WOBURN, MA - Inside a windowless conference room in a Woburn office building, four scientists meet weekly to brainstorm inventions that can make hair dryers that work faster, pencil sharpeners that grind finer points, and stronger golf balls that glow in the night.

Reprinted with permission from
The Boston Globe, September 7, 1997
By Diana Brown

It is a heady world of physics and ingenuity inhabited by Richard Pavelle of Winchester, Sol Aisenberg of Natick, George Freedman of Wayland and A. Ze'ev Hed of Nashua.

Together, they form Invent Resources, a company that invents products and solutions for individuals and corporations that need help with everything from improving distribution of palm nuts in Singapore to developing a tennis racket sensor that indicates the perfect hit to refining the Magna Doodle drawing tableau for children.

Together they hold more than 100 patents for their inventions and have advanced degrees in nuclear physics, solid state physics, mathematical physics, computer science and physical electronics.

Once a week, they come together to stretch their minds and egos to the absolute limit. "It's constant curiosity," explains Aisenberg, a physicist with a PhD from MIT. He has masterminded a scratch-resistant artificial diamond coating that can protect cookware and eyeglasses. He has also engineered blood pressure instruments and other medical technologies over the years.

During his career, Hed has helped develop super alloy sprays for NASA that are now used to protect jet engines. He also worked on the early photocopier for Battelle Memorial Institute and bullet-resistant glass at the Illinois Institute of Technology.

Hed said he has made a career out of devising inventions that solve problems he started out knowing very little about. But it is that fresh perspective, that open mind, he says, that works best for him and Invent Resources.

"Our expertise is generalities, so we don't know all the reasons why something won't work" Hed said "But we can find the way that it will work."

Some companies will bypass their own research and development offices and go right to these four men for help with their most irksome product problems.

Arm and Hammer approached Invent Resources three years ago to develop an alarm system for their baking soda boxes.

The idea was that an alarm would sound after the boxes had been in customers's refrigerators for three months signaling that it is time to replace the box. The company wanted the inventors to design an alarm that would cost customers an extra 2 cents.

The four men came up with 18 different solutions - some chemical some electronic - and the company is now exploring how, if ever, it will use the technology.

A baseball bat company approached Invent Resources to develop a "sweet spot sensor" that would alert hitters when the ball squared perfectly on the bat. The inventors found the answers but the bat company didn't go forward with the technology.

So Invent Resources contacted the tennis racket manufacturer Prince Sports Group Inc. who paid them $12,000 to build a small alarm system prototype that fits just above the racket handle. But Prince's sales department said it could not sell the sensored racket so the four men are now looking for other companies to market the rackets.

"There is nothing that is more frustrating" said Hed of this all-too-common practice of coming up with inventions that are never distributed.

"But we have a lot of things in the pipeline" Pavelle said.

Usually the procedure is that Invent Resources does not charge a client up front. The four men research inventions, then a license is offered and a royalty arrangement is negotiated. Royalties are the ultimate goal.

Richard Pavelle lucked out in that regard. A computer science and mathematics researcher at MIT for 20 years Pavelle and a partner designed a thin flexible pocket calculator in 1976. They obtained a patent, and when Casio Electronics Corp later decided that it wanted to produce a similar calculator, a patent search revealed that Pavelle already had the rights to it.

Pavelle licensed it to Casio, Canon and Sharp and collected royalties on more than $100 million in sales of the palm-size calculators.

George Freedman also had some remarkable successes in his 40-year career of product development with Raytheon. With a team of about 18 engineers Freedman created a microwave espresso maker, a microwave pizza maker, and a microwave hamburger cooker "Inventing things was my thing" he said.

He also wrote a book about getting inventions through the morass of corporate bureaucracies "The Pursuit of Innovation" (American Management Association 1988).

But Freedman finally realized that by inventing for Raytheon, it was the company that made the big bucks - nearly $400 million in sales he said.

"One of the reasons I'm in this group is because I said 'Why should I get Raytheon rich? I'd like to be rich "' Freedman said.

To date, the men of Invent Resources have patent applications pending for myriad inventions including animal food dishes that stay warm; clothes dryers that are twice as efficient as current models; cutting boards that retard bacterial growth; a painless device that quells dog barking; a smoke-free and smell-free food smoker for the kitchen; paint removal systems for bridges and large structures; a melon ripeness detector; and a toilet odor neutralization system.

"It's like these four guys have never lost their imaginations since childhood," said William B. Dorfman who does marketing for Invent Resources.