Tom Scarnato has finally found a way to keep a cool head. But the 73-year-old Barrington resident had to come up with his own invention to help keep his forehead from sweating while playing golf.
Scarnato holds more than 40 job-related patents from his former position as product development engineer for Navistar, a farm equipment company in Chicago. After he retired, he came up with some personal patents to help make day-to-day living easier. His favorite is a golf cap that has little moisture-absorbent pads along the band to allow air flow.
“I’ve sort of solved that problem of keeping my head cool,” he said. “My caps are not stained like they used to be.”
Every day, people around the globe come up with ideas for inventions, and those living in the northwest suburbs are no exception. Their reasons for doing so are often as unique as the inventions themselves. Some, like Scarnato, see themselves as problem solvers. They may not even manufacture or sell the product. The satisfaction is in the creating.
“I become extremely frustrated when I see that things could get better,” Scarnato said. “We as a people could benefit from an improvement, so I concentrate on it.”
From amusement park rides and soda pop containers to pottery tools, remote controls and rubber pitching plates, these inventors have a real flair for filling the needs of the American public.
Patent agent Kajane McManus of McManus and Associates in Wonder Lake works with between 30 and 50 individual inventors each year. From tools and hand puppets to punching bags and baby beds, she has seen it all. McManus said that just about anyone can invent something.
“It just requires having some kind of need that you’re obsessed with and finding something to fill that need,” she said. “As they say, necessity is the mother of invention.”
Scarnato came up with his cap invention on the golf course. He wears a hat to shield himself from the hot sun, but the band of a normal hat fits snugly against his forehead and doesn’t allow him to perspire.
“A person’s forehead is one of the most temperature-sensitive parts of the body,” he explained. “If you can keep that person’s forehead cool, then they are very comfortable.”
With his cap, four pads of moisture-absorbent sponge material line the inside of the band, leaving spaces for air flow.
Unlike some inventors, Scarnato doesn’t envision starting his own company to produce his golf hats. But he is working to get his idea licensed to a manufacturer.
Another problem Scarnato decided to tackle was soda pop that loses its fizz. “Let’s say I didn’t want to consume all of the contents and I decided that I wanted to cap the bottle,” he said. “Later if I went back, the contents would be flat. That’s because the carbonation inside can be lost in the open space (of the bottle).”
So he invented a collapsible container you can pour soft drinks into that can be folded down to the level of liquid left inside. There’s no lost space, so the fizz remains.
“I have a patent on it, but my big problem is finding a manufacturer that is willing to make it and place it in the open market,” he said.
Scarnato also came up with a dripless bottle that has a spout shaped like the edge of a spoon so liquid doesn’t run down the side of the bottle, and with a self-regulating air unit for the furnace that maximizes air efficiency.
For Mary Huntington, inspiration came when she was soaking in a hot tub. Suddenly her idea for an amusement park ride–something she had been mulling over for several years–became crystal clear.
“I quickly wrote down the description of exactly how I wanted to put it together,” said the 47-year-old resident of unincorporated McHenry.
Eighteen months later, in February 1996, she had a patent. She won’t say much more about her ride except that it is safe for all ages and an entire family can ride together.
“It’s based on the hot air principles of flight, but you don’t go flying,” she said.
For Huntington, coming up with an amusement park ride stemmed from her childhood and tied in with her current job as a stress management trainee.
“People need to play more and find things to do with their children,” she said. “This seemed to have a lot of appeal to span the ages.”
By the end of this year, Huntington hopes to have a prototype of her patented ride constructed so she can sell it to an amusement park by next summer.
Other inventors design things to make life a little easier. Kurt Unterschuetz, a potter from Marengo, came up with a tool that makes working with clay a breeze.
Unterschuetz and his wife, Caryn, operate SchatziBoyz Pottery in their basement; their products include bowls, plates, lamps and pizza bakers.
Making pottery entails using a lot of water, and the tool Unterschuetz was working with would rust within a week. “I sought out another tool (that wouldn’t rust) but never found one,” he said.
