4 FIRST INVENTIONS
One summer I worked at a wood processing plant, owned by a family friend, in Ridgefield, Washington. Mostly, I drove around all day in a Bobcat loader, picking up piles of wood scraps and dumping them into a big hopper that fed a furnace. The furnace boiled water, and the steam was piped to various points around the plant. The main function of the company was the impregnation of wood with creosote, which makes it largely impervious to water and the effects of weather. Piers, pilings, and railroad ties are all treated with this substance.
One of the requirements for the job was that I had to wear a hardhat, which I hated. It didn’t make a lot of sense to me, since I worked outdoors; unless the sky suddenly began to fall on me, I couldn’t think what else might hit me in the head. But I wore it nevertheless.
Because it was summer, the heat from the sun would warm the air in the gap between the inside of the hat and my head, making it very uncomfortable. So I had an idea: what if I could add a small electric fan, somewhere in the hat, that would circulate the air, working the same the way as an attic fan in a house? Surely, that would cool things down a little bit. But that would mean batteries, which would add weight to the hat, or a cord running down to a battery pack on my belt. Neither of these was acceptable.
Then a new thought hit me: Since the heat was created by the sunlight striking the hat, why not incorporate solar cells into the surface of the hat to power the fan? That made perfect sense to me, so I set out to build a prototype.
The “SOL-A-HAT” looked pretty conventional from the front, but quite different from the side. I positioned the fan at the lower back of the hat, and extended the hat’s shell. This required me to take an existing hardhat, modify it, and make a plaster mold, from which I could make a fiberglass copy. I also had to build flat spots on the hat for the solar cells, with ridges to protect them. Solar cells tend to be very thin and fragile, and if the hat fell off and struck the ground just right, they would break quite easily. The ridges allowed me to add pieces of polycarbonate plastic, so tough it is used in bullet-proof applications, to protect the cells.
Much to my delight, it worked quite well. I wore it to work, and everyone wanted one. But I couldn’t afford to get a patent on it, nor could I afford to produce it myself. I tried to drum up interest among hardhat manufacturers, to no avail. I tried to find investors, or venture capital, but this, too, proved fruitless. Eventually, the prototype ended up in a box.
Three years later, at 21, I got my first real job, as a draftsman. This was the one skill that I did retain from my abbreviated college career. I worked for a company that designed heating, ventilation, and air conditioning equipment. It was boring work, but at least I wasn’t doing manual labor, and I was using a skill. But my mind was always drifting off somewhere else, thinking about my next great invention, and dreaming that I would eventually become a successful inventor.
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