Any Bright Ideas?

How Local Inventors Try to Capitalize on That 'Aha!' Moment

Thomas Edison, how we love thee. You brought us the motion picture projector and the phonograph. You spared us the agony of having to answer the phone with "ahoy-hoy!" -- the preferred greeting of your contemporary, Mr. Graham Bell -- by coining the word "hello."

And, of course, you gave us the light bulb, which not only illuminated our world (without exposed flames), but also came to symbolize the thinking man's greatest treasure: the idea.

You had lots of ideas. More than 1,000 patents were issued under your name! Wizard, indeed.

So riddle us this, Tommy: If a light goes on over your head and nobody else sees it glow, does it make an invention?

The answer, of course, is what separates the inventor from the merely inventive.

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The Washington area should be a bastion of independent inventors -- after all, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office is right here in Alexandria. Yet only 17 patents were issued to independent inventors in the District last year. (Maryland inventors received 365 patents and Virginia, 401, according to the most recent data from the patent office.) The Inventors Network of the Capital Area, the primary support group for local inventors, has just 75 members.

But there are signs that Washington is, in fact, brimming with light. A recent area casting call for "Everyday Edisons," a PBS reality show that chronicles the journey of inventing, turned up nearly 1,000 hopefuls.

At the audition, a man holding a makeshift golf club sat two seats from a woman clutching Tupperware. Like most of the would-be Edisons, they were reluctant to discuss their inventions. Their arms were crossed, as if shielding their ideas from predators.

They are representative of the amateur inventor, of which there are two types, according to Richard C. Levy, author of "The Complete Idiot's Guide to Cashing In on Your Inventions": "The paranoid and the more paranoid."

Of course, inventors should be discreet: Once an idea is publicly disclosed, the clock starts ticking, and an inventor has 12 months to file a patent to protect this bit of intellectual property. But most beginners do not understand that an idea is just an idea.

Matt Fleming is an exception. At the casting call, the 32-year-old Arlington resident played his unpatented tabletop game in plain sight, because, he says, "I don't have the patience or money to hide my inventions."