For many of the inventions the Inventions In Everything team has profiled over the years, there's an unfortunate pattern.
It starts with inspiration. An inventor starts with an idea and successfully sees it all the way through the patent process. Then, it runs into the harsh realities of the marketplace. Some inventions never even make it into the marketplace. Some manage to plod along in very niche applications.
But until U.S. Patent 5,877,460, we haven't seen a patented invention that became popular with its intended market soon after it launched, only to go on to all but disappear. If you want to find it today, you might get lucky shopping on eBay.
It's the story of Ritchie Stachowski's Water Talkie, which the then 11-year-old conceived in 1996, filed to patent in 1997, and was awarded with a patent in 1999. The following video clips assembled from contemporary televised news coverage in the late 1990s features Stachowski demonstrating his product:
While the poor sound quality of the video clips make it tough to tell, they do demonstrate why the product ultimately vanished from store shelves. The water talkie didn't work very well.
In 1999, at Age 13, Ritchie Stachowski sold the company he started to sell Water Talkies and other toys. Today, he goes by Rich instead of Ritchie and is a principal at Hairagami, a startup his mother Barbara founded to market a range of hair-design and style products she invented and developed. Inventions you can buy today at retailers like Amazon and Walmart.
The story certainly doesn't fit the pattern we described at the outset. It's a story of a invention that failed in the marketplace, yet for the inventor, is still a success story. One with a very different outcome from what we or anyone else might have predicted.
Labels: technology
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