Kids’ Ideas Make Millions—Yours Could, Too!

Wednesday, July 2nd 2008 by Shanel Yang         Email this article to a friend

If you think you have to have a great education in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, engineering, or anything else to come up with a great new invention, you are mistaken.

Kids as young as five years old have come up with amazingly simple solutions to our everyday problems—or cool new products that are so desirable—that their ideas made them famous child inventors with their products worth, or potentially worth, millions of dollars!

And, we’re not talking child prodigies, either! These are average kids, like most of the rest of us were. Except for one critical difference: Their parents were extraordinary enough to help them develop their ideas into prototypes, get their inventions patented, and do whatever else was necessary to get their kids’ projects out of their heads and into production for all of us who either need or want their nifty inventions to enjoy for ourselves.

Just take a look below at 20 random kid inventors I quickly gathered from the internet. Most of their ideas fall into the category of “Why didn’t I think of that?” A few did come from more mechanically-minded and slightly older kids (like Edison, Bell, and Westinghouse); but, even then, the seeds of their inventions were planted at a much earlier age when they had no clear idea of how to turn their dreams into realities. They just never gave up till their hard work finally created and furthered the technology that had never before existed—while they were still teenagers! And, none of these kids had wealthy or educated parents. What they did have, as already mentioned, are supportive parents who encouraged them to go for it!

If you didn’t have supportive parents, that’s no longer an excuse now that you’re an adult. It’s time for you to go for it! Give yourself the support system you need. Be your own biggest fan and cheerleader. Also, go out and find others to join your cheering squad, perhaps other inventors/entrepreneurs. There’s really no excuse if you have a great idea that you love and are sure that a lot of people need it, or will want it, if they only knew they could buy it for a reasonable price. Go out there and make it available for us! If it’s as good as you believe it is, you can’t miss!

20 KID INVENTORS AND THEIR INVENTIONS

1. Chelsea Lannon: Age 5; invented the Pocket Diaper, a diaper with a detachable pocket with a baby wipe and a baby powder puff inside. She came up with this while watching her mother assembling these items to change her baby brother.

2. Suzanna Goodin: Age 6; invented the Edible Pet Food Spoon because she disliked the smelly, messy chore of cleaning the pet food spoon after feeding her two cats the wet cat food that they liked. She and her grandmother made a recipe based on recipes for dog biscuits and hand-shaped the spoons and baked them.

3. Abigail M. Fleck: Age 8; invented Makin’ Bacon, a healthier way to cook bacon when her father joked he wanted to drip dry it. Her microwavable bacon cooker has 3 plastic rods that look like little telephone poles to drape bacon slices over, allowing all the excess fat to drip into a detachable plastic tray at the bottom.

4. Jacob Dunnack: Age 8; invented the JD BatBall, a stubby oversized plastic baseball bat that has a hollow top that unscrews to allow a tennis-ball sized ball to be conveniently stored there. He came up with this brainchild when he was visiting his grandmother, took his bat, but realized he’d forgotten his ball. Problem solved.

5. Austin Meggitt: Age 9; invented the Glove and Battie Caddie, a device that fastens a baseball, baseball bat, and baseball glove to the handlebars of a bicycle. He got his idea after trying to balance all three of these items while steering his bicycle to a game and almost got into an accident. He got to work in his garage and attached a plastic bar to his handlebars using tubing and clamps to hold his bat, a hook for his glove, and a pouch for his ball. Voila, the first Battie Caddie.

6. K-K Gregory: Age 10; invented Wristies, warm, soft, water resistant fingerless gloves when she was building a snow fort and her hands got cold and wet.

7. Taylor Hernandez: Age 10; invented Magic Sponge Blocks, large sponge toy blocks that can stack high due to the magnets in them, yet they are safer, quieter, and require less storage space than regular blocks because they collapse.

8. Rebecca Schroeder: Age 10; invented the Glo-Sheet, a clipboard that glows in the dark so any paper on it can be seen the dark. She started thinking about how tot make paper glow in the dark so she could finish her math homework while waiting in the car for her mother to finish her shopping when it started to get dark. Her invention is used by doctors, photographers, and movie critics who also need to write things in dark places. NASA and the US Navy also use her invention.

9. Frank Epperson: Age 11; invented Popsicles simply by forgetting to take out a wooden stirring stick in his sodapop mix overnight and it froze onto the stick.

