people there are scraping for any
crumb they can get.

‘People had approached David and asked to see his invention; we said
no one saw it unless they signed a letter of confidentiality. They all refused.
One said: ‘If I send an engineer along and he sees a good design, that will
mean he can’t use it.’ And I said: ‘Yeah, exactly.’ ‘ Bennett and Weaver
agree that confidentiality letters are one of the most efficient ways for
inventors to sound out the potential for their ideas.

Furber’s choices were the same as any hopeful inventor’s. Once he had
the patent he could set up his own company to make the product, and reap
any benefits of success (and agonies of failure); he could look for business
partners to fund his idea; or he could license the idea to an established
manufacturer, which would probably mean a better chance of it selling, but
would mean he would receive only a licence fee and royalties. First he needed
the patent, however.

Using a professional patent agent was probably the key to Furber’s success,
says Weaver. ‘Some people almost set themselves up to have their ideas stolen
by writing their own patents.’ A patent must ‘show reasonably’ how the idea
it covers can be achieved, and it must also have enough information to allow
the idea to be tested. A model usually covers the first condition, but knowing
how much, and how little, to include to satisfy the second is tricky. ‘The
patent must describe the invention and say how to make it,’ Weaver says.
‘But the clever thing is to hide some of the technique. It’s very hard to
be detached enough to write a wide enough patent on your own invention.
For example, you might describe the particular materials you used to make
it; that means it would not cover the same device made with different materials.’

Another danger for inventors writing their own patents, he says, is
that it is not written in ‘patent-lawyerese’. According to Weaver, this
‘shows that you’re a bit hard up, and probably don’t have the money to sue,
so any firm might rip the idea off after it’s published.’ For example, what
most people call a square, a patent agent would define as a ‘rectilinear
construction of variable side length’.

Furber’s idea was licensed to Trentside Engineering, an agricultural
engineering subcontractor in Stoke-on-Trent. Last November the product was
launched, aimed at the owners of the 4000 machines already on the market.
A version is also being made to fit onto new machines, which use a larger
plastic spool, 750 millimetres wide rather than 500 millimetres. As well
as the one-off licence fee of around £3000, Furber will get a quarterly
royalty cheque, equivalent to 10 per cent of each sale. ‘I don’t know how
I’ll use the money,’ he says. ‘I suppose it depends how well it sells.’

It sounds like a schoolboy dream: from idea to product in just over
18 months. But Ray Bennett cautions that inventors’ dreams of success are
often unrealistic. ‘There are two ways to progress,’ he says. ‘The first
is to have a bottomless pit of finance. Not many people have. The other
is to accept that if you’re going to make £10 000 from your invention,
someone else is going to make ten times as much. That is the cruel but true
commercial side of it.’

A hard-headed commercial attitude helped Fred Brown with his invention,
the ‘Bendi’ fork-lift truck. The idea sounds quite simple. Brown moved the
wheels that steer the truck from underneath the back of the vehicle to underneath
the front forks, and provided a mechanism that allows the wheels to rotate
in opposite directions. The combination enables the vehicle to make tighter
turns. ‘I would never claim to be an inventor,’ says Brown, a director of
Translift, a manufacturer of fork-lifts based at Redditch in the Midlands.
‘There were attempts 40 years ago to make trucks like this in the US, but
they weren’t coming at the right time, or with the right design.’

What makes this the right time is new regulations from the European
Commission. These came into force in January 1989 and require the drivers’
cabs of newly registered trucks to be more spacious. The introduction of
the new regulations made some existing fork-lift designs illegal because
their cabs are too narrow or low. That made it worthwhile investing in new
designs. Many fork-lifts are used in warehouses, where space is money; if
the truck can turn in a smaller radius, despite a larger cab, the warehouse
aisles can be kept narrower, leaving more space for stock. Standard ‘counterbalance’
trucks, in which weight at the rear stops a truck tipping when its front
forks are loaded, need 3.5-metre aisles; the Bendi, which is also a counterbalance
model with as big a cab as standard trucks, can turn in 2 metres.

