The Birth and Death of a Clever New Invention

I received a telephone call one day (some years ago when tractor feed paper was the norm for computers) from a gentleman who we shall call "Mr. Andrews". A friend of his had given him my name, telling him I would give him advice about what to do with his invention.

Mr. Andrews had invented a way of separating the perforated edges of tractor feed printer paper. We met and he demonstrated his prototype to me. He showed me the results of his patent search, and some letters from apparently interested parties in Japan. His trimmer idea was quite simple. He mounted a razor blade in the tractors of the tractor feed mechanism of an Epson printer. It appeared to work well.

I was impressed with his demonstration and offered to manufacture and market his margin trimmer for him. Mr. Andrews agreed to my. After signing the papers I took possession of his prototype, instituted my own patent search, and contacted several printer companies about the idea of a margin trimmer built into the tractor units.

The first piece of bad news came when I began experimenting with Mr. Andrews printer with the built in margin trimmer. After a relatively short period of time I discovered that the prototype had a couple of problems. After a few hundred pages had been trimmed a significant amount of paper dust began to build up in the tractor. The paper dust began getting into the works of the printer and gumming things up.

The second piece of less than welcome news was from the printer manufactures who said they might be interested as long as there were no sharp blades involved that could injure someone. My brother cut his thumb badly enough to need 4 stitches while using it.

The third piece of bad news came from my patent attorney. An identical device had been patented in Austria in the 1950's. It wasn't patentable! Apparently the patent search Mr. Andrews had obtained was through an inventors club at a big discount. The patent search was only performed on US patents and did not search foreign patents.

I began to experiment with tractors from some old printers I had laying around, and after a few days I had a tractor unit that worked quite well, left no paper dust, had no sharp blades that could cause injuries, and was patentable.

While experimenting with the tractor units I found that I could use one of the tractors as a hand-held manual type of trimmer. Depending upon the weight of the paper and the style of perforations, I could trim the margin of a stack of up to about 20 sheets at a time.

So now I had two potential products, a hand held trimmer, and a trimmer built into printers. There was no question in my mind that the devices were patentable and marketable.

I enlisted the help of my brother, setting up a limited partnership to fund the project, and we raised about $ 75,000 from about 30 small investors we rounded up from among our friends. One of our investors owned and operated a plastic injection molding company.

We applied for a patent, and I designed a hand held margin trimmer that was attractive, easy to use, and entirely injection moldable.

I also designed a stand alone automatic margin trimmer that automatically trimmed the margins off of the paper as it fed out from the printer, or in batches. The prototype automatic margin trimmer had a paper tension sensor so it could track the output of the printer, trimming at the same rate as the printer printed. It also could trim just the left margin, just the right margin, or both.

The tool and die makers at the injection molders built the prototypes of the hand held and automatic margin trimmers.

Our injection molder built the tooling we needed for the hand held device, amortizing the tooling over a large number of units. We were to pay an additional dollar per piece until the tooling was paid for. I'm having a hard time remembering the details, but I think it was costing us about a buck and a half ($ 1.75) per trimmer to injection mold the plastic parts, assemble the trimmers, and package them in blister cards.

I think we had a suggested retail price of $ 7.95 although I am not sure. My brother and I were trying to market it ourselves, but we weren't really salesmen, and weren't making much progress.

One of our investors was my marketing guy for another product. He took the prototypes of the trimmers to a computer products trade show. He was able to demonstrate our new products to the president of Curtis manufacturing. Curtis was in the business of manufacturing and marketing computer accessories such as surge protectors diskette holders, mouse pads etc.

The president of Curtis loved the automatic margin trimmer. He agreed to market and distribute the handheld version. The president of Curtis hired a product development company in Palo Alto CA. to refine my automatic trimmer. After several months the new product development company had a working prototype to show us, and it was slick. I believe it was going to cost about $ 50 to produce and was to be marketed for a couple of hundred. We would get 5% of the gross sales (wholesale). Curtis was selling hand held margin trimmers, color coordinated to match Curtis's color scheme, for $ 9.95 I think, and they were beginning to sell. Life was good.

That's when out-of-the-blue the parent company of Curtis, a gold mining company I believe, declared bankruptcy. I'm not clear on the details, but somehow the bankruptcy caused the president of Curtis to resign.

The new president of Curtis without explanation canceled the burster / trimmer project, and the hand held trimmer as well. They had sold 27,000 of the hand held trimmers.

We obtained the prototype trimmer / burster from Product Genesis and tried to market it ourselves. We were unable to interest any manufactures in our device. Probably because it was so inexpensive to build that the profit margin would have been much smaller.

We had no money to manufacture the product ourselves, so the whole thing died. To this day you can still buy one of those big heavy expensive busters if you need to separate continuous forms in batches, for several thousand dollars.

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Contact Printer Support Number for Help with your Printer Check This Website

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The Birth and Death of a Clever New Invention

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