Page 163 - One Thousand Ways to Make $1000

There are many other opportunities for improving the things that we use in
the home, in the garden and office, if one is observing enough to see them
and ingenious enough to figure out a way to add improvements. Of course, if
you are experienced in a certain field, you have a particular advantage in
being able to invent improvements that apply especially to that area of
activity. There is nothing so perfect in this world that it cannot be improved;
nothing so well done that it cannot be done better. The man who thinks that
we have progressed so far that everything worth while has been thought of
will awake to find that nothing is static, but that the fertile brain of man is
constantly finding a way to do everything better.

Of course there are opportunities—many of them—for inventing new things
to fill a long-felt want. But the development and marketing of such inventions
is at best uncertain. The story is told of the man who invented a knife and
fork for a one-handed person, and in his enthusiasm had thousands
manufactured. He learned too late that there were not enough onehanded
people to use them and that it would cost so much to create a demand that he
would have to charge more for his product than the average one-handed
person would pay. Had he spent the same time and effort on improving
something for which a known demand existed the loss of both time and
money might have been saved.

BertPond’sHobbyEnded Up in a Business

W

HILE Bert Pond was still a high-school boy in Chicago, he became
interested in model airplanes and joined the Illinois Model Aero Club. This
airplane research group, he believed, was far ahead of the rest of the world in
the study of miniature flying craft of all kinds. While he attended Illinois U,
he continued to make many midget planes and often paid his fraternity house
bills with cash prizes he won at national exhibits.

It was after Lindbergh’s flight, however, when the country became aviation-
conscious, that he began to cash in on his knowledge of model airplanes. He
resigned his job with the Minneapolis-Honeywell Corporation and decided to