The Better Mousetrap : Inventor Sees Group Efforts as the Wave of Future Progress
FALLBROOK, Calif. — Tom Rhodes’ inventions aren’t exactly the great-leap-for-mankind sort of breakthroughs--although he did have a hand in designing the composition of the boot that astronaut Neil Armstrong used when he first set foot on the moon.
Rhodes suggests that we’re now in an era where there won’t be any more Thomas Edisons or Benjamin Franklins or Isaac Newtons, men who can singularly turn the world on its head with strokes of brilliance. We’re now a society progressing by committee, not by individual--of knots of engineers, driven both by their own character and by industry’s and government’s requests for better mousetraps.
That isn’t all bad, mind you, that there may be no individual, standout superstars in the business of inventing. Rhodes, a 21-year resident of Fallbrook, spent much of his professional life huddling with fellow engineers, joined in search of little breakthroughs here and there that would help industry do this or that a little bit better.
Rhodes, for instance, provided a technological breakthrough in the early days of the coaxial cable, now a staple in the electronics industry. He invented gizmos that helped make better radial tires. He invented a better way to cure rubber, too--but it’s doubtful that his name got beyond some trade publications.
Congenital Optimist
But Rhodes is, like all inventors, a congenital optimist who won’t park his imagination in a rest stop. To Rhodes, life is a continuing brain tease; his hobby is looking at tomorrow, not reminiscing about yesterday. He has used his retirement--as chief of engineering research at UniRoyal--to pursue still more ideas.
Such as the wheelchair that can literally climb up and down stairs.
Such as the giant roller-shade-type contraption that nurses can use to turn immobile patients over in their hospital beds without lifting them.
Such as the snow chains that can be put on without the user dirtying his clothes or hands by having to touch the tire.
Such as the redesigned inner-tube that can be inflated within a flat tire--without first having to take the tire off the wheel.
And if Rhodes is on one final quest, it is to spur America’s young people to get smitten by engineering--that combination of imagination, artistry, craftsmanship and mechanics that will keep the world’s people moving forward.
“As a nation, we’re in terrible shape in engineering,” says Rhodes, 76. “Young men aren’t taking up engineering. In 10 years, this country will be 300,000 engineers short. In Japan, the ratio of engineers to other workers in manufacturing industries is one to six. In this country, it’s one to 17. Only one-quarter of 1% of our college graduates acquire a doctorate degree in science or engineering.”
Why?
“Economics,” he says. “You can make 10 times as much money in public relations or real estate or on Wall Street.
“Education,” he says. “In the ‘60s, we degraded our school systems. We expected less of our students. We weren’t as tough on them as we should have been, as teachers.
“Status,” he says. “Manufacturing engineering requires that you spend time in the factory, on the line. There’s more status in white-collar jobs.
“Role models,” he says. “When’s the last time a young man or woman read a book about a 20th-Century inventor? That’s partly because engineering today is so complex, it’s almost impossible for just one person to get famous.”
Aha! Here’s an area where Rhodes believes that he can help, although it’s not fame he’s looking for.
Telling It Like It Was
He has written a 420-page manuscript, “From the Prairie to the Moon,” his autobiography. It’s a collection of vignettes about a skinny little kid growing up on an Iowa farm who, scholastically outdistanced by his brother and sister, turned instead to art, to music and to tinkering.
This is a kid who tried to build a bowling alley in his hayloft, a kid who made money selling homemade toys, a 15-year-old who built a 12-inch telescope in his basement that was such an accomplishment in quality and design that it was published by Scientific American.
There’s no one anecdote in Rhodes’ life that would knock some kid’s socks off, he concedes. But his stories of small successes--and big failures--might excite another young person to give it a shot.
The success is in the trying, not the final patent, says Rhodes, who himself holds 36 U.S. patents in the field of processes and products but who lost track of all the ideas that never made it that far.
“You need 100 ideas to get 10 worthy of a research investment from a lab to get even just one into production,” says a man who has hoed that row. “Inventors are always hoping they’ll come up with the big one, but I’ve had men work with me for 20 or 30 years in research who never got a patent.”
No Instant Gratification
Even patents don’t spell success.
“I spent 600 hours just thinking about the problem with snow chains,” Rhodes said. “I would spend an hour every night on it. I finally came up with the solution.” Indeed, Rhodes’ snow-chain device worked, and he got it patented. But it was so complicated that even his own wife refused to use it. He couldn’t market it.
He was unable to interest Detroit in his flat-tire fixer because it would have required automobile makers to slightly redesign their wheel hubs so that his inner tube could be inserted within the bad tire, and he wasn’t able to shake up an entire industry for his sake.
The wheelchair stair climber works--really--but he’s been told by potential manufacturers that they can’t get their liability insurance carriers to cover the thing.
He designed and built a scaled prototype of an ocean wave-dampening device, constructed of buoys and louvers, that would trap ocean surges and reduce waves outside of harbors. It was considered for development during the Vietnam War but never got to production.
He still holds hope for his “Easy-Over Patient Lift.” He’s had nurses look at it and nod approvingly, and now he’s trying to market it.
But his redesigned violin--does it take an inventor’s arrogance to try to go Stradivarius one better?--never got out of his hobby shop. “It sounds like a bagpipe,” Rhodes chuckles.
Finger in Every Pot
All the while, Rhodes hasn’t lost sight of his boyhood fondness for tinkering and for enjoying the arts.
He molded out of clay, then cast in bronze, Renaissance-type medallions of his 20 all-time heroes, ranging from Rembrandt, Leonardo da Vinci and Charles Darwin to Albert Einstein, Mahatma Gandhi and Winston Churchill. When he was done, he cast two more medals--depictions of himself and his wife of 50 years, Cherie. (“When we’re getting along, we face each other on the wall,” she says. “When we fight, we’re back to back on the wall.”)
He crafted his own violin and hand-carved a case for it. Then he crafted a pochette, a working, miniature violin.
He has a collection of peach pits that he whittled into the shapes of animals.
For Christmas mementos, Rhodes stamps out his own aluminum coins, each year’s edition bearing a special holiday message.
He binds his own books, with Moroccan leather or fine, hand-carved walnut covers. One custom cover binds his 19th-Century copy of John Milton’s “Paradise Lost.”
Rhodes has designed and built his own weapons, ranging from a nine-shot revolver to freestyle target pistols to pulley-rigged archery bows to what he describes as the world’s most accurate blow guns. They are on display in his hobby shop, which is equipped with lathes and drills but is so meticulously clean that his wife shares it as a reading and television room.
Rhodes sees no end in sight to his hobby of thinking. “The inventive man,” he says, “is the incomplete man. I know I’ll never complete myself.”
Cherie Rhodes says her husband’s hobby is a delight to her. “He’s never underfoot in the kitchen, getting in my way and looking for something to do. He’s out there, doing something.”
Even thoughts of dying conjure ideas in Rhodes’ mind, in need of shape and form and technology.
“A lot of people would like, when they die, to be able to pass on more quickly and totally into the cosmos,” he says. “Cremation is the closest we have to that now, because it hurries the process somewhat. But I’m looking at an ionizing gun as part of the cremation process that would destroy matter completely, turning it into ions. You’d become part of the cosmos. I think some people might take comfort in that.”
If Rhodes’ imagination is at the brink of technology, he turns back to early man to cite his favorite invention of all time: the wheel.