The development has taken eight years, the last four of them funded
by Translift, which owns the patent. ‘It’s probably taken £500 000
to get it into full production,’ reckons Brown. ‘But (the Bendi) will be
as cheap as any counterbalance truck.’ The company already has orders worth
£500 000, and hopes to get four times that much next year.

Brown has been in the fork-lift business for over 20 years. He began
inventing by helping to develop a specialised truck for tall warehouses;
the vehicle is high and narrow, and lifts the cab and forks. Versions are
now made by every fork-lift manufacturer. ‘I always think of an inventor
as someone who has lots of bright ideas, but who doesn’t know if they are
cost-effective and marketable,’ he says. ‘I have kept mine strictly in my
own field; though others in the industry think of me as a mad inventor,
because I’m always going in the opposite direction from the rest of the
market. They thought the Bendi was crazy.’ But they overlooked Brown’s experience
– and the presence of Translift as a knowledgeable and willing backer of
new designs.

Finally, an invention on the brink of market success. One evening three
years ago Michael Wilson, a senior lecturer in oral microbiology at the
University of London, was watching a television programme about the problem
of halting the spread of cholera among refugees. He learnt that aid workers
must usually resort to flying in clean water, at huge expense, and began
wondering why no one had devised a cheap way of purifying the polluted water
available locally.

His invention, filed in September 1988, relies on the adaptation of
a natural phenomenon, known as osmosis, to filter contaminants in water.
If pure water and salty (or sugary) water are separated by a ‘semipermeable’
membrane through which only water molecules can pass, then pure water is
drawn through the membrane in an effort to equalise the concentrations of
salts and sugars on either side of it.

Wilson, with Philip Monro, who was then researching bone-cell growth
at the University of Southampton, devised a simple bag made of Cellophane,
a cheap semipermeable membrane made from cellulose, enclosing a dry mixture
of sugars and salts. When the bag is dropped into a polluted river or stream,
the sugars and salts draw in pure water and the membrane keeps out larger
particles, such as bacteria and viruses. The diluted solution of pure water,
salts and sugars can then be drawn off through a valve made of dialysis
tubing and used safely to counter water loss and the depletion of salts
and sugars that cholera causes. If the disposable bags could be made cheaply,
for about 10p each, aid agencies would be able to afford them. And because
the bags need no power source, they are suitable for developing areas of
the world where polluted watercourses are common.

The two developers recognised, however, that achieving such a low price
would be very difficult unless they could subsidise the cost by finding
other customers willing to pay more. They reckoned that travellers and the
armed forces would pay up to £10 for a more complex refillable version.
So they designed one resembling a deflated football, with the dry mixture
in a bag inside another. The outer bag would be refilled with polluted water
through one bung; another bung would join the inner bag to the exterior
of the outer bag, so that fresh doses of mixture could be put in. The purified
liquid for drinking would still be a sugar and salts solution, drawn off
through dialysis tubing.

The principal innovations are the manipulation of the natural process
of osmosis, the use of a dry mixture so that the bag can be stored indefinitely,
and its composition. In 1988, Monro had set up HATS (Hampshire Advisory
and Technical Services), through which he intended to develop small inventions.
But when he met Wilson on some joint research in 1989 he decided to concentrate
on the one development. Almost immediately he had to spend £30 000
applying for international patents. In May last year, the bag won a monthly
prize in the NatWest/BP Award for Innovation, another national competition
for inventors, and in February this year it was runner-up in the competition’s
overall prize for 1990. The National Westminster Bank then lent HATS £100
000, demanding only the invention’s patent, by then the property of HATS,
as security. So far HATS has spent £50 000 on patent agents’ fees
and applications in countries that could be makers or users of the bag,
such as Pakistan and India.

After seeking worldwide protection for the patent in September 1989,
just within the year’s limit of the patent’s filing, the duo were tempted
to sign a series of licensing deals with companies in various countries.
‘We didn’t have enough cash to do it any other way,’ recalls Monro. The
offers, of between £10 000 and £30 000 per deal, would give
HATS financial stability. Then Monro could pursue larger manufacturers to
make the aid agency version too.

