CHAPTER VII
MAKING YOUR INVENTION PAY
After reading what has gone before you may well conclude that an inventor’s life is not a happy one but let me remind you that whatever road you take to seek fame and to win fortune you will find it just as full of petty strife and big difficulties.
In sooth inventing is one of the easiest and pleasantest pursuits in which you can engage to make a good living and many inventors who were as poor as Job’s turkey when they began to think up new ideas and concoct useful schemes now have their thumb-nail biographies in Who’s Who and live on the fat of the land.
And you can do the same thing too if you have a real invention and a lot of native shrewdness. Yes, to be a money-making inventor you must have inventive ability plus business ability, or rather the other way about, for business ability counts for more in the game of success than inventive ability.
There are hundreds of inventors of the highest type who are comparatively poor men for the lack of business ability while many others, like Edison, all round inventor, Westinghouse, inventor of the air brake, and Eastman, inventor of the kodak, have made fortunes that run up into the millions because they are first, last and all the time hard headed business men. And you must be a business man too if you want to make money out of your invention.
How to Raise the Initial Funds.—By initial funds I mean the first money. It is easy to tell an inventor who has a rich dad or a bank account in his own name how to finance his invention.
But mine is a harder task in that I am taking it for granted you are like 999 out of every 1000 inventors and that you have little or no money, are fired with ambition and that you have a big idea.
Assuming that this is the precise state of affairs let’s go back to where we started from in Chapter I, that is to the last part of it where you had drawn out your invention on paper, written a description of it and had some of your friends put their signatures to it.
Should your invention seem to your friends to have merit it will take but very little urging to get one or more of them to furnish whatever amount of money you think will be needed to carry on the experiments or to build a working model. Of course you will in turn have to agree to give him, or them, a certain small interest in your invention, and this is fair exchange for you are putting up your brains against their money.
If your invention is a small one and but little money is needed to develop it into a marketable product a 5 per cent. interest is enough to give those who back you for taking the risk. A 10 per cent. interest is ample to offer for sufficient funds to develop a more complicated invention.