10. Cassidy Goldstein: Age 11; invented the Crayon Holder to use up her stubbiest Crayons by sticking them into those little plastic thingies on the ends of long-stem roses from florists. It’s sold in 500 Wal-Mart stores, and she gets 5%.

11. Jeanie Low: Age 11; invented the Kiddie Stool, which attaches under the bathroom sink and folds out so kids can pull them out by themselves and use them.

12. Louis Braille: Age 15; invented writing with raised dots called “Braille.”

13. Thomas Alva Edison: Age 15; invented the telegraphic repeating instrument, allowing automatic transmission of a message received to the next recipient.

14. Cyrus Hall McCormick: Age 15; invented a lightweight cradle for carrying harvested grain. Seven years later, he invented his world famous reaper.

15. George Nissen: Age 16; invented the trampoline in his parents’ garage, with steel parts from a junkyard for the frame and a piece of canvas stretched across it.

16. Henry Bessemer: Age 17; invented embossed stamps for official documents.

17. Chester Greenwood: Age 17; invented earmuffs. His factory manufactured them for 60 years. He also patented 100 more inventions throughout his life.

18. Robert Heft: Age 17; invented our current U.S. flag for a high school assignment and got a “B-.” His teacher promised to reconsider if he could get Congress to adopt it as our new national flag. The rest, as they say, is history.

19. Alexander Graham Bell: Age 18; began working on the idea of transmitting speech and developed the basic idea for a telephone, which he completed by 29.

20. George Westinghouse: Age 19; invented the rotary steam engine.

AMAZINGLY SIMPLE INVENTIONS BY ADULTS

Of course, kids aren’t the only ones who can come up with great inventions. Adults have come up with a few good ones, too. ; ) And, why not? We don’t need to rely on our parents to give us the support we need; we can do that for ourselves!

NOTE: I didn’t pick any earth-shattering, life-saving inventions for this part of the post. Rather, my focus is on inventions that any one of us could have come up with if we had just thought of them first and then ran with them until they succeeded.

1. Band-Aid: In 1920, Earle Dickson was a low-level employee of Johnson & Johnson. He was also newly married to his wife who kept cutting and burning herself while learning how to cook for her new husband. Bandaging each of her fingers the old fashioned way with large, bulky bandages and tape was cumbersome and made her work in the kitchen that much more clumsy with her fingers thusly bandaged. So, he improvised by cutting the bandages down to size and sticking them inside a smaller amount of tape so she could apply these custom bandages herself, and these were slim enough to let her work freely. By the time Dickson retired in in 1957, he had worked he had become the Vice-President of Johnson & Johnson and “band-aid” had become the generic term for adhesive bandages.

2. Monopoly: In 1933, Charles B. Darrow was one of the many casualties of the Great Depression when he suddenly became unemployed. But, when he noticed his neighbors and acquaintances playing a home-made board game that involved buying and selling real estate, he made his own version, copyrighted it, and began to sell it. When the demand quickly outgrew he and his family’s ability to supply it, he tried to sell it to Parker Bros., but they refused, citing 52 design flaws with it. Later, when the continuing mushrooming success of the game could not be ignored, Parker Bros. did finally buy it from him. It’s now the world’s most popular game.

3. Scrabble: In 1938, Alfred Mosher Butts was an out of work architect who decided to invent a new board game. He wanted to combine the fun associated with numbers games like dice and bingo, words games like anagrams and crosswords, and skillful movements games like chess and checkers. He also wanted to add the excitement of pure chance to the mix, so he came up with a game that had: (1) the word skills of anagrams and crosswords; (2) the chance of drawing the letters to form the words; and (3) the skill of moving them to the best spaces on the board to mathematically produce the highest scores. He offered his invention to all the major toy/game manufacturers at the time, with no success. The, he met entrepreneur and game-lover James Brunot, who bought the rights to it.

