•Written by Peter Hulm• ••Monday•, 03 •May• 2010 22:50•
The 38th Geneva Exhibition of Inventions, once again, challenged the notion that if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. Our contributor Peter Hulm explains..
Geneva -- Geneva's inventions fairs, now the world's biggest with 785 patented inventions from 45 countries, never fails to disappoint. You go through the doors hoping to find the gadget you can't possibly live without. It's never there, of course.
What you see instead -- once you get past yet another version of massage-pants from South Korea, a number of fold-up bikes and energy-saving stoves -- is a gallery of hopeful, eager, desperate and sometimes terminally bored people lined up to show us how much we need their bright idea, no matter how outlandish.
Some, like the proposal by a Middle Eastern prince for a marine horse vehicle race for the blind, disabled and visually impaired (I think it was) in aid of charity, can be explained only by wall charts and photos.
Others were more substantive, such as the Austrian inventor who brought a plaster cow to push his idea for an improved cattle stall, at least I think it was that.
Others still took a decidedly theatrical turn. A German idea to install add-on frames of breakproof glass in windows to foil burglars was brought alive, to delight of spectators and the evident disgust of wincing fellow stallholders by two men who regularly tried to crack the glass with a thundering axe. It seemed appropriate that the inventor's name was Wagner.
To be fair, some of the ideas are brilliant in their simplicity. Dr. H. Hartmuck Schmuecker of Ulm in Germany produced a head safety belt for car drivers to protect against head-injuries, neck injuries and whiplash. He points out that airbags are only reliable in frontal collisions below 50km/h. The head safety belt, according to tests with dummies, works for rear impact and frontal collisions up to 80 km/h.
Anything that helps protect drivers against themselves and their need for speed sounds good. but can you imagine people routinely wearing a headband as they drive? Even seatbelts had a hard time getting acceptance until they became obligatory.
A South Korean couple showed off a multiplug that neatly folded together all the varieties of electrical socket plugs across the world (much better than the clunkers presently on sale). They even presented a more efficient socket for the plugs they had designed. But where is the commercial motivation for the current socket producers, even in the European Union, to put themselves out of business?
An even simpler bright idea came from a group of young people who were receiving training in Nyon to help them find jobs through the Association Pro-Jet (no pun is too dire when you live within sight of Geneva's Jet d'Eau). They built a wooden bench designed specifically for people who have difficulty getting to their feet. The slatted seating is 55cm high, with two middle dividing arms and a recess in the arms to hold walking canes. Selling the seats at CHF1400, the young men have already received orders from public authorites for public benches and seniors' communities.
The ever-inventive, multi-award-winning Pierre Messerli of Corcelles in Berne this year gave us his solar panel of glass flanges that snake back and forth in rows across stainless-steel tubing so that they capture and intensify the sun's rays from morning to night in the same way as a greenhouse. The panel, in contrast to rivals, can also be affixed to flat roofs.
The organizers do their best to put the exhibition on a serious footing. They gave their top prize this year, for example, to Dr Celia Sanchez-Ramos Roda, a Spanish scientist, for a cheaper and faster biometric identification method. They point out that the 2009 exhibition resulted in something like $40 million in licenses.
The public prize, selected by voting from the 70,000 visitors, went to André Vernay of Switzerland for a special automobile cap to prevent motorists with diesel cars putting ordinary gasoline into their fuel tank.
However, I've never seen what looked like obvious commercial ideas from the Inventors Exhibition in Swiss shops in later years, for example, the wheelbarrow designed to manoeuvre up and down stairs.
What does seem to have changed over the years is the greater involvement of universities and governments. The Exhibition Jury gave a gold medal to the Family of Business Social[ly]-Oriented Projects for Strategic Development of Russian Territories. FBSOPSDRT (if that's its acronym) produced a cartoon pamphlet about itself in the shapeof a Russian doll (good idea). But the only part I could understand were a couple of the panels with simple captions ("I've earned enough for vacations -- thanks to my coaches" and "Now I've bought a new car. Career!").
Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, however, appears with a message in the same Russian-style English ("By all means we shall do the work for human capital development"), so I presume it is doing good work as an independent non-profit charity.
The easiest collection to deal with came from the Welsh Assembly Government, which produced its list of sponsored projects in the form of a U.K. passport. The inventions had obviously gone through vetting before being featured. So you could examine a new type of mooring aid for those who couldn't get their minds around the variety of seafarers' knots, a way to fix radiators so that they could pivot for cleaning or easy repair, a laptop bag that turned into a field desk, a device to enable a refuse bag to be carried one-handed, an easier way transport soccer training tackle, a series of moldular boxes that fit into a shopping trolley, a featured. So you could examine a new type of mooring aid for those who couldn't get their minds around the variety of seafarers' knots, a way to fix radiators so that they could pivot for cleaning or easy repair, a laptop bag that turned into a field desk, a device to enable a refuse bag to be carried one-handed, an easier way transport soccer training tackle, a series of modular boxes that fit into a shopping trolley, a spotting telescope that uses only inexpensive, commonly available glass, and -- for humanitarians -- a torch integrated into a tourniquet that reveals vein contours for injections. One Welsh invention won the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) prize to a male inventor for an electrical device enabling users to control their rehabilitation themselves via computer after a sports injury. Another Welsh invention, a strap and clip to enable shoppers to carry their bags easily while keeping their hands free won the industrial design prize.
Another potential device for humanitarians at the 2010 fair presented a technique for separating needles from syringe cases -- reducing the cost of medicine transport and protecting the package from damage. A French ultra-flat aquarium which operates for two years without maintenance for two years attracted both public attention and the France-Switzerland Chamber of Commerce and Industry prize.
But the sales section at the end of the exhibition revealed the truth about which products get to market fastest. A stall selling super-glue attracted a large crowd. A child's game seemed always to have a group of witnesses. Another large stall sold a portable air extractor for vacuum-sealing foods to store in your fridge. And one of the largest counters was devoted to a huge variety of sweets.
Sorry, no mousetraps. But a few miles up the lake there's proof of the kind of invention people seem always ready to admire. The Swiss National Museum at Pringins is extending its current special exhibition that has been running since last November from 25 April till 27 June because of its success. It features the Swiss (army) knife.
Full prize list (in French) PDF
See AFP's video on the show, and its full story.
Peter Hulm is Advisor on Innovative Journalism to the European Graduate School for Multidisciplinary Studies (Saas-Fee/New York). He was co-publisher and managing editor of Crosslines Global Report and maintains the crosslines.ch website.
Subscribe to this comment's feed
