My inventions and patents

 I have quite a few inventions and patents; I do not remember how many? 30? 40? 50?  US industry in general pushes you towards this path, as the regular publications are discouraged.  I do not have a single invention I am truly proud of.  

I had some ideas that were good but were 'ahead of time' in a way, that is, it was an interesting idea but there was no true application for it at that time,  or we tried to apply it where it was not needed.  Dry lipid nanoparticles was that kind of invention, which was not needed till RNA technology came in, and brought COVID vaccines with it.  I tried it with the drugs that were stable and did not need the lipid encapsulation.

 Then I had good ideas that were killed and not patented because we had other priorities and had no resources to prototype it. Such an example was a chemical graft between rhodamine dyes  and metal complex dyes  (such as RR23 magenta dye). This dye would be photochemically stable and also stable to migration, therefore quite good for inkjet photo applications.  When we communicated it to our dye supply company, they said that they tried to prototype it and it did not work.   It may have been caught in the corporate politics, I do not know. 

There was a whole bunch of patents that were put together as  'defensive publications'  which provided a patent protection for commercially released products.   There is a lot of work behind them, but no 'inventive act'. 

Then there was a category of 'bad' inventions, those that looked like a good idea but did not work 'well'.

However I started to write this for a different reason. The year was about  1970 and I was 10 years old. I took a 10x 20 cm piece of a textolite board, covered it with a white ski wax  and put  a polyethylene film on top. The  wax layer was sandwiched in between the board and the film.  When squeezed, the board looked brown because the wax was locally squeezed out, but if not, it looked white.  The polyethylene film was then attached to the board on one side  by a tape, similar to  the book binding: the textolite was the back cover and the transparent polyethylene sheet was the first page.

It was possible to write on the polyethylene with a wooden stick, because the ski wax was pushed out by the stick. The text had  the color of ttextolite and the overall grayish-white layer of the wax provided the background .  In order to erase what was written, one had to lift the polyethylene film and then re-attach it, evenly distributing  the wax back in place.  

This made some kind of a scratchboard  with the contents that could be easily  erased and re-written down again. I used it for a while and then it was thrown away. It was not a bad idea, I think; not sure where did I get it from.

Now when I see an Amazon Reader  or a notebook with a touch sensitive screen, I think of it. The shape factor and, partially, the usage model were similar.