He soon realized he would have to create the tool himself. For the PottersPro Needle Tool, he used surgical stainless steel that would never rust and designed it so it fits well in a potter’s hand. “We finally came up with a design that worked,” Unterschuetz said.
The PottersPro Needle Tool is 6 inches long with a weighted handle and costs $12.95 for the regular size, $14.95 for the heavy-duty variety with tempered tip.
The Unterschuetzes decided to market their product on their own. In March, they headed to Rochester, N.Y., for the National Council on Education for the Ceramic Arts, a clay convention for professional potters.
“We bought a booth and thought we would test the waters,” Kurt Unterschuetz said. “It was very successful. We sold a couple hundred of them in three days.” They continue to sell the product and even have a Web page on the Internet (http://www.mc.net/schatzi).
Anyone who has “channel surfed” with the TV remote control owes a debt to Richard Thorne. In the 1970s, Thorne worked for Zenith Corp. in Chicago and, with a team of electronics engineers, invented a better remote-control system for the television.
Thorne, an Elgin resident, said early remote controls were not as easy to operate as they are today. For example, if a person wanted to go from Channel 2 to Channel 11, he had to progress forward through all the channels.
Thorne helped create a remote control that went both forward and backward so it didn’t take as long to get to the preferred channel. “I came up with an electronic circuit that would allow a single switch to control the motor in either direction,” Thorne said, noting that remotes then worked by activating electric motors, unlike the infrared beams that are used in current remotes.
Coming up with a remote control that ran through channels in both directions wasn’t an incredible discovery, just timely. “It was a fairly simple thing, but it had never been done before, so it was patentable,” he said.
Thorne’s name is also on a 1987 patent for an electronic air cleaner circuit in furnaces. The circuit is used in an extremely fine filter that cleans the air for people who have allergies.
He has a patent on his own for an electronic fluorescent lamp ballast, a device that controls the lamp to produce the right amount of light. His device, for which he received a patent in 1989, is made from electronic components that cost less than magnetic materials do and save energy.
“It was really just something I was doing for my own sake,” he said. “I wasn’t trying to make a living off of it or anything.”
Some inventors do end up supplementing their income with their brilliant ideas. For Stephen Barnum of Hoffman Estates, selling his baseball and softball pitching plates has proved to be a lucrative side business.
It all started when Barnum, who had been a Little League coach for 12 years, noted that the plates for Little League pitchers didn’t last very long, he said. The plate was secured to the ground by three spikes that were threaded through the rubber of the plate. “After one or two games, what happens is you damage the area where the spike is attached,” he said.
That led Barnum to develop his own pitching plate, which is made with a molded flange, or metal bracket that sticks out on both sides. There is a hole in the plate, and a stake is pounded through it to secure it. “Once you put it in the ground, it stays put,” he said.
He built his first prototype in 1991, and he was fully satisfied at that point. “I didn’t think about ever patenting it, but friends I coached with said it was a great idea,” he said.
He decided to pursue a patent and received it in March 1993. Today, he operates JAB Products out of his home, selling his JAB PRO Pitching Plate to sporting goods dealers.
Years ago, Mike Mason, a physical education teacher at Hunting Ridge School in Palatine, noticed that his students were afraid of jumping hurdles. Many would trip and fall if they failed to clear the hurdle, which would tip over and fall to the ground when hit. So Mason invented the Over’n Under Hurdle, which has a swinging arm and a bright orange cone for a base. If a student hits the hurdle, it simply swings away.
“It was a safer way for kids to hurdle so they don’t trip and fall,” said Mason, a Palatine resident. “It started off as just a safety thing, and then I saw that there was a need for it.”
He received a patent in 1977 and sold the rights to Shields Manufacturing Co. in New York, which has been selling the product ever since.
While receiving a patent is part of the process, it is not necessarily the motivating force for many. Mason’s invention, for example, stemmed from safety issues. For Scarnato, who is still pursuing a manufacturer for his golf cap invention, new ideas spring forth out of a need for improvement.
“You see a problem and you work on it,” he said. “Inventions are nothing more than problem solving, and I just love doing it. I get great satisfaction out of it.”
