Why didn't I think of that? Many of today's seemingly simplistic `necessities' were once just budding ideas in the minds of inventors who recognized a good opportunity when they saw one

0 Comments | Insight on the News, April 29, 2002 | by Brandon Spun

Grandfather could have been a millionaire -- maybe. Nat Spunberg invented corn-on-the-cob holders. I know because I saw the leather-bound book in which he kept all his ideas. Alas, the book was lost with his other things when he passed away.

These days, there are all sorts of corn-on-the-cob holders: wooden ones, disposable ones, ones that have special rubber grips, even some shaped like miniature ears of corn. Spunberg might have become rich, but he never secured a patent, and so the Spuns have survived the last 70 years without millions.

That's how it works sometimes. An opportunity presents itself and then vanishes. The problem, of course, is recognizing one. Possibly they occur but once in a lifetime, requiring a precise marriage of inspiration, circumstance and hard work. Or perhaps they are there perpetually.

This uncertainty is only aggravated by Lady Fortune, who proves time and again that even the strangest things can presefit just such an opportunity. Here, for instance, are a few arguably trivial inventions and some of the people who one way or another brought them to market realization. Consider:

* The name Michael Nesmith should mean something to those of you who bopped to "Daydream Believer" or "Last Train to Clarksville." Yes, he is a former Monkee, but he does not like talking about it. He wasn't even available for an interview concerning his mother, Bette Graham, who passed away 22 years ago after inventing correction fluid once well-known to every typist.

In 1954, Graham herself was a secretary at Texas Bank and Trust as well as an amateur artist. Tired of erasing her typos, she began applying her paints to them instead. The idea caught on in the office, and she started mixing the tempera at home in a blender.

Initially, she called the concoction Mistake Out, but the name she settled on was Liquid Paper. She eventually was fired from the bank when she became preoccupied with her creation.

After Liquid Paper became a successful product, Gillette bought it in 1979 for $48 million. Graham walked away with enough to support her son, as well as two of her own organizations: the Bette Clair McMurray Foundation and the Gihon Foundation, which contribute to women's welfare and the arts.

* "What we need are wheels" thought luggage salesman David Sadow. No, he didn't invent wheels but, tired of lugging bags through airport after airport, he attached tiny rollers to the products he hawked. In 1972, Sadow was granted U.S. patent No. 3643474, making him the inventor of Luggage-on-Wheels.

Surprisingly, as common and practical an item as this may be, Sadow didn't break the bank. He had trouble finding a buyer, and it wasn't until a bigwig at Macy's saw the genius of the device, months after the patent, that Sadow made his first sale.

Now, residing in Chappaqua, N.Y., and a neighbor of the Clintons, Sadow can concentrate on his first love-- photography. With almost 40 patents under his belt, his most financially successful invention so far has been a laptop brief-case with a built-in airbag.

* Some people manage to do the most remarkable things with their garbage. J.C. Hormel of Hormel Foods is one of those folks. In 1937, rather than disposing of excess pork shoulders, he combined them with sodium nitrate and water to create a jellied loaf of canned table meat, popularly known as Spam. The name came from a contest Hormel held at his home.

More than 6 billion cans of Spam have been produced, according to Spam Trivia at the Spam Museum (sponsored by the Spam Fan Club). This is enough cans, according to company calculations, to circle the globe 12.5 times.

* Of course, there has been many an American contribution to gastronomical diversity-- including Jell-O and the chocolate-chip cookie.

When she ran out of baker's chocolate in 1930, Ruth Wakefield of Whitman, Mass., baked the first chocolate-chip cookie by adding semisweet chocolate bits to the recipe. Incorrectly, she had assumed the end result would be plain chocolate cookies. She named the accidental result after the inn in which she baked, the Toll House.

Thirty-three years earlier, near Ro-chester, N.Y., Earl B. Wait slowly perfected the gelatin food now known as Jell-O. The carpenter and medicine manufacturer, with help from his wife, added color and fruit flavoring to a product that he had boiled down from bones, hooves and other animal parts. But Jell-O didn't become popular until years later, after Wait had sold the business. It took door-to-door sales and an ad in Ladies' Home Journal to get the jiggly snack moving as a national favorite.

* Some "novelty" inventions, all of which made millions for their inventors, include Kitty-Litter, Post-It Notes, Q-Tips, crayons, Scotch tape and Band-Aids.

But many of these "can't-do-without" items have been around only for a relatively few years. Cat-box litter, a $700 million industry, has existed for only five decades, while Scotch tape and cotton swabs found their origins in the 1920s. The Q-Tip replaced a home-fashioned ear cleaner that Leo Gerstenzang's wife made for their child from a toothpick and some cotton.