There s engines and wings and carpets and electrical points, things for computer graphics. He s got maybe 50 ideas. He said I would like to take twelve months and work at these inventions and see what happens. And I risked everything that I had built up, all our financial security. Two thirds of my life was past and if I failed I would then be too old to start again.
Fear is a great motivator.
One of the first things I did was to do a patent search. Things that you think that you have invented have almost invariably been invented before. I selected three inventions to start. One was an internal combustion engine, and every inventor has one. The other two inventions I had was a pair of sneakers that pumped a serious volume of air through with every stride that you took.