Last year the agency granted 94,096 patents, more than ever before. Of those, more than 20 percent were given to individual inventors. Enabled and inspired by technology, flush with cash from a robust economy, American commercial creativity is soaring and tinkerers nationwide are toiling in their garages to design a better mousetrap. For many, just scraping together enough money to get a patent is an enormous challenge. For others, a marketing agreement with retailers is as elusive as a snowfall in the summer.
Some inventors work for years on a single idea, hoping to see the results while they are still able.
Only a few find success quickly. Indeed, inventors' devotion to their conceptions can be as intense and durable as parents' feeling for their own offspring. Here are the stories of five area residents all trying to nurture their brainstorms into full-blown, profitable companies. But two years ago he stumbled onto an idea for a product that struck him as so clever, and so marketable, that he quit his job to work on his invention full time. Weigel's epiphany came when he was trying to fix the dead spots on his lawn, where grass wouldn't grow because leaves seemed to concentrate there.