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CHAPTER 6 / MUST YOU INVENT? A POX ON CREATIVITY82 NO B.S. Guide to Succeeding in Business by Breaking All the RulesJoe intuitively felt that little boys would be fascinated watching the ants tunnel and work in this flat-screen aquarium, at home, in their rooms, and get a kick out of their mothers not liking it. This changed its market size from all the schools to all the preteen boys. That%u2019s a gigantic change! He implemented his idea with full-page mail-order ads placed in comic books. He immediately had a blockbuster success on his hands. With the fantastic results of his ads as proof, he was able to get every toy store and major mass retailer to stock the product. The Ant Farm continues to sell today, decades after Joe moved it.Richard Thalheimer, the founder of The Sharper Image, was inspired by Joe Cossman. Richard was adept at taking already-existing, slow-moving, utilitarian products and repositioning them as amazing inventions; gadgets you just had to have. Today%u2019s Sharper Image mail-order catalog and e-commerce business owes much to what Richard learned observing Joe Cossman. My friend Joe Sugarman was also inspired by Joe Cossman. Joe Sugarman took the ordinary desktop calculator, got a smaller-sized one made, and was the first marketer to offer it, as an amazing new technological breakthrough, in full-page ads in all the airlines%u2019 seat-pocket magazines. He later had his biggest success with an ordinary product widely available: sunglasses. He had his manufactured with a special tint, named them BluBlockers%u00ae, advertised them in half-hour TV infomercials featuring man-on-the-street demonstrations, sold them on home shopping channels, and ultimately rolled them out to retail distribution. BluBlockers%u00ae made Joe Sugarman a big fortune. This type of sunglass was not his invention. Sunglasses tinted to screen out harmful rays, sharpen vision, and improve night vision had already been put into the marketplace, but were never mass-advertised, and were poorly sold through opticians%u2019 offices. If these guys interest you, if you%u2019ll check Amazon by their names, you%u2019ll find books written by them or about them.In the 1970s, microwaves were big, bulky things sold only to restaurants. Some executives at a manufacturer of then, Litton Industries, had