Isegoria

As a fan of both Leatherman multi-tools and entrepreneurialism, I enjoyed the story of How Tim Leatherman outdid the Swiss Army knife:

My wife and I decided to travel abroad in 1975. We were young-it was one of those budget trips, and we bought an old Fiat in Amsterdam for $300. I was carrying a Boy Scout-type knife and used it for everything, from slicing bread to making adjustments to the car. But I kept wishing I had a pair of pliers! During the trip — it lasted almost nine months — I had a piece of paper in my pocket where I listed ideas for new products, things I might work on back in the U.S. It was in a hotel room in Tehran that I started sketching a pocketknife that contained pliers.

Once we got back to Portland, I asked my wife if I could build it — just one for me. I told her it would only take a month, and she got a job to support us. I set up shop in the garage and picked up a file and a hacksaw. (I have a degree in mechanical engineering but knew nothing about machining.) My brother-in-law was a machinist, and what he didn’t teach me about metalworking, I had to figure out myself. My month turned into three years. I learned that I’m not a very good inventor. I don’t have much foresight. You know Marconi, who built some of the first radios? I’ve heard that before he picked up a pencil, he had the entire model envisioned in his mind. I’m not that way. It took a few months just to visualize each part of the knife.

The first concept was a knife with a pair of regular pliers, and then a separate needle nose would swing over and be driven by the pliers. Then I got really ambitious and decided to add a feature that would lock the pliers, so that once I’d grab onto something, they would stay clamped. I wanted to put in a hacksaw, but they wear out pretty fast. I even tried to put in a can opener, a flat screwdriver, a leather punch, a pair of scissors, and a Phillips screwdriver. Eventually I ended up with two prototypes.

At that point I filed for a patent. I was hoping for an easy way out, that someone would pay me a million dollars for the patent rights. I thought my most likely prospects would be knife companies, so I brought my prototype to Gerber, a Portland, Ore., knife business. They looked it over and said, “This isn’t a knife, it’s a tool. We’re not in the tool business.” I still thought it was a knife, so I went to the major knife companies, but they all said no. I eventually got the message, and decided that if it’s not a knife, it’s a tool. I visited several tool companies, and they all said, “This isn’t a tool, it’s a gadget. Gadgets don’t sell.”

It took eight years before the tool took off. Read the whole story.

Heliovolt is Making Cheaper Solar Cells with the $77 million in venture capital it has received:

Heliovolt is one of several startups developing a type of thin-film solar cell that converts light into electricity with a micrometers-thick layer of a copper-indium-gallium selenide (CIGS) semiconductor. Thin-film solar cells are attractive because they could produce electricity cheaper than conventional silicon solar cells. Although thin-film cells produce less electricity per square meter than conventional silicon solar cells do, they make up for this by using orders of magnitude less active material per square meter. This can result in significant savings. For example, generating one watt of electricity requires about 80 cents’ worth of silicon, but it only requires a penny’s worth of a semiconductor used in a thin-film cell, says John Benner, who manages electronic materials for photovoltaics research at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in Golden, CO. (Heliovolt is working with NREL to further develop its cells.)