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| photo of Thomas Edison by Louis Bachrach |
Have you seen George Foreman’s commercial for InventHelp? “People ask me all time, George, how do I get my idea in front of
companies…call my friends at InventHelp.” It would be fun to find out how much
George Foreman earns for these outbursts. But what's even more interesting is
the question of how many people there are out there to justify the existence of
a company like Invent Help? Hundreds, thousands, millions? How many
undiscovered Thomas Edisons are there? How many Alexander Graham Bells are iterating the latter day equivalent of “Mr. Watson—come here—I
want to see you.” OK not everyone is going to invent the light bulb or the
telephone. Not everyone is going to experiment with electricity like Ben Franklin did
in his famous kite experiment. Many of the big discoveries--for example, quanta and
the Higgs boson--either have been or are in the process of being made. NASA is already
planning for a journey to Mars. What type of ideas is George talking about and
what are the kinds of things that his friends at InventHelp ending up having
to vet. For instance has anyone come up with a gadget that will enable you to
unravel a new roll of toilet paper in the middle of the night? You know how
irritating it is when your hand circles round and round and can’t find that
first piece and finally how badly you feel when you decide to simply rip
through several layers to start the ball rolling, as it were? How about an alarm
which goes off when you don’t put your keys where they belong--so you don’t have
to be late for work when you’re trying to find them? How about a “restaurant
mediator” that takes the decision making out of restaurant going? Does your
Saturday night on the town become a test of wills between you and your wife,
with someone always getting the bottom end of the stick? This new patent will
improve your marriage and enable you to blame a bad meal on a device rather
than a person. OK and digging down deep what about some modern inventions that
have the global implications of electricity or the telephone? How about a
pocket nuclear Armageddon detector? Or a peace monger, an innocuous little
antenna like device that’s already brought about peace between seemingly intractable
adversaries. What about the polar ice cap capper? Or the 3-D crapper? If you
have any ideas like this, call George Foreman’s friends at InventHelp.
This commercial seems to be exploiting a misconception that people must have that George Foreman actually invented the George Foreman Grill. Foreman made millions off the endorsement for that product, but the job was initially offered to Hulk Hogan who turned it down. George Foreman never invented anything, so why people would always be asking him how to develop their inventions is difficult to understand. People should be asking him "George, how do I get famous enough for my agent to be fielding calls for product endorsements?"
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