Yankee ingenuity, we call it - the seeming knack of New Englanders
to come up with new ways of doing things. Elias Howe invented
the sewing machine in Spencer, Massachusetts. Massachusetts-born
and Yale-educated Eli Whitney revolutionized the South with the
cotton gin. Alexander Graham Bell perfected the telephone in Boston.
And then there was Chester Greenwood, of Farmington, Maine, who,
in 1878, at the age of 20, received a patent for earmuffs.
More recently, An Wang, in Lowell, helped create today's highly
automated office with his 35 patents relating to computer technology;
John Rock, of Brookline, and Gregory Pincus, of Worcester, developed
the oral contraceptive; and Edwin Land invented polarized sunglasses
and the Polaroid camera in Cambridge.
Inventiveness is not the province of any one region, of course;
good ideas can pop up anywhere. Not unexpectedly, California,
now the most populous state, led the nation in patents issued
in 1996. But the six New England states, with about 5 percent
of the US population, accounted for a disproportionate 8 percent
of new patents.
The seedbeds of great ideas have changed radically over the years.
Companies - often working in collaboration with university researchers
- now account for about 80 percent of all patents issued, according
to the US Patent and Trademark Office. IBM, Canon, and Motorola
lead the pack. Colleges and universities receive about 2 percent
of the patents issued every year; among this group, the Massachusetts
Institute of Technology ranked number one in 1996.
That said, New England inventors, whether in corporate or college
settings or working alone, hold their own as inspired innovators,
people whose ideas could have an impact in coming years. Here's
a sampling of what some of them are doing.
The story of the Bikini Plus razor, as Sferruzza has named his
invention, opens with a Hitch-cock-like scene. One day in 1987,
Sferruzza was walking into his girifriend's home. Upstairs, he
heard screams. Racing up, he found her standing in the bathtub,
the walls and tub spattered with blood. In her hand was a safety
razor. She had cut herself while shaving and was cursing the razor's
shape - a straight, right-angle head on a handle, hardly the thing
for shaving a soft, curved surface.
Then Sferruzza had an idea. "I looked over at the comer of
the bathtub, and I saw a dome-topped bottle of, I think it was
shampoo," he recalls. "And I said, 'That's it.' "
So he got to work on a razor with a curved blade mounted on a
curved head to shave legs, armpits, and the bikiniline. To further
prevent nicks, the blade is set just below the surface of the
head, like the blade in a carpenter's plane.
Unlike many inventors today, Sferruzza ended his education with
his 1978 diploma from Apponequet Regional Vocational High School,
in Lakeville. He worked as a junior machinist and then as a mechanic
before setting up his own successful machine shop. Pursuing his
razor idea, Sferruzza hired a plant in Taunton to make the plastic
handles, found a company in Asia to make the blades, and designed
his own assembly machines. He is marketing the Bikini Plus via
the Internet and a handful of stores in the New Bedford and Middleborough
region. Sferruzza, though somewhat nervous about repaying the
family members and friends who have invested hundreds of thousands
of dollars in his dream, says the endeavor has non-monetary rewards:
"There's no college in the world that could have taught me
what I've learned."
FREETOWN - Gerald Sferruzza works off the beaten path. These
days many inventors veer toward the high-tech, such as CyberDisplay,
Taunton-based Kopin's new gadget that allows users to view images
transmitted over cell phones and pagers.
But while the razzle-dazzle world of silicon wafers and circuitry
spins around him, 37-year-old Sferruzza has spent the last eight
years tilting against the trend, while he developed - a woman's
shaver. The Bikini Plus, a disposable shaver which Sferruzza says
lasts for three months, is designed for those hard to reach places
- bikini lines, under arms and ankles. "I got the idea one
day when a woman I was dating cut herself while shaving,"
he recalled. The woman, who had suffered a rather sizeable gash,
challenged Sferruzza to invent a shaver that wouldn't nick or
cause a rash.
A longtime player in the research and development industry, he
accepted the challenge. He got the idea for the Bikini Plus' first
prototype from a Dome-shaped lotion bottle which sat on the sill
of a bathtub. In recalling his teen years, he remembered changing
a double-edged razor in his shaver and how intrigued he was with
the blade's flexibility. "I experimented by wrapping a blade
with a thin piece of plastic around a curved surface," he
said. Since he owned a small manufacturing firm, he was able to
experiment further, building better models.
A graduate of an automotive technical school, the Lakeville resident
got his start as an entrepreneur during his teens, when he won
first place in a statewide automotive contest sponsored by Chrysler
Plymouth. "They sabotaged the cars in some way, shorted wires,
plugged up hoses and we had to find the problems and fix them,"
he said. A year later, he plunged headlong into the world of research
and developing, consulting on projects with such companies as
Sippican Ocean Systems, Horizon Marine, Aegis Corporation, Isotronics
Corp. and New England Plastics.
He credits those early experiences with helping to prepare him
for what has been the most ambitious undertaking of his professional
life. Taking the shaver from paper to market has been no easy
task.
I'm broke," he said. "I had to sell a property in Freetown
and two in Florida to generate capital for the project."
Still, he's counting his blessings. In 1990 he was one of 42 selected
from among 300 applicants to appear at the annual inventor's weekend
at the Boston Museum of Science. The clinic allows the public
to see potential inventions and inventors to meet potential investors,
which Sferruzza did.
To date, he and his investors, whom he declined to identify, have
committed a total of $900,000. Sferruzza says he has racked up
$50,000 in personal debt and that figure is climbing. The capital
is being gobbled by costs associated with designing/building manufacturing
tooling, injection molding equipment, assembly, artwork for posters
and packaging and filing for patents.
The result from G.S. Industries Inc. is a round shaver with a
curved blade, which Sferruzza claims virtually ends those dreaded
nicks and cuts. Unlike straight razors, the Bikini Plus' unique
shape supports the skin so it isn't drawn into the blade during
shaving. The hollow design, which allows the water to flush out
hair fragments, resists clogging.
"This shaver can be used with any shave gel, cream, body
wash or just soap and water," he said. The blade offers advantages
over those on the market - it is longer, nearly 2 inches, and
lasts three times longer, he says.
The shaver's durability, he explained, is achieved by freezing
the blades in liquid nitrogen restoring the blades' molecular
structures to their original state which is altered during manufacturing.
While a few area stores carry the shaver - Nature's Pantry and
Savas Liquors in Lakeville, and East Freetown Pharmacy -Sferruzza
is planning a direct marketing campaign.
1f you sell in the retail market, by the time you give the wholesaler
and retailer their cuts, the cost to the consumer begins to soar,"
he said.