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.
Why has Battaglia struggled so? Among the obvious reasons is money. His Thrifty salary is $32,000 a year, plus a couple thousand in bonuses. That wouldn't prevent many entrepreneurs from getting a business off the ground. But the product Battaglia proposes to make will require a pretty hefty investment on the front end. In 1998 a proposal from a product-design firm pegged the cost of creating a proper prototype between $10,350 and $16,970, depending on whether Battaglia wanted to share royalties. More than a year later, when he complained about the cost, he received a curt E-mail message from another potential backer. "What they wanted to charge you was reasonable," the would-be investor wrote. "If you believe in your product, that's what it takes -- cash."
And there are other red flags. A product-design engineer reviewed Battaglia's proposal and told the inventor that the cost of manufacturing products based on his design would probably drive the price of the product beyond what consumers would be willing to spend. The engineer also pointed out that the strength of the geodesic shape, which Battaglia sees as an attribute, might ironically be a problem. He explained in an E-mail message to Battaglia, "It seems to me that there is an inherent conflict between the structural stiffness and strength offered by the geodesic-dome principle and the compliance and deformation required of energy-management materials." In other words, if geodesics are so stiff, perhaps they won't "give" enough, and the wearer will suffer injury. Additionally, athletic equipment must have a smooth surface so that it doesn't catch on pavement, for instance, and cause harm to the wearer. Battaglia's design, with the triangles of a geodesic dome cut into it, would have to be carefully produced to achieve such smoothness.
Ultimately, the staff of some laboratory will have to test Battaglia's equipment in prototype form to see if it will work. But arranging a lab test is not easy for a nonengineer with no affiliation with the sporting-goods industry. Battaglia may be able to commission a few more prototypes over the years, but without validation he'll have a hard time selling a license to a large company. Alternatively, he could launch his own company to sell his products. His ITM peers have encouraged him to try to entice skater punks to embrace the aesthetic of the geodesic design -- essentially a strategy that says, Screw the benefits of the design and buy it because it looks cool. Battaglia is willing to consider tailoring his pitch. But even if a maverick grassroots interest in Battaglia's products were to arise, he would still want to do lab testing before selling them on the open market. It's a question of minimizing risk. As Battaglia noted in the "con" column in a 1993 list of pros and cons of geodesic equipment: "Possible paralysis lawsuits."
Battaglia has spent one-fifth of his life pursuing his patent -- an idea that was supposed to liberate him from the tedium of working for others but so far hasn't.
Youthful ambition, geography, and politics conspired to draw Battaglia to the exhilarating yet frustrating world of invention. He came to San Francisco in 1991 and took a job at a company that provided valet parking at many of San Francisco's downtown hotels. Like all thirtysomething transplants, Battaglia spent his first few months getting to know the city. He joined a soccer league. Then, as the 1992 presidential election drew closer, Battaglia fell for H. Ross Perot, the plain-talking entrepreneur from Texas who challenged the staid two-party system. He volunteered in Perot's local field office. "I looked up to him," Battaglia recalls. "The maverick, the innovator who was well rewarded."
The combination of his hero's can-do charisma and the city's electric entrepreneurial vibe proved intoxicating. In between depositing and retrieving cars in the Hyatt hotel's garage, Battaglia began scribbling the notes that would one day fill his files. A "statement of company purpose" (circa late 1992) mentions no product but reveals Battaglia's desire "to consciously consider all current and future effects that my business decisions will have on the U.S. and world natural environment." Later he outlined his plans to "have a computer and patent-pending status in two months."
