Page 160 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

case in point. For years women had been using and losing straight hairpins.
The pins fell out of the hair because there was nothing to hold them in. Then
some bright fellow thought about putting a little kink in the wire. It was so
simple it seemed unimportant. Yet a great business has been built up in
Chicago, and millions of dollars have been made on “hump” hairpins.

On the other hand, this same chap might have spent years inventing a dish-
washing machine, only to find after inventing it that people had to be
educated to wash dishes by machine and that there were already a dozen on
the market. If you are of an inventive or deductive turn of mind, and have an
ambition to make some money on a patent, first be sure your market exists
before spending time and money on an invention.

Of the large number of patents issued annually, many are taken out by
corporations to protect their development work in improving upon their
products, or their production methods and apparatus, which have already
been more or less approved in the market. Often corporations will also take
out patents on alternatives or substitutes which they do not intend to exploit,
but merely to hold, to forestall competitors adopting them. But of the other
patents—those issued to “free lance” inventors—perhaps nine out of ten
patents are on inventions which prove to be of practically no commercial
importance. Generally, this is not so much because the invention lacks merit
as because there is an inadequate commercial field for it. There are many
reasons why the commercial field for an invention may be inadequate.
Expense of manufacture may be too great to bring the selling price of the
invention down to profitable production. The cost of merchandising may be
too great in cases where the article invented cannot be standardized and
requires too large an assortment of stock.

Often the invention involves a meritorious idea for the particular situations
for which it was designed, but the possible users are too few and too scattered
to make it practicable to contact and sell them economically. This is
particularly true of accessories usable only on particular makes and models of
automobiles or on certain types and makes of domestic boilers.

In other instances the cost to a manufacturer of taking over an invention and