Hi, this is Dane Carlson. Thank you for reading the Business Opportunities Weblog.
This voice post is sponsored by the HP iPAQ.
Last night, my wife and watched the season finale of American Inventor on ABC. While I think that the second the season wasn’t as good overall as the first season, something about the winning invention bugged me.
Greg Chavez, a firefighter from Camarillo, California, describes his Guardian Angel invention as,
A small, pressurized tank of water, disguised as a Christmas package, that is placed under the Christmas tree and attached to a small hose leading to the top of the tree where a fusible link is disguised as an angel. The heat from a fire pops the link and water suppresses the fire. There is also an alarm that works without a battery and is intended to suppress a Christmas tree fire and sound an alarm to get people out of the house alive.
I don’t recall where, but I seen this exact thing before.
A quick trip the Google Patent Search at and a search for “christmas tree fire extinguisher” revealed at least ten patents — most of which include the words “Christmas Tree Fire Extinguisher” in their titles!
Did no one at American Inventor take the time to check prior art? There’s even a patent from 1947, called the AUTOMATIC CHRISTMAS TREE FIRE EXTINGUISHER. I’ll read the first two paragraphs from the patent abstract and you decide.
toddfox on August 2nd, 2007 at 8:23 pm
hahaha aahhh that’s great, considering if you are someone who is ‘inventing’ things, you’d have to be searching patents yourself wouldn’t you?
and yeah, shouldn’t a show like that have researchers?
Bruce Storms on August 3rd, 2007 at 3:25 pm
hey, you guys should peruse certain 1965 gov’t innovation hearings, which discuss some famous inventors like Goddard, Carlson, Whittle, Armstrong, Farnsworth, and others, but not Gould, nor Lemelson, nor Michaelson (Michelson ??)—just a suggestion
Fred on August 3rd, 2007 at 5:23 pm
“American Inventor” it’s all about touchy feely crap — I vote no!!