This article was published in the "Martinelli Newspapers" in the April 13, 2006 weekly issue of The Westchester Crusader, The Rye Chronicle, The Eastchester Record, The Pelham Sun, The Sound View News Home News & Times, The Mt. Vernon Independent, Harrison Independent
and North Castle News

Life and Money (TM)- Venting About Inventing - Part 1

Submitted to The Martinelli Publications on 4/4/2006 for publication in the 9 papers on 4/6/06

By Frank Sisco, CPA, PFS

(Word count =  1,862  including 72 words for About the Author)

Inventing something that is very useful and valuable is one of the best ways to increase your financial wealth and provide yourself and your family with expanded life opportunities.  It can also be a road to failure and financial ruin.  A couple of lessons I've learned about inventing are: (1) treat failure as a part of success and realize it may lead to something else and (2) get the input of other people. I've found that the more I experiment, the more I learn, and the more I learn, the better I love people and life.  Most of my inventions have failed in terms of financial reward, at least so far, but they have succeeded in terms of enabling me to develop relationships with very interesting people of varied fields, which probably would not have otherwise happened.  Nevertheless, it is helpful to plan and get the input of others early in the process.  Take in their feedback and continually reevaluate and revise.

Unlike most of my inventions that have consumed hundreds of hours of focused time, elaborate prototyping, and sometimes scores of thousands of dollars, one invention had as a working prototype simply a plastic hat and a metal clothes hanger and was born and died on the same day.  I called it "No Hands!!"  Thank goodness for the input of two people, my daughter and a Federal Express deliveryman, who brought me to my senses.  Yet, there was a silver lining.  Here's the story that took place twenty years ago in my home in New Rochelle, NY.

My daughter, Kelly, when she was one year old, inspired my invention.  Up until she was about eighteen months old, I took care of her, as a mother would, as John Lennon did with his son Sean. Before "Mr. Mom."  In an effort to try my hand at "mothering," figuring it would be my only shot at it, I convinced my wife to go to work, while I worked my financial advisory business from home, and concurrently I would be "mother" during the day for Kelly, bathing her, talking to her, cleaning her, putting her to sleep, quieting her down, and feeding her.  And, yes, giving Kelly her bottle, which she never really wanted, even though years later as a young woman she probably had the state’s largest collection of celebrity  "Got Milk?" advertisements.

Giving Kelly a bottle was always a chore sometimes lasting twenty-five minutes.  It was the necessity that mothered this invention.  Maybe Kelly liked the bonding that took place while I held her bottle.  Nah!  I think she just liked controlling my time and me.  She probably knew I had to type that business plan or financial plan to get to the client who wanted it yesterday.  She probably knew it was driving me crazy wasting time holding that bottle.  She probably was laughing inside all the while.  But I had to sit there, feeding Kelly her bottle and waiting for her to finish. I would dutifully obey my wife Lorrie's daily command given at least twice upon her morning departure, "Don’t forget to give Kelly her bottle three times today.  Now, please don’t forget, Frank."

When it was milk time, I would stop my work, which I did from my small office at home, even though the phones were ringing and my personal computer was patiently waiting for me to continue typing.  I would stop and heat the milk.  Then I would put the clear plastic bottle bag into the hollow end of the bottle. The benefit of this type of bottle was that the bottle bag collapsed as the baby withdrew the milk and thus there was no air for the baby to suck into her stomach and cause irritation.

Sometimes, ideas just attack you.  One Tuesday, I came up with what I thought at first was a very logical invention that could make lots of money.  I was frustrated that Kelly wanted her bottle just when I was rushing to type a financial report or to do some other work.  As I was heating her bottle in the kitchen, with her on the floor in an infant seat, I was struck by a great idea that I saw clearly in my mind’s eye.  I said to her, "Stay right there and don’t move.  Daddy will be right back down."  I bounded up the stairs, into the master bedroom, flung open the closet door, reached up to the top closet shelf to pull down my green plastic derby that I got from a tavern on St. Patrick's Day, which I put there four or five years earlier, sort of like Edison.   As background, at the Thomas Edison museum factory in West Orange, New Jersey, the tour guide once told us several years ago that Edison kept over 32,000 odd items like elephant’s tusks and turtle shells.  If Edison ever needed the chemicals or materials they contained, he would not have to wait the days or weeks or months to ship the stuff to him.  It would be there when he needed it, there to be used.  That is the way it was with the green plastic derby.  It was there all this time just for me to use it now.  I grabbed it, along with a metal clothes hanger, flew down the stairs and was back in the kitchen with Kelly before she had a chance to cry. 

