re: Have you ever had an invention idea that someone stole from you?

I'm a sales rep for several companies, one of them put out a new product that was a disaster. When used pretty much as anyone would use it, it failed almost every time. I thought of an inexpensive, easy fix for the product, and called engineering about it. I told the engineering department too much, and in 3 weeks, my revision was being used in hundreds of thousands of products, plus in replacements for tens of thousands of defective product they had sold.

Live and learn. Patent will come first next time.

Intellectual property..yes, the crooks that used to run Mobile Gas...and their attorney who's namesake is on Ladd-Pebbles Stadium

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I'm a sales rep for several companies, one of them put out a new product that was a disaster. When used pretty much as anyone would use it, it failed almost every time. I thought of an inexpensive, easy fix for the product, and called engineering about it. I told the engineering department too much, and in 3 weeks, my revision was being used in hundreds of thousands of products, plus in replacements for tens of thousands of defective product they had sold

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I’m an engineer for a technology reseller. We sell web filters and firewalls. We had an issue a while back when Google encrypted everything and it broke a ton of things for everybody trying to look at Google searches and log into Google accounts. I rescripted a block page for a few customers to allow logins to get past it and still force Google safe search.

One of the engineers at the company asked if they could use that and just wanting to keep a good relationship, I said sure.

They released that in the next firmware update and averted a lot of trouble our competition did.

Didn’t click to me till years later that I got f’d.

Farts in a jar

Back in the 70's I was in my first engineering class. The assignment was to improve upon an existing tool or invent something to replace it, including a sketch, a description of the problem, etc. ..... the usual stuff asked for in an academic problem. I turned in a cordless screwdriver. Prof returned it to me full of comments as to it wasn't practical, couldn't generate enough torque and if it could then the operator couldn't hold it (probably true as I used a flashlight design rather than a drill design). Anyhow, a couple of years later they were everywhere.

I invented a relay circuit in the early 2000s that would hook into a car and get power on signal from ignition to then supply 120v to a computer power supply.
When the car was turned off rather than kill power to the supply it switched to the constant power input and then sent a shut down signal to the computer and after computer was no longer drawing power it shut down power to the supply.

I worked on it with a few friends.
One sold the idea independently. He paid me a shite ton of money so at the time it didn't care. But I much later found out he made a hell of a lot more than I did and the whole thing was my concept. And I made the first prototype. I had a carputer company.

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If only honda would have answered my letters. They probably couldnt read English in the 80s

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By the ‘80s American Honda could, but 20 years before that, not so much….

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