Brunot and his wife made a few changes, including changing the name from Lexico to Scrabble and trademarked it in 1948. Then, in 1949, they rented an old abandoned schoolhouse and, with the help of their friends, manufactured 12 games an hour, hand-stamping each wooden tile, one at a time. They made 2,500 of them in their first year with a net loss of $450. They struggled for four years. Then, in the early 1950s the president of Macy’s discovered it while on vacation and ordered some for his stores. By 1952, the Brunots could not keep up with the demand, so they contracted with a major game manufacturer to market and manufacture it for the United States and Canada. In 1972, the Brunots sold the trademark to that same company, giving them the exclusive rights to Scrabble brand products and entertainments services in the U.S. and Canada. Now, 100 million have been sold worldwide, and 1-2 million are sold every year in North America alone.

4. Liquid Paper: In 1951, Bette Nesmith Graham was a single mother and a secretary when she longed for a better way to erase her typographical errors, which left ugly smudges. The idea came to her while she watched holiday window painters erasing their smudges by simply painting over them. By 1953, she began using tempera paint to paint over her typos. The strong interest from the other secretaries at her work encouraged her to get help from an office supply dealer, a local chemistry teacher, and an employee of a paint manufacturing company, till her formula for what she then called Mistake Out was perfected. She tried to sell it to IBM, who was not interested. Later, she renamed it Liquid Paper and sold it out of her home for 17 years. By the time of her death, she had amassed a fortune of nearly $50 million to be divided equally between her only son Michael Nesmith, formerly of The Monkees, and the charitable foundation she established for women.

5. Hoola Hoop: In 1957, founders of the Wham-O toy company, Richard Knerr and Arthur “Spud” Melin, heard that children in Australia twirled bamboo hoops around their waists for exercise in gym class. Since they couldn’t patent a device that had been in existence for thousands of years, they trademarked the name Hula Hoop. They released it in 1958 and sold over 100 million in the first year.

6. Frisbee: Wham-O had been making the flying discs called Pluto Platters for years (which patent was held by someone else). In 1957, Richard Knerr gave it the new catchy brand name Frisbee and marketed it as a new sport. In 1964, they sold the first “professional” model with their own patented aerodynamic design.

7. Barbie: Ruth Handler noticed her daughter and friends preferred playing with diminutive 2-dimensional adult paper dolls rather than life-sized 3-dimensional dolls of babies. So, she thought they would enjoy playing with diminutive 3-dimensional adult dolls. She took her idea to the board of directors at Mattel who rejected her idea as too expensive to make and as lacking mass appeal. That didn’t deter Handler. She designed a prototype of the doll anyway, called it “Barbie” after her own daughter Barbara, and hired a clothing designer to create realistic outfits for her. When Handler showed all this to Mattel, they finally agreed to back her new doll and debuted it at the American Toy Fair in New York City in 1959. The critics were skeptical, but the little girls loved it! Barbie sold for $3 each and set a new sales record at Mattel in its first year with a total of $350,000. Now, with over 1 billion dolls sold, Barbie is the most successful product line in toy history.

8. Jenga: In 1974, Leslie Scott finally decided to market the game she had brought back with her to Oxford University from Ghana, Africa, where she had lived as a teenager. After playing this game with her friends at Oxford U. for years, she trademarked her name for it, Jenga, which is Swahili for “to build,” and copyrighted her own unique rules. It is now the second most popular game in the world.

9. Baby Einstein: In 1997, Julie Aigner-Clark had been looking for instructional videos for her toddler child but found none that she liked. So, she decided to make her own. When she realized her child loved it, she realized she had a potential gold mine on her hands. She and her husband invested $18,000 of their savings to produce their first product, a VHS/DVD called Baby Einstein (later called Language Nursery). This video has toys playing characters and features music, stories, numbers, and words from many different languages. In her own words, she practically mauled a baby store retailer at a convention and convinced her to test market her video in their chain of stores. When they tested well, more videos followed. The revenues grew from about $1 million in 1998 to $10 million in 2000.

Aigner-Clark sold 20% of the company to Artisan Entertainment in 2000, and the rest to The Walt Disney Company in 2001. Disney expanded the series to include Baby MacDonald (agriculture), Baby Bach (music), Baby da Vinci (anatomy), Baby Monet (seasons), and Baby Newton (shapes). A new line of instructional toys were developed by Disney based on these series. In 2005, The Disney Channel debuted a new animated TV series called “Little Einsteins.” Not to rest on her laurels, Aigner-Clark is now working on a new series of instructional videos for elementary aged kids called The Safe Side with America’s Most Wanted’s John Walsh.