But their solicitors persuaded them that the best option was to get
a single licensee, as this would forestall rows between rival licensees
trying to market the product. Last September, Monro interested Bowater,
a British packaging manufacturer, in the idea. However, the company’s director
of technical development, Colin Williams, soon uncovered difficulties. ‘Using
cellulose, there’s a problem joining the inner container (with the mixture)
to the outer one so that there’s no leakage – otherwise that allows infection
in. We needed something that could be joined by the conventional heat-sealing
methods that we use with plastics and so on,’ he says. He reckons the problem
could have been solved with a year’s development work. What convinced him
to abandon the idea altogether was a report from his marketing department
that concluded there were no companies interested in selling Wilson and
Monro’s device. ‘It wasn’t price,’ Williams says. ‘Their perception was
just that they would not have any customers.’

So on 22 February, just 11 days after the device won two more prizes
in Toshiba’s 1991 awards, together worth £15 000, Bowater told Wilson
and Monro it would not be taking the project further. The pair were disappointed
and perplexed: why, they wondered, had the decision taken five months? ‘People
generally don’t realise the gestation time for an invention,’ says Weaver.
‘It typically takes two to three years to get from the idea to pilot production.’
The inventors also made a mistake by approaching only Bowater. Monro says:
‘We thought, why risk antagonising them by talking to others? But that was
naivete. We should have been talking to 20 or 30 companies in parallel.’

The project has not died, however. After the national press reported
the duo’s difficulty an anonymous benefactor offered help. The benefactor
is paying the fees for HATS’s solicitors and also for the consultancy group
KPMG Peat Marwick McLintock, chosen in part because it is a corporate sponsor
of the Save the Children charity, which is finding business partners to
cooperate on the project worldwide.

But turning Wilson and Munro’s bright vision into commercial success
still has some way to go. Making the product work will require a combination
of expertise in pharmaceuticals, manufacturing and marketing that few companies
have, and both developers are steadfast in their insistence that the chosen
company must also have high ethical standards: ‘The aim is to run it as
a humanitarian project,’ says Munro. Meanwhile, the problem it was invented
to solve continues. After winning their prize, Wilson and Munro could only
watch as the following months brought the Kurdish refugee crisis and a cyclone
to Bangladesh. In both cases cholera was a major threat to health. It is
easy to understand why Monro says: ‘Testing? The field trials will be the
easy part.’

So what are the secrets of successful invention? The two, as yet, unsuccessful
ideas, the induction motor and the narrow-log structures, suggest that innovation,
possible market niches, academic qualifications and working prototypes do
not ensure anything. The two successful ones, the bale wrapper and the fork-lift
truck, indicate that time is not a factor: the fork-lift truck took eight
years to reach the market, the bale wrapper only 18 months. What does make
a winner is an invention at a competitive price, aimed at a market that
is always trying to save costs. In the end it comes down to brutal commerce.
‘Millions of things are being invented all the time that never see the light
of day,’ says Weaver of the London Enterprise Agency. ‘And that’s not the
fault of the individual.’

But hope springs eternal. George Kidd was happy to hear that his invention
would be mentioned in this feature. ‘Maybe someone will like it,’ he said.
‘I’ll renew the patents. Do you realise you just cost me two hundred pounds?’

Charles Arthur is a freeelance journalist. He specialises in writing
about social issues and technology.

* * *

The enlightened genius with a knack for successful invention

Thomas Edison was not a typical inventor. For one thing, he was successful.
For another, once he had become successful he did not work alone but set
up a system to encourage invention. His famous saying that ‘genius is one
per cent inspiration and ninety-nine per cent perspiration’ was not some
word play by Oscar Wilde. It was how he lived.

Nothing could put him off. Though deaf since childhood, after a bout
of scarlet fever, he devised a tripod-mounted megaphone that let people
speak or shout to each other over several miles, the phonograph, the microphone
and a rival to Alexander Graham Bell’s telephone for Western Union. When
friends were not around to help him out and do the listening, he could sometimes
hear by picking up the vibrations through his teeth.

