Improvements Are the Most Salable Patents

 Improvements Are the Most Salable Patents 

    THE best way to make money on inventions is to devise improvements for things which you use every day. As a rule manufacturers are anxious to improve their products and will pay substantial sums for ideas along those lines. Take the ordinary kitchen mixer, for example. It does many things, but it is safe to say that there are a hundred and one undiscovered uses for this common home appliance. There are several manufacturers of such appliances and competition between them is keen. An attachment to increase the use of the mixer, which one of these manufacturers could feature exclusively, would be a valuable sales point. Similarly, it is possible to improve the most simple things. A good example is the ordinary tube of tooth paste. The tube was an improvement over the sifttop can, just as the sift-top can was an improvement over the can of soap which our fathers used. Yet the tube leaves much to be desired. It is unhandy, it is a nuisance, and it is unsanitary. What will the next improvement be? Will it be some simple dispenser, similar to the soap dispensers on Pullman cars, which can be built into a medicine cabinet or the washstand and always be ready for use? Somebody thought of wall dispensers for Italian Balm, and it became one of the most important parts of the sales plan of that company. 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.