Gadget Nation. FastPencil Premiere
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are breathing right at tailpipe level, so they are getting doused with diesel exhaust. Even away from the city, Hal saw many parents taking their kids to the school bus while a younger sibling waited in a stroller. These siblings would wave goodbye, then get a blast of bus exhaust blown right in their faces. Yuck.
So, along with customizing Kyle’s stroller with, get this, mag wheels, headlights, taillights, undercarriage lights, rearview mirrors, DVD player, speedometer/odometer, temperature gauge, a cell phone holder and charger (because no parent should be caught without a cell phone), and a solar panel to keep everything charged—Hal invented the Air Guardian to filter the air Kyle breathed. “My son is now four years old and hasn’t wheezed a day in his life!” I’m sure Hal breathes a sigh of relief over that.
Hal’s first prototype came together in a day, with the help of his then two-year-old son, who put the O-rings on the tubing. Hal went to Home Depot, grabbed selected items off the shelves, and put them together. He named the first unit the Air Octopus because the ventilation tubes looked like an octopus’s arms. Deciding this design was too big and bulky, Hal bought more things from Home Depot and made a few more prototypes. The result is the Air Guardian, which is about the size of three cassette tapes. It attaches to the inside of an enclosed stroller, car seat, or bike trailer. The fans in the Air Guardian draw contaminated air through filters that, according to Hal, scrub the air clean up to 99.7 percent. The clean air is then blown toward the baby’s face, like a breath of fresh air.
Hal says everybody in the whole world supports his invention. Hal took the Air Guardian to the Yankee Invention Expo and it proved to be the star of the show. A month later, he was on ; text-decoration: none;”>The Tonight Show with Jay Leno for his “Pitch to America.” Kyle arrived at the show in his souped-up stroller. The audience got to vote—is the Air Guardian a likely “sell” or “no sell.” They voted it “a sell.” Hal’s next big move was a spot on ABC’s American Inventor show. He’s gotten some impressive airtime.
Hal was motivated to take the Air Guardian to market after he lost his job as a limousine driver two years ago, but he has always landed on his feet. Now he’s customizing strollers.
“The Air Guardian is not on the market yet, but it is patent pending. People come up to me wanting to be an investor on this project. But I have perfect credit and I’m not looking for just the money. I need someone who can help me with research and development, someone who has the knowledge to bring it to market.”
Hal has worked out most of the details; he even has a product motto: The Air Guardian: Bettering the Quality of Life for Our Little Ones.
With any luck, the right guardian angel will partner with Hal and together they’ll protect the next generation’s lungs. But right now, it’s still up in the air.
OrthoTote™
Strapped for Cash
Every business traveler knows the drill. You’re running through the airport looking for a gate, ticket clutched in your hand. As you weave in and around the other travelers, you can feel the strap of your travel bag slowly slipping off your shoulder. What a pain. My own solution would be to just work out more and have bigger shoulders. David Finkelstein had another idea.
David’s shoulders also would not hold the strap of his travel bag. “Every five feet I walked,” he remembers, “the bag fell off my shoulder. It was very annoying.” This inconvenience spawned an invention, and ultimately a new career for David, a businessman who never dreamed that, at age 61, he’d be an inventor.
David graduated with a degree in accounting in 1967, but “I always hated it,” he says. “I have a creative bent, and accounting is the opposite of that.” So after three years in accounting, David went into the medical supply business, where he stayed for thirty-five years and was successful enough to eventually finance his invention.
Now, let’s go back to the airport, where a frustrated Finkelstein fought to keep his bag on his shoulder. David considered the problem and realized he needed to reverse the power of gravity, which was pulling the bag down the slope of his shoulder. He devised an attachment to a shoulder strap that would reverse the downward angle of the shoulder. The OrthoTote was on its way to arriving at airports everywhere.
“I drew up pictures and went to an intellectual property attorney. This was before September 11, 2001. It took two years to get the patent back. I got a utility patent, which is better than a design patent.”
David took his drawings to an engineering firm to produce prototypes, all financed out of his own pocket. “It took twenty-five changes. It was like Goldilocks and the Three Bears—this version was too soft, that version was too sticky.”
David says he was “blown away” by how long the process took. He would wait six to eight weeks to receive a prototype from the engineering firm, only to see within minutes that the version was flawed. Then he’d have to wait several more weeks for the changes to be made.
Throughout the process, David’s two daughters served as “test pilots” for OrthoTote, giving him frank feedback. He left his medical supply business to concentrate fully on the OrthoTote, and enlisted the partnership of his lifelong friend, Brian.
In mid-2005, test runs complete, the OrthoTote was finally ready for its debut. “I decided to manufacture it fully in the U.S. Although I probably could have saved money going out of the country, I believe that products made in the U.S. are the highest quality.
“I didn’t have millions to spend on advertising,” David explains, “so I went to the library and found a listing of all the magazine editors that I thought might have the slightest interest. I sent each one a letter, a sample, and a photo. As a result, the OrthoTote was written up in eight or ten magazines.”
David Finkelstein is proud of his product. His goals for the future of the OrthoTote include developing special versions of the product for women’s handbags and for backpacks, as well as getting into a contractual agreement with the post office to get an OrthoTote on their carriers’ bags.
Looking back on the process, this grandfather of nine reflects, “The roadblocks along the way for an inventor are tremendous. The money, the work, the time it takes—it’s all much more than I thought. It takes tremendous perseverance.”
But it has also been tremendously fulfilling. For David, becoming an inventor has been the realization of a dream he didn’t even know he had. In creating the OrthoTote, a product which he insists “won’t change the world, only yours,” David has indeed changed his own world.
No question that getting OrthoTote to market has been a haul, but luckily David’s OrthoTote makes heavy tasks a little easier.
Take-Out-Time-Out® Mat
Because Bad Behavior Happens
Away from Home, Too
Being a mom is a full-time job, especially when you have two little ones. Lisa Bogart Carvajal knows parenting stress. This South Florida mother has two boys, now aged four and six. When her oldest hit the “terrible twos” and she had a baby in tow, Lisa had her hands full.
Lisa wanted to make sure she managed this stage of their lives without losing