gedaan met pissen in het zwembad

[elsie]

23 january 2005:

Last night, I invented a product and submitted the idea to an inventor's consultant online. It's a 2-part urine testing kit for swimming pools. This was partly inspired by Skot's mentioning the urban legend that such an agent exists and that it scared him as a child when his mom said the water would change color and partly by the movie Envy. I'm not going to go into the technical aspects of how it works because that would be giving it away, but let's just say the main ingredient for the first step is a natural plant extract and both environmentally and physically safe. The materials for the second step won't be going into the water so much, so that's not a major concern. Hope this works out. And, yes, I recognize the humor in such an invention, practical as its applications may be.

today:

The patent attorneys who did a search for me at the U.S. Patent Office in Washington, DC have contacted me to deliver the good news that "none of the patents in this selection seem to operate in the same manner as your inventive concept." They have sent a link to a directory where they have uploaded all the similar patents just in case I find something of concern. So far, the first on the list seems the most similar, but it still does not serve the same purpose or function in the exact same manner. I'll be keeping busy with this for a little while. Fortunately, the descriptions are straightforward, so this won't kill my excitement. Another application I recently thought of was testing water supplies for human urine in the case of disease epidemics in Third World countries.