IDEAS WHICH BROUGHT FORTUNES.

Gisborne Times, Volume XXIX, Issue 3229, 27 May 1911, Page 3

IDEAS WHICH BROUGHT FORTUNES.

INVENTIONS WORTH MILLIONS

The report that an invention for making salt has recently been sold to an American syndicate for no less than £1,000,000 once again illustrates the remarkable value of good ideas in these days of keen competition in the commercial world- We cannot, of course, all think out time and labor saving devices which are going to bring us in a cool million, but we can keen cur eyes open for useful inventions which, although they may not at the moment seem very profitable, may prove little gold-mines; for the fact should not be overlooked that some enormous fortunes have been made from little things.

Simple toys, puzzles, and games have often proved such a success, as to put thousands of pounds into the pockets of their inventors. The man who invented the tin rattle for babies retired with a quarter of a million of money, while the man who thought out the idea of the returning ball, which consisted of an ordinary rubber or wooden hall to which was attached a long elastic cord, profited to the extent of £lO,000 per annum. The flying top had a rush of popularity which enabled its inventor to live in the lap of luxury for the remainder of his life, while the once popular toy known as “Dancing Jim Crow” is said to have yielded its patentee an annual income of upwards of £15,000. Inventor of Roller-Skates.

It is not so many years ago that everyone laboriously laced his boots from the lowest hole to the top. There was none of that lightning crossing of the laces into the neat little hooks with which the modern face-boot is provided. The inventor of the boot-hook. H. A. Snipp, sold his patent outright for the sum of £SO, and the purchasers are said to have made £250.000 out of the idea.

When Harvey Kennedy introduced his shoe-lace he made £5001)00, and Mr Plimpton, the inventor of the rollerskate, made a similar fortune out of his idea. Probably our readers will remember a legal action which took place some years' ago, when in the course of the evidence it transpired that the inventor of the metal plates used for protecting the soles and heels of shoes from wear sold_ 12,000,000 plates in 1879, and in 1887 the number reached' a. total of 143,000,000, which realised' profits of £230,000 for the Year. Badly Rewarded.

But the inventor does not always, reap such magnificent rewards for liis genius. Take the ease of Mr. J. Longridge, the famous engineer who invented the wire-wound gun, for instance, Longridge invented the gun in 1854, and did all in liis power to place it before the authorities, but they would have nothing to do with it. ' Thirty years afterwards, however, the Ordnance Department at Woolwich subjected one of the guns to exhaustive tests, and so satisfactory were the results that they declared that nothing could equal it for heavy ordnance. Unfortunately, the inventor died from a broken heart before this end was attained.

In all the world’s history, however, there is no more startling instance of ingratitude and forgetfulness than the history of Henry Cort, a native of Gosport. He expended tiny whole of his private fortune of £20,000 in perfecting bis inventions for puddling iron and rolling it into bars and plates. Then he was robbed of the fruits of his toil by the villainy of certain Government officials, and in the end left to starve. This was in 1784. Since that day Cort’s inventions have conferred upon the world an amount of wealth equivalent to £700,000,000, and given constant employment to about 600,000 workmen for the past four generations.