Hi everyone, I’m an average person just like you and like you I had an idea that I thought was a good one that I really wanted to make happen.

Like many of us I just did not have the time, money or know how to make it happen. I messed around in my basement sketching, building prototypes out of junk, showing them to friends for their opinions and constantly rebuilding, starting over and rethinking my ideas.

I’ve never had a lot of money so I was constantly buying bits and pieces of already made objects that were close to what I needed and then cutting them up, drilling them and combining them to come up with some contraption that would get my idea across. Believe me they didn’t always look pretty, or work the best, but they were good enough to prove to me that it could be done.

I’ve done this all of my life, since I was in third grade and invented the cereal sugarer. It consisted of a canning jar lid, a ramp and a base made out of 2 scraps of wood nailed together in an “L” shape.

It was my pride and joy on “show and tell day” back circa 1974. You’d line it up with your bowl of cereal, spoon the sugar into the canning jar lid and voila it would slide down the ramp and into your bowl!

I stumbled across an ad for a casting call for Everyday Edisons while surfing the web for info on American Inventor. I ended up taking one of my ideas to the Washington D.C. casting call for Season 2.

I made it to the filming stage but they ended up saying that my idea was too much of a niche market. It was only good for craftsman and construction workers. I did not make the show that season, but I could see they really liked my idea, it just wasn’t a fit for the show. I could also see from that casting call that they were serious, it wasn’t about looking silly for camera, or putting on a good show, it was about the ideas. These people wanted to make dreams come true. They wanted to invent.

I went back home very excited and ready to come up with an idea that was the proverbial “tooth brush”, something everyone uses and needs. I spent months thinking about it when a flash of inspiration came to me when I least expected it.

I took what I created from that flash of inspiration to the Providence RI casting call for Season 3 it equaled making it on the show!

Now I have the Everyday Edisons team behind one of my “Cereal Sugarer” machines. No it’s not actually the machine I described above, but it came out of the same mind and was created the same way, out of whatever bits and pieces I could find. The only difference is that I’m quite a bit older and I managed to get the concept across well enough to someone that can actually do something about it.

I could never have made this happen on my own. Like I’ve said I’ve done this pretty much all of my life always wishing that someday I’d hit on something that someone would want. It turns out all my struggling and building and working late into the night finally has paid off.

I am one of the fortunate few to be a Season 3 Everyday Edison. A little over a year from now I will see something I created fully realized, packaged, marketed and setting on a store shelf ready for anyone to purchase.

It is an amazing feeling. It’s so amazing that even though I haven’t even had the first official meeting with the team yet I’ve already started on my next, and in my opinion, even better idea. I’ll be at Season 4’s casting call just like many of you, trying again.

Inventing is so much fun…it’s what I do. I love the challenge of it. I always say it doesn’t matter if it gets made or not. It doesn’t even matter if in the end it doesn’t work. It’s the trying and the figuring and the tinkering that I love. I can’t just sit around when I have an idea that might make something work better, or make life a little easier. I’ve got to try. I’ll continue trying for the rest of my life.

Any way, I’ve started this blog to keep you posted on how Season 3 is going and what this all means to me.

I’m a graphic designer by trade and I’ve dabbled in product development a little but I was never trained for that.

At my last job they realized that with all my tinkering and inventing I’ve done on the side that I had the kind of mind that let me think of ways to improve their product and they would always run new ideas or concepts by me, the graphic designer, for my input. It gave me a taste of what could be.

Of course because of the nature of the show I’m not allowed to discuss the details or tell you exactly what product will be setting on that shelf next year, but I can share with you my feelings about it all.

I realize how fortunate I am. I know you all wanted this just as much as I did. I’m here to tell you it doesn’t matter who you are, or what your official label is, if you have the inventor in you they will come out and do their thing.

Keep trying, keep thinking and hopefully you too will be an Everyday Edison someday.

That’s all for this first entry. I’ll be back after the first meet and greet with the crew to share my thoughts on it all and how it went.

I hope you find this interesting and worth reading. Let me know your thoughts and I’ll do my best to tailor this blog to the masses. If I ramble, let me know. Sometimes I just need to get it all out.

Above all else, keep inventing.