The image of my invention was still fixed in my mind.  I took a metal clothes hanger from the closet, unraveled the twist near the loop and straightened the metal into one long sturdy wire.  I bent the wire around the hat’s brim.  The remaining wire I bent back on itself so it resembled the outline of a very fat finger and pushed it into the hollow of the bottom of the plastic bottle that was still warm. I adjusted the wire until it fit perfectly. I held up my contraption of "hat plus hanger plus bottle,” looked at it proudly, and showed Kelly. She didn’t grasp it.  She did not see the genius of the idea, at least not yet.  I then picked up the infant seat by the handle with her in it, and with my "No Hands" in my other hand, we went into the den, which had become my home office. 

My desk was a seven-foot long solid oak door that could accommodate a computer and lots of work, but also a baby and sundry related items.  My computer was sitting on the left hand corner of the desk, and the printer to the left of it.  On the right side of the desk, I positioned Kelly in her infant seat facing me.  I then placed the green plastic derby hat on my head with the hanger looped around it, with the finger end protruding from the brim.  I fit the bottle snugly over the finger end of the hanger that jutted out toward the front.  I cocked the hat down, adjusted the hanger, and pointed the bottle towards Kelly’s mouth.  She grinned this big smile, almost a laugh at how crazy we were there on that Tuesday afternoon alone together.  I moved my head forward until the bottle’s nipple entered her mouth.  Kelly started to suck, and joyously.

 Then, I did my magic.  I took my hands off the bottle, moved them over to the keyboard to my left and started to type.  And type I did.  She sucked milk and I typed words, at the same time.  I even said to Kelly.  "Look Kelly.  No Hands!"  I envisioned all the extra work I could now do while she drank milk.  I fantasized about the infomercial, and how I could go from prototype to mass production in under a few months and sell at least 200,000 units of my invention before it was knocked off by competition.  I closed my eyes and began to see the cash flow projections.  The applause.  At last my creativity was going to pay off.

The doorbell rang, disturbing Kelly and me, both in our moments.  It jolted me.  I jumped up and rushed to the door.  I opened the wooden door, and then, on opening the glass storm door, I saw that it was a new Federal Express guy delivering to me a client's envelope.  I smiled at him, but he did not return the smile, which I thought was a little odd.  He had this puzzled look on his face.  I thought it was strange that, when I said hello, he nervously said "okay," never looking at my eyes, but instead looking at my forehead or higher. 

As he turned, rushed into his truck, and drove away, I wondered why he looked at me as he did. As I reached for my head to scratch it, my hand did not feel hair but instead felt hard plastic, shocking me into the reality of what just happened.  In my haste to answer the door, I left my "No Hands!" on my head.  The Fed Express guy, seeing me with it, must have taken me for some kind of kook wearing an unexplainable strange plastic green hat that had a hanger and a baby bottle sticking out of it!

As his truck pulled away, I started to run after him to explain, but his truck was too far to catch. I ran back to my home office.  Kelly was laughing a belly laugh when I got back inside. Even she realized how silly the whole contraption was.  I took off "No Hands!" and put it on the desk, looked at it and I started to laugh. I laughed at it, and at myself for making another invention unlikely to see profits.  Not only was this invention unsightly and impractical but also it mixed two activities that should stay separate – working and feeding a child.  After that day, when I invented new things or had bold new ideas, the image of that ugly green contraption came up in my mind to remind me to first make a realistic appraisal of potential consumer acceptance.  Another lesson from that experience for me was that in the following months when I fed Kelly her bottle, I resisted getting frustrated over time pressures, I looked at her face, and not the computer screen, I talked to her and not on the phone, and I was more open to laugh with her. Inventiveness sometimes has a purpose beyond profits, like bringing a father and daughter closer together on a Tuesday afternoon in their own little world…  laughing.

Please feel free to send me your letters about your inventions and how they impacted your life and your money, and with your permission, I will include them in future columns.

About the author.

Frank Sisco is a CPA and Personal Financial Specialist, and author of many articles about personal finance and issues of life and money.   His firm, Financial Management Corporation, is located in Harrison, NY.  Frank makes his home with his wife and daughter in New Rochelle, NY.  He can be reached at 914.381.3737 or by email at ideasmoney@aol.com.  Visit his website at www.LifeAndMoney.com, which contains this and prior articles.