Patent No. 5,524,641: An Inventor's Story

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We break for lunch. Battaglia sidles up to me and says that the three-idea tip struck him as helpful. He has other ideas, he promises. But still, the geodesic athletic equipment -- well, he can't believe that it isn't a winner. "It's the best, most valuable idea I've ever had," he asserts.

LONELY ART'S CLUB: "When you don't know why you're not succeeding, it tears at your sense of right and wrong."

Back at his apartment after the meeting, Battaglia breaks out his files, which have been kept as faithfully as if they belonged to J. Edgar Hoover. They are jammed with the detritus of invention. Notes on napkins. Lists. Copies of correspondence. Market research in the form of the kind of candy-colored charts that appear in USA Today. His early drawings of helmets and knee pads are signed and dated by a witness, since Battaglia heard that taking such precautions was an effective way to prevent the theft of intellectual property.

The files reveal the many ways over the years that Battaglia has tried to get backing for his idea, which he refers to as Dometric Technology for marketing purposes. There is a 1997 letter to an incubator in San Jose, Calif., asking for design assistance, prototype development, and an introduction to a NASA testing facility. There is an application to the 1998 Discover magazine innovation awards, which failed to make the grade. And there are many letters to rich people. Battaglia has pitched his idea to Mark Cuban, the billionaire Internet entrepreneur who owns the Dallas Mavericks. He has pitched former quarterback Steve Young. He has pitched Dean Kamen, the celebrated inventor who unveiled the Segway Human Transporter on Good Morning America last year.

Another letter in Battaglia's files is addressed to Ted Leonsis, the wealthy AOL Time Warner executive who owns the Washington Capitals. Leonsis, though notoriously arrogant, didn't reject Battaglia out of hand. He never got the chance since Battaglia never mailed the letter. Why? "How much 'no' can you take?" he says, starting to sound like Henry Fonda in The Grapes of Wrath. "When you don't know why you're not succeeding, it tears at your sense of right and wrong."

More unsettling than the stack of fruitless correspondence is the fact that his pitch, when made in person, has proved no more compelling. Battaglia often drives great distances to engineering schools to track down people who have expertise in developing products like protective athletic gear. To those travels the inventor brings the brio of a door-to-door salesman, which is what his father actually trained him to be. Back in Okemos, Mich., where Battaglia grew up, his dad pushed him to sell newspaper subscriptions. When he graduated from college, he took a job at his father's company, which sold trade ads in dairy-farm journals. "Were it not for the amount of conditioning I received as a youngster, I would have given up on this a long time ago," Battaglia says.

Battaglia's visits to academics have always seemed promising at first, he says. There was the time that a professor at the University of California Berkeley referred Battaglia to a doctoral candidate, suggesting that she look into his idea. She did and told Battaglia she would be willing to create a computer-aided design of his prototype. The two talked for weeks, but then she dropped the assignment in favor of another that was closer to her own research.

More recently, Battaglia was in Michigan visiting his family. He interrupted his vacation to drive 60 miles to Ann Arbor to visit a research scientist at the University of Michigan who studies ways to prevent injury. The E-mail message that this expert had sent Battaglia contained one particularly rousing sentence: "Has anyone fabricated one of your devices ... or is that something I should set one of my graduate students to do as a trial?" Battaglia's meeting was cordial, but to date the professor has not followed through on his generous offer.

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Mike Hofman

Mike Hofman was previously editor of Inc.com and a deputy editor at Inc. magazine, which he joined in 1996. The site was nominated for a National Magazine Award for Digital Media in 2010, and was named the best business website by Folio Magazine. In 2006, Hofman was part of a team of writers nominated for a Webby Award for best business blog. He lives in New York City.

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