Henrietta Hay's Column

Sometime in the last century Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "If a man write a better book, preach a better sermon, or make a better mouse-trap than his neighbor, tho' he build a house in the woods, the world will make a beaten path to his door." Inventors are usually honored in our society, but I sometimes wonder whether we should beat a path to their doors, or leave them in the woods. Guess it depends on what they invent.

Take the alarm clock. Surely if Mother Nature expected us to wake up in the dark, she would have supplied us with special sensors. But back in the 18th century some A type Yankee was having trouble waking up at 4 a.m. in the New England darkness. He was a compulsive personality and was "distraught all day" if he slept past 4. So he built a pine cabinet, transferred the insides of a big brass clock and inserted a gear and a pin. When the hour hand tripped the gear the movement set a bell in motion and woke him up. He never bothered to patent his alarm clock. He was merely interested in not oversleeping. Incidentally, he lived to be 94, presumably rising daily at 4:00 a.m. to the end. My source does not state whether his clock lasted as long as he did. Yankees are a hardy breed.

Rube Goldberg was the ultimate inventor. We have been laughing at his inventions for many years, but I think he has inspired more kids than we will ever know. One of my sons was a real Goldberg clone. In his early and ingenious youth he rigged up a device using a fan with three blades cut off, a piece of string, a record player and a lot of wires and switches. He could lie peacefully in his bed, flip a switch, and cause people in the living room to leap from their chairs as the sudden loud strains of Lohengrin or the Beatles, or whatever he had fiendishly planned ahead of time, came out of the speakers at full volume. This also was never patented. I felt like a criminal when I dismantled the whole thing before I moved.

Many inventions make us stop and say; "Now why didn't I think of that? I could be a millionaire." Take the frisbee. In the late l800's there was a baking company in Bridgeport, Connecticut called the Frisbie Pie Co. They made pies, cookies and potato chips. The pie tins were tossed around on the nearby college campuses by the intellectual students at Harvard and Yale. Some years later a man named Morrison decided to make the pie tin into a toy, so he made Morrison's Flyin' Saucer out of plastic. Eventually he discovered the college students "frisbieing", so he spelled his toy Frisbee and made a mint - I assume.

An hour of research at my favorite information store, the public library, did not turn up any information on one of my favorites, the hula-hoop. But I'll bet that the person who thought it up is lying in the lap of luxury on some tropical island - maybe watching the original hula without the hoop.

We'd rather not make a beaten path to the door of one inventor. About 1770 William Aldis was living in a cell in Newgate Prison in England for inciting a riot. Sounds familiar. He had nothing to do but eat and sleep and think and worry about what he would do when he got out. One morning when he was cleaning his teeth by the time-honored method of rubbing them with a rag, he had an idea. He saved a small bone from the meat he had been served and bored tiny holes in it. He talked the guard into getting him some hard bristles, cut them down, tied them into tufts and glued them into the holes. Civilization had its first toothbrush. When he got out of prison he went into the toothbrush manufacturing business and was an instant success.

It may seem that everything has already been invented, but of course we are just beginning. Just this spring I read about an electronic lawn mower, which senses when the grass is getting too thick and kicks in extra power. And there's a new tape less tape measure. All you have to do is point it at something and it tells you the distance and also the area and volume and how many tiles you will need to cover the floor. And I saw an ad for the perfect yo-yo, machined out of aircraft aluminum and engineered for "incredible balance." Price -- a mere $45.

I'm waiting for a better mousetrap.