In which I describe some feverish ideas had which, in retrospect, might have been very profitable.
I presume I am not unusual, let alone unique, in the belief that some of my ideas could have been huge successes had I the courage (OK, the wherewithal) to pursue them and bring them into the world. Alas, the gap between “dreaming it” and “doing it”* is quite a chasm and the “doing it” bit is what separates the wheat from the, um, not wheat. That’s the expression, right? Anyway, here are a couple of ideas I had that I am sure would have worked out swimmingly.
- The solution to motel air conditioners
This image is pretty much what all motel air conditioners looked like for several decades. You can probably hear (and smell) it if you ever slept in a room with one of these units. The controls were simplicity incarnate: A temperature dial and a “high” and “low” selector.
What it did not have was a thermostat. You had to turn it on and off manually. In practise, this meant that you usually slept with it running all night and often left it running during the day of a multi-night stay to keep the temperature liveable. This led to some chilly nights (I was usually in warmer climates) with the AC on high all night. I expect that this was quite expensive for the motels as well.
Now, completely replacing all the AC units with newer ones equipped with a thermostat (or, heavens forfend, central units) would have been very expensive. But what if you made an expensive device that would serve that function without having to make any pricey changes? That would be a win for the motel and the guests!
And I figured out how to do it. Are you familiar with these doohickeys?
It’s a simple analog timer device. You plug it into the wall, you plug, say, a light into it and turn the light on. You set the “on” and “off” times with the green and red tabs for when you want the light to turn on or off. The device cuts the circuit during the “off” times and completes it during the “on” times. Crude, sure, but simple, cheap and effective.
“Ah,” you say, “That’s marvelous for timing things, but how does that replace a thermostat?”
And you’re right. But…what if, instead of a time, we put a cheap mercury switch in it instead of a timer?
That is, in fact, what thermostats use. The mercury moves based on the temperature, completing or disconnecting the circuit. You adjust the “tilt” of the switch to change the temperature at which it turns on or off. They’re cheap, they’re reliable, and they’re small enough to fit in a little box you plug into an outlet.
This little thingie would have saved motel chains so much money. I’d bet the ranch on it. Unfortunately, I had no ranch to bet at the time and I just sat on the idea. These days, almost all the old AC units have been replaced. You could use it with window units, but they’re cheap enough these days that the device would cost almost as much as the AC which lessens the appeal considerably.
It was a good idea, but its time has passed.
2. A realistic baseball pitching machine
This is a very old school baseball pitching machine. If it looks to you like two electic motors spinning rubber tires, give yourself a gold star because that’s pretty much it. It is, however, far more sophisticated than it looks. By adjusting the relative speeds of the tires, you could have it throw different kinds of pitches. More modern ones even let you tilt the tires, giving you more options to more perfectly recreate specific pitches.
It is not without its flaws. It takes some time to switch between types of pitches which real pitchers do not do. More importantly, the motion of “dropping a ball into a chute” isn’t really like watching a pitcher throw a ball. A hitter can definitely work on their hitting mechanics and their ability to hit pitches that move (like a curveball), but it’s not great for preparing for a specific pitcher.
Some time in the mid 1990s, I started thinking about how this could be improved. You could project images of a pitcher actually throwing the ball onto a screen. You put the pitching machine on an arched rail so it could match where the ball comes out of the pitcher’s hand. Finally, you let the computer adjust the machine’s setting quickly to match the pitcher’s real abilities (95 mph fastball, 84 mph slider, 78 mph curve, etc.).
To me, this seemed like a way to prepare hitters for specific pitchers they would face, something far more useful than the garden variety pitching machine.
And I was right! Behold:
It’s so close to my original concept it hurts. It’s better than I imagined, but c’mon, the technology has improved a wee bit over the years. It turns out this was genuinely a good idea, but it was too early and, realistically, I was probably never going to follow up on it anyway.
I can’t even say I regret not following up on these ideas. They were daydreams, not engineering prototypes, and I won’t pretend otherwise. They’re fun to think about though. I still think, in some cases, the mercury switch box would be handy. But, I still own a manual typewriter, so what do I know?
-RK
* Perhaps I simply didn’t have enough coffee in me. Side note: You probably cannot imagine this, but in the early 1980s, the coffee industry was doing very poorly. So poorly that they somehow produced a series of ads featuring, and I am not making this up: David Bowie, Kurt Vonnegut, Heart, Cicely Tyson, Ken Anderson, Joe Jackson, Jane Curtin, and the music of the Electric Light Orchestra in an effort to make coffee seem cool to young people. No matter how strange you think the 80s were, I can assure you that they were far, far stranger and more alien.