His invention never made Oprah

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February 3, 2010

Dwain Walden The Moultrie Observer Wed Feb 03, 2010, 11:25 PM EST

Sometimes stuff just doesn’t catch on. The intent may have been good but for some reason, it wasn’t marketable.

It was about a decade ago that I wrote a column about a health researcher who had invented a device aimed at reducing youth obesity. His machine required the kid to pedal it like a bicycle to make the television work. I knew from the getgo that this wasn’t going to work because the gizmo world was way ahead of him. Needless to say, his invention never made Oprah.

Now this concept, if actually applied, would have approached the issue on two points. If the kid actually pedaled the machine to power the TV, then the physical activity would have burned calories and thus reduced obesity. Or, if the kid was too lazy to pedal, then he would watch less television and that increased the chances that he might go outside and play ball or climb a tree. Possible but not probable.

These are the kinds of ideas that work on paper. But as the football analogy goes, you don’t play the game on paper.

And it was absurd to think that someone would have a bicycle hooked up to a television set in the den.

First, that would defeat the purpose of a remote and two, we already have enough health devices that have been converted to clothes racks.

A lot of things had brief moments of successful marketing. Remember Betamax? And there was the chia pet and pet rocks. It wasn’t long after its introduction that people realized they didn’t have to buy a chia pet. All they had to do was leave meat loaf in the refrigerator for about five weeks and then name it.

And then there was the lamp called the “clapper.” I can see prehistoric man applauding his first constructed fire. I just think it looks ridiculous to applaud a lamp. Yes, I can appreciate the great perpetuation of Thomas Edison’s first device, but I’m not clapping to turn my lamp on. I reserve that for finally passing a kidney stone.

Then there are those things that got invented which I thought would be a flash in the pan, but lo and behold they were functional and marketable.

The first thing that comes to mind is the electronic-eye automatic flushing toilet. I thought to myself, how lazy are we getting that we can’t push the handle?

Well apparently, it wasn’t about being lazy, it was about being dumb. I didn’t know we had that many people who actually didn’t understand the concept of flushing a toilet.

Speaking of toilets, some inventions just weren’t given much thought at all. No one ran a scenario. Example being: A guy invents a little screen that goes in the bottom of a urinal and makes a fortune off such a simple device. Another fellow thinks he can use the basis of that invention for great profits, so he designs a similar device to go in the bottom of a commode. It just wasn’t the same.

Now back to the matter of obesity. Every day now we get new reports about how obese we are becoming. Before long, according to Larry the Cable Guy, we likely will read a report that men are going to Hooters for the food. And that’s much more plausible than men buying Playboy for the articles.

(Dwain Walden is editor/publisher of The Moultrie Observer, 985-4545. Email: dwain.walden@gaflnews.com)

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