His first working invention, though not his first patent, was a clock
designed to give him more sleep. His family had been poor after his father’s
shingle-making business collapsed in 1854, so he worked day and night. As
a teenager he worked night shifts as a railroad telegraph operator, and
had to signal each hour to the head office to show he was awake. The clock
he developed did this automatically while he slept. But Edison was found
out one night and promptly sacked.

Edison went into full-time invention in 1868, aged 21, armed with an
amazing aptitude for fault-finding and improving on any electrical equipment.
His first patented invention, filed in 1868 and granted the following year,
was a vote-recorder for Congress. It worked, but Congress did not want it,
leaving him out of pocket. He resolved then never to attempt to invent anything
unless he was sure of its commercial demand.

Subsequently he developed a ‘diplex’ telegraph that could carry two
messages in the same direction on one line, and an improved version of a
stock ticker that kept investors informed of share prices by telegraph.
In 1870 he was paid $40 000 – a huge sum then – for his patent rights on
the latter. Though the money paid for a great deal of future work, it proved
to be an unwise decision. Edison’s stock ticker became the basis of some
of the richest businesses in the world.

In that respect he was like many modern inventors, who are often badly
advised, or just unsure what advice they need. Today’s lone inventors differ
from Edison in one important respect, however. ‘A large number of them are
unemployed,’ says Peter Weaver, the innovations adviser to the London Enterprise
Agency. ‘I’m not sure how to interpret it. Maybe when that happens, they
get more time; maybe their minds become more lateral in their approach to
problems.’ There is one broad similarity, though. Says Weaver: ‘Many see
their invention as the solution to their unemployment. They don’t realise
the gestation time for a product is up to three years.’

How long some of Edison’s ideas took to realise is impossible to know:
at times he was working on 45 at once. What is clear is that many succeeded:
he was a multimillionaire by the age of 30. But he was continually plagued
by lawsuits over patent rights, and swindled out of money he was owed. Once,
after being asked during a patents rights case to recall an event from 11
years earlier, he fumed: ‘A lawsuit is the suicide of time.’

In 1876, aged 29, he announced that he was giving up the world of manufacturing
to the ‘robber barons’, and set up a 20-strong team of scientists and inventors
in Menlo Park, New Jersey. Here he and his team, which included the electrical
engineer Nikola Tesla, invented a huge number of products for industrial
use, such as the tasimeter and odourscope, for measuring heat and smells,
the phonograph in 1877 and the electric filament lamp in 1878.

The electric lamp was Edison’s crowning achievement though he had a
fight on his hands to get it established. The development threatened the
vested interests of the US gas industry, then turning over $150 million
annually (equivalent to billions now). When he patented a platinum filament
light gas shares fell, even though the lamp burnt out in 10 minutes because
he had not realised the benefits of vacuum. The innovation persuaded a group
of financiers to set up the Edison Electric Light Company and to support
the pioneer’s research with a $50 000 advance plus shares in the company.
When, a year later, he succeeded with vacuum models that lasted 40 hours,
the value of the shares increased sixfold. One gas company sent a saboteur
to try to short-circuit the public demonstration of the system. Edison had
taken precautions, however: he had fitted the circuit with a safety fuse.

Despite this success, the financiers lacked Edison’s confidence that
electricity would replace gas for lighting, and they refused to finance
the construction of the factories needed to make equipment. So Edison did
it out of his own pocket, cashing in his stock in Edison Electric or using
it as security for loans.

Yet even this great inventor was not infallible. One of his biggest
arguments came in 1890, when he and Tesla, who was by then in business for
himself, disputed the merits of direct current over alternating current
for distributing electricity. There are sound scientific reasons why AC
is preferable, especially over long distances: there is less power loss
from line heating and high voltages can be stepped down by transformers,
which is not possible with DC. But Edison, because of his limited formal
scientific training, was sure DC was better. In stagey public lectures supporting
his claim, dogs were electrocuted to show the perils of the high voltages
associated with AC.

The only effect was to encourage the state of New York to introduce
the electric chair for capital punishment. It was a crushing irony in the
life of the great inventor: he opposed the death penalty throughout his
84 years. It was one invention he would not want counted among the 1093
patents in his name when he died on 18 October, 1931.