Public Displays of Affection

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These days, Berghash immerses himself in kazoo history whenever he can put aside his work at the dominant divisions of Brimms, which manufactures everything from denture cleaners to athletic mouth guards to cosmetic powders. He'll slip away, entering the candy-box-pretty Victorian house that shelters both the factory and the shrine to his company's least profitable product.

"When I look back at the different kinds of kazoos this company made over the years, I realize the early owners were probably a lot like me," Berghash says, straining to be heard above the kachunk, kachunk of the vintage dye presses. "They were serious businessmen who knew when to stop being serious."

If Arthur Barry knows when to stop being serious, he doesn't show it. The tall, mustachioed CEO of Presto Galaxy Suction Cups speaks in a voice so devoid of inflection that it's impossible to detect the presence, or absence, of irony. "If I was to sell metal bushings or ball bearings, it might not be so exciting," intones Barry. "But when I look around here and see all the ways people have thought of to use suction cups, I think that's very exciting."

Aside from Presto Galaxy's eight employees, few people know that a suction-cup museum exists inside Barry's long, narrow office in Brooklyn, N.Y., where the walls have been coated with plastic so that he can display his treasures. But the collection's lack of renown doesn't bother its creator. The museum fulfills its purpose, namely to provide Barry with inspiration and reassurance that his job is something worth doing. As such, it is either the ultimate celebration of beauty in the mundane or a bravura demonstration of self-delusion.

Either way, it keeps Barry going.

Few people know that the suction-cup museum exists. But that doesn't bother its creator.

Barry's exhibits -- which include an assortment of radar-detector and soap-dish holders; a rare British cup powerful enough to support large sheets of glass; and delicate, three-quarter-inch devices for removing glass eyeballs from their sockets -- may not send most pulses racing. Ditto for the dozen or so framed patents dating from 1866 to 1932 for suction cups that incorporate wire hooks, suction cups used to hold up cards, and suction cups that turn door handles. But Barry gets many of his new-product ideas by just staring at his surroundings. "My father used to come up with most of the ideas, but now I'm doing all of it," says Barry, who became CEO of the company when his father died, three years ago. "If I don't come up with new products, I don't stay in business. And seeing things that other people have come up with encourages me. It helps."

While his father was still alive, Barry had not only less motivation to delve into his stock-in-trade but also less opportunity. "My father was a very conservative businessman," Barry says. "When I took the reins, I was able to indulge my own interest in history and start doing research." That research began with a question that had been nagging Barry -- a former teacher in the New York City public schools -- since 1981, when he and his father shifted their company's emphasis from bird feeders to the burpable plastic circles that clamped bird feeders to windows. "I had always wanted to find out what the first commercial use of suction cups was," he says. "My theory was that it might have been the toilet-bowl plunger."

The stacks of the New York Public Library proved shamefully deficient in related texts, but Barry did find in a history of bathrooms a reference to the medieval practice of "cupping": placing glass cups on the skin to bring blood to the surface. "When I found out about cupping, it was like a bolt of lightning," he says. "Cupping! My god, suction cups have almost the same history as magnets!" With that rich historical precedent confirmed -- "Hippocrates probably used cupping to treat people," he theorizes -- Barry soon found an illustration of the procedure and mounted it on a wall of what later would become his museum. It was soon joined by another discovery: an illustration of an experiment performed in the 1600s in which 16 horses harnessed to a couple of metal suction cups attempted to break the cups' seal. "They couldn't do it," says Barry with satisfaction.

Aside from the patents and a few framed news clippings detailing the exploits of Dan Goodwin, a human fly who used suction cups to scale Chicago's Sears Tower, most of Barry's exhibits are applications of his own products and those of his competitors. (Actually, Presto Galaxy has only one significant competitor, a company toward which Barry harbors such bad blood that even cupping probably couldn't cure it.) Many of the suction cups are significant for their design -- soccer balls, children's faces, and tropical scenes among them. Barry holds the patent on decorative suction cups.

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Leigh Buchanan

Leigh Buchanan is an editor at large for Inc. Magazine. A former editor at Harvard Business Review and founding editor of WebMaster magazine, she writes regular columns on leadership and workplace culture, and she contributes Inc.'s capsule book reviews, "A Skimmer's Guide to the Latest Business Books."

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