Special Guest Blogger: Joseph Friedman

Most products begin with someone thinking how cool it would be if that thing existed and then go and invent that thing and then launch it out into the world and i was one of those and had several ideas and i had several patents to my name but built my fortune around probably the most basic one and changed the world one drink at a time.
My first invention was a tweak to the fountain pen which i sold to Sheaffer Pen Company and then experimented with ideas ranging from engine improvements, household products and sound and optics but an unsuccessful inventor isn't good at paying the bills so i dabbled in real estate and optometry for a while i waited for my big break.
That came while sitting in my brother Albert's sweet shop with my daughter who was drinking something out of a cup with a paper straw but the straw was too high and she was struggling to reach it so i took the straight straw, bent it over a screw which is always in the pocket of an inventor and therefore creating corrugations so the paper straw conveniently bent over the edge of the glass.
Her friends asked me if i could do the same to their straw's and a light bulb went off so i patented it under the catchy title 'Drinking Tube'.
I made a prototype straw with tiny corregations so it would bend easily and showed it to my brother in-laws who offered to finance a machine to mass produce them and we sold them to hospitals for patients who couldn't sit up in bed and struggled to drink from standard vertical straws.
We created the Flexible Straw Corporation and sold tens of millions worldwide and then sold the business to Maryland Cup Corporation who changed the design from paper to plastic and i retired rich and all thanks to a invention that literally sucked.