10. Jibbitz: In 2005, stay-at-home mom Sheri Schmelzer and her three children had 12 Crocs among them. They had trouble telling their shoes apart, so they decided to decorate the holes with flowers and such. When her husband got home, he saw an opportunity for a niche home business: unique charms that can fit in the many holes of Crocs to personalize these otherwise impersonal shoes. They launched a website that same year and began filling orders in the basement of their home. They sold over 8 million pieces worldwide in that very first year. In 2006, Jibbitz, LLC, was bought by Crocs, Inc., for millions of dollars as its wholly owned subsidiary and Sheri Schmelzer became its President and Chief Design Officer.

MY OWN IDEAS FOR INVENTIONS

I’ve had cool ideas for inventions, too. However, I don’t love any of them enough to develop them myself. So, I’m just going to give them to the public here in case anyone actually makes any of these products so I can hurry out and buy them.

1. Panty Shield for Thongs: Panty shields with the the normal adhesive strip cover cut into two parts about 2/3 of the way down. Why? To allow us to keep the 1/3 portion of the shield with the adhesive cover still on it while wearing it with our thongs. The unsticky portion simply folds over between our butt cheeks but doesn’t get stuck together into an unholy bond making the dang things nearly impossible to remove without using scissors! But, with these new inventions, we can simply remove the shield from our thongs after use, remove the remaining 1/3 portion of the adhesive strip cover, and use that newly sticky portion to secure the entire shield shut after folding it into itself, in thirds. I manually cut all of my panty shields like this just to avoid the huge hassle of wrestling with each one afterwards.

I did a little quick research on the internet and couldn’t find anything like this. The closest thing I found was a patent issued in 1996 for a magnetic panty shield. That would also solve the problem, but I haven’t seen any of those on the market yet. My idea’s cheaper and easier for any existing panty shield company to implement.

2. Lighted Pen: This idea I was crazy enough about to try to develop it; but, to my dismay, I found it’s already been done. But, it’s too pricey for me. I still use my mechanical pencil Scotch-taped to my slim LCD pen light. It works just as well.

3. Self-Cleaning Rags: I hate using paper towels. It seems like such a waste! I go through entire rolls every time I did a full house cleaning. Sponges are no good, either, because they’re either too big to get into the corners or too small and require umpteen rinsings and rewashings to finish the job. Nothing works as well as the good old fashioned rag, just a thin square of cotton the size of a kitchen towel.

But, then these things get so nasty dirty that you don’t what to do with them after each use. It would be best to toss them in the washing machine, but that seems wasteful for such just a few rags. (And, you still have to shake off all the detritus first—gross!). Nor, do I want to throw the grimy rags in with the rest of my nice laundry. Hand washing them in the sink or bathtub is another dreaded chore because, not only does that usually let some of the flotsam down the drain to potentially clog the pipes, it usually also leaves an equally tough ring around the sink/tub that you now have to clean with—you, guessed it, another rag! How about a nice little contraption, about the size of a breadmaker, that automatically cleans rags and separates the hair/sand/guck for easy removal and tidy disposal? I guarantee you that this thing would sell like hotcakes in Japan, Korea, and China!

4. Silent Leaf Blower: ‘Nuff said.

5. Arms-Length Pooper-Scooper: No doubt the worst part of walking your dog is picking up after them. But, what if you had a handy-dandy plastic stick with a grabbing device at the end of it that you could attach a fresh plastic bag to (size of bag to match the size of dog), and with one pull of a trigger on the handle of the stick, after aiming the business end of the stick at the mess, the contraption would grab the load cleanly with the plastic bag (much as we do with our hand covered with an inside-out plastic bag), twist it, and seal it shut? No muss, no fuss! Best of all, no smell when you go to remove the neat little bundle from the end of the stick.

CONCLUSION

Hmm. I just realized that most of my ideas are for solving some of life’s worst messes. Then, they’re sure to be great successes! So, why won’t I develop them? Because I already found my calling in life: this blog. And, I’m pursuing it with all my time, effort, and money. I’m investing everything I’ve got to make it a huge success so I can continue my dream to help as many people as possible with the lessons I love to teach about how to succeed in life. If you haven’t found your passion yet, maybe a great invention is your ticket to fame and fortune. Whatever it is, you’ll know it when you find it. Then, it will be up to you to really go for it!

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