Inventive spirit is alive and well

Invention too often is the mother of necessity. Our lives are filled with gadgets we didn’t know we needed until we were cajoled into buying them (take car GPS devices – please). And coming from megacorporations, they’re more about marketing than innovation. So it’s refreshing to see that there’s still a place for individual inventors tinkering around in the garage, coming up with devices – often startling in their simplicity – that fill important, even life-saving functions.

Like the CPR glove developed by Corey Centen and Nilesh Patel, students at Ontario’s McMaster University – one of 10 new home-built devices singled out by Popular Science magazine this month in its 2007 Invention Awards. Casting about for an engineering class project, the duo came across statistics that showed most would-be rescuers do not do CPR properly – and that the number of lives saved through CPR could quadruple if proper techniques were used. So they developed a glove with electronics sewn in (by Centen’s aunt) that, when worn by a rescuer attempting CPR, measures the victim’s heart rate, tells the rescuer how often and how hard to perform chest compressions, and even indicates when the rescuer should stop and breathe into the victim’s mouth. If this glove goes into mass production, it’s something every office, school, store and ballfield could use. It could save tens of thousands of lives a year. And it took them only $2,500 to create.

Among the other inventions cited by PopSci:
-- Racecar builder Bruce Crower’s six-stroke gas engine uses the heat from the first four strokes to steam-power the last two strokes, making a gallon of gas go 40 percent farther. Development cost: $1,000.
-- Engineer Paul Gierow designed an ultra-portable satellite antenna that looks like a big beach ball and could be set up quickly to create communications at a disaster site – and you can run it off a car battery.
-- Engineer Richard Glasson designed a kevlar/steel net that can keep rocket-propelled grenades from hitting a helicopter. Think of the lives that would save in Iraq.

These are all products of individual initiative, trial and error, and hard work. They show that the spirit of invention is still alive and well. As the magazine puts it: “Inventing is about solving problems, and not stopping until your solution becomes real.”