My Career as an Inventor

My Career as an Inventor

As a university student in my first year, it is safe to say that I had very weak typing skills which were somewhat of a match for my early academic essay writing skills.  Initially, I would find those ubiquitous adds for typists on the public bulletin boards in the quad at Laurier University.  I think the going rate at the time was fifty cents per page and more if the deadline was closer.  A paper due the next day, and you submit to the typist that same night, the rate might jump astronomically to $4.00 per page. 

 It was a capitalist world based on supply and demand with the urgency of time. It was a form of blackmail that worked to the advantage of the typist.  I had never studied typing as a formal subject but did practice at home with my sister’s typing books and could accomplish about 30 words per minute.  Given the rates at the time I was determined to do my own typing.  I was never motivated enough to type for other people, that was just crazy talk.

I think the biggest challenge to typing a successful paper was fitting in footnotes at the bottom of the page.  The trick was how far down the page does one type before beginning the footnote so that everything fits.  A universal question as it was a universal problem.  I resolved to crack that challenge.  I began slowly at first typing my own Anthropology, History and Geography essays at an astoundingly slow rate with many frustrations, restarts, late nights, late submissions, but at the end of the cycle, at the depth of the deepest despair there was also slow tiny baby steps of progress.  Within two short months I was already up to 33 words per minute.  

I was still making mistakes and with each mistake I had to erase using a crude ink eraser which could also quickly wear a hole through the page taking me, the typist, back to ground zero.  If only there was a way to correct the mistake without a destructive eraser and just “white-out, so to speak, the mistake and type over it.  Try as I might I could never find that solution.  Was there a way to do that? I was motivated by the cliche, “Necessity is the mother of invention.”  

If there is a need that very need would lead to an innovative solution.  Suffice it to say that idea of whiting out mistakes never came to fruition with me no matter how many angles I approached the problem from, especially when my typing speed reached 42 words per minute the pressure to White Out had diminished in my mind.  The idea of Correctional Fluid or Liquid Paper slowly died in my mind.  It was not to be.

Shortly after my mind was reeling towards the liquid paper quest I graduated from Laurier and had started teaching.  My brother-in-law at the time worked for Shell Oil and was telling me about a new concept, a two fold one in fact whereby gas stations would quickly evolve or devolve into self-serve facilities where people pumped their own gasoline at the pumps.  I thought how ridiculous.  

I had worked at various full service gas stations in my youth.  I clearly recall the day when a vehicle would drive over the alarm cord ringing a loud bell which would summon me from the depths of the station, at a run, out to the car.  I would slide up to the driver, usually a man, and address him as sir.  He would tell me how much gas?  I would start the pump running then I would run to check oil, clean all the windows and gauge the tire pressure in all tires and time that with the pump clicking off to a full tank.  All transactions were done in cash and sometimes there was even a tip.

Now my brother-in-law was telling me about self service.  I thought how is that even possible.  I guess the selling point is to think of all the money consumers will save. Think of the speed and convenience.  The add part to this was in addition to petroleum products and these so-called self serve gas stations was that they would further morph into convenience stores and sell dairy products, snack foods and other fast food items.  Never did it cross my entrepreneurial mind, me the potential inventor of Liquid Paper, that their would be any demand for these kind of services.  Never in a million years would it take off, there would be zero consumer demand.  I was on the pulse of the public.  I knew what I knew.

I think my third example which clinches my credibility as entrepreneurial inventor has to do with my days as a young father.  This is the time I verged on greatness, when I bordered on empire building, when I teetered on being just outright amazing and its when I fell from grace.  While travelling with little kids, babies in fact, they had a tendency to require a constant change in diapers among many other needs some of which linger to this day. 

 I as a young versatile young father, I was able to change a diaper in many and varied locations. Anything from my lap, to the hood of a car, the seat of a car, the floor of a public washroom, a picnic table while baby cries or sleeps in a baby stroller.  Vertically any horizontal or semi horizontal plane was fair game for diaper changing.  Still problematic as some of these locations when factoring in the hygiene factor were less than ideal.  

My mind reeled.  In fact it took me back to the days of potentially inventing White Out in my university days.  I thought, pondered in my personal think tank, wrote notes to myself on sticky note, also not yet invented yet, and finally concluded that men and women need a horizontal  platform of sturdy design in a semi-hygienic environment from which one could change a baby’s soiled diaper in relative comfort and safety for both the participating adult and baby involved.  How could this be done, where could this be done. I had the why. I had conceptualized the need but what were the details of the product.  It was within my grasp, so close, yet so far.

By the time my four children grew up and had their diapers changed on the medians of roads, on sidewalks, dining-room tables, I had no solution.  The day I walked into a public roadside washroom on an interstate highway in Northern Kentucky,  in a moment of shock and admiration, I nearly bowed to the floor and cried.  There mounted on the wall, with a name honouring some Australian marsupial, was a fold down plastic platform on which one could ceremoniously lay down a baby if in worship or sacrifice or just simply to change a diaper, off the floor and in semi hygienic placement.  I trembled.  I left that washroom a humbled man.

As I drive and think about these events in my life from Liquid paper, to self serve gas stations to public accessible baby change stations, I’m desperately looking for a place to set my new mobile cellular phone, if only there was a place to hold or set, to secure in some rational safe way such that I could safely use it and drive at the same time.  God these things are dangerous. If only there was a way!