The Next Big Thing

Got a bright idea, you might want to follow it up with a patent.

Bubble gum, potato chips and karaoke machines are fixtures in today’s world. Their creation has brought in millions of dollars in revenue, but not necessarily for the people that thought them up. To teach any future inventors a lesson, MSN Money has compiled a list of eight inventors whose insight is benefiting everyone but them.

For example, a man named George Crum is responsible for making the first batch of potato chips. Crum was a chef at a New York restaurant when he came up with the thin potato slices after a customer complained the french fries were too thick. Potato chips soon became a popular addition to the menu. But since Crum was part African American he wasn’t able to apply for a patent at that time. Today Herman Lay is credited for the salty snack and controls 59% of the U.S. market.

To see who else missed out on milking their cash cow just keep reading. If a man can make a fortune on a pet rock who knows what the next best thing could be, just don’t forget the patent.

Automated teller machines
Imagine having to wait for a bank to open before you could withdraw cash from your account. It's unthinkable to a generation that's grown up with access to automated teller machines. But that's the situation that motivated John Shepherd-Barron to pioneer the ATM.

Shepherd-Barron, a former bank security director in the United Kingdom, imagined a cash dispenser that would be accessible to customers after banking hours. He pitched his idea to an official at Barclays (BCS), who commissioned a half-dozen ATMs in 1967. They were a hit. Today, there are about 2 million cash machines in use worldwide.

A Scottish inventor, James Goodfellow, also credited with creating the ATM, holds a patent on the device. Shepherd-Barron, who died in May at age 84, never staked a legal claim on his cash-dispensing machine.

Potato chips
The man who made the first batch of potato chips wasn't allowed to fully profit from his creation.

His name was George Crum, a chef at Moon's Lake House in Saratoga Springs, N.Y. In summer 1853, Crum had a particularly difficult customer who kept returning his french fries to the kitchen, complaining that the potatoes were too thick. Crum subsequently cut the potatoes into slivers and fried them in oil. The resulting pieces were so thin they had to be eaten by hand.

The picky customer was satisfied, and potato chips became a popular addition to the restaurant's menu. Before long, the chips were boxed and sold separately, and Crum earned enough to open his own restaurant.

Crum, part African-American and part Native American, earned a modest income in his lifetime but was not his creation's primary beneficiary. "In those days, people of color were not allowed to take out patents on their inventions," says Lisbeth Gant-Britton, a professor of African-American studies at UCLA.

The creation of a business dynasty was left to Herman Lay, whose company became Frito-Lay, now part of PepsiCo (PEP), which controls 59% of the U.S. market for salty snacks.

Bubble gum
Modern chewing gum was first sold in the United States in 1869. It was named after a New York inventor, Thomas Adams, who called his product Adams New York No. 1.

For bubble gum, Americans had to wait nearly 60 years, until a 23-year-old New Jersey man with no background in chemistry figured out how to make gum less sticky and more amenable to bubble blowing.

Walter Diemer worked for Fleer, an established candy-maker, but as an accountant. He was aware of the company's bid to create a better gum, and, as it happened, his office was next to the lab. So Diemer tried some of his gum recipes and eventually identified the missing ingredient: latex. He mixed a trial batch and flavored it with a combination of wintergreen, peppermint, vanilla and cinnamon.

The product was a hit, and Diemer was eventually promoted to senior vice president. He taught company salesmen to blow bubbles during sales calls. Demand skyrocketed, yet Diemer received little of what has become a multibillion-dollar confectionary business.

Oil drills
They said his quest to draw oil out of the ground was crazy, but that didn't stop Edwin Drake, the inventor of the oil drill.

In 1858, a group of investors from a company called Seneca Oil sent Drake to Titusville, Pa., hoping he could access the oil pooled below ground that regularly bubbled to the surface. Drake spent $2,000 of the investors' money before most of them gave up on him. One of the investors continued supplying Drake with funds to pursue a plan to drill for oil with a method similar to that used to mine salt. In summer 1859, Drake's scheme succeeded. He and his single backer launched the oil industry.

But Drake was not to be among the ranks of the wealthy class created by oil exploration. Drake didn't patent his idea, and many others rushed to replicate his creation.

Seneca Oil later became a subsidiary of John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil, which grew to hold such a monopoly on the oil industry that the Supreme Court split it into several smaller companies, which eventually became Exxon Mobil (XOM) and Chevron (CVX), among others.

Karaoke
For years, the man who invented karaoke lived in obscurity, even as his creation became a global sensation. That changed in 1999, when Time magazine introduced readers to Daisuke Inoue, a musician in Kobe, Japan, who was the first to assemble and sell karaoke machines. Books and movies followed, but Inoue never became rich from his invention.

Inoue hit on karaoke in 1967 while working as a keyboard player in a Kobe club, accompanying patrons overcome with the urge to sing. When one of his patrons, a wealthy businessman, asked Inoue to accompany him on a weekend retreat, Inoue instead gave him a box containing an eight-track player and a microphone. The karaoke machine was born, and some nightspots have never been the same.

Satellite Communications
Arthur C. Clarke is best known as the prolific science-fiction novelist who wrote "2001: A Space Odyssey." But in 1945, Clarke published "Extra-Terrestrial Relays: Can Rocket Stations Give World-wide Radio Coverage?"

More than a decade later, the Russians launched Sputnik 1, the first Earth-orbiting satellite. In 1965, Hughes Aircraft, which later became part of Boeing (BA), put the world's first commercial communications satellite into orbit.

Clarke died in 2008, by which time global revenues for the satellite industry totaled $144 billion.

World Wide Web
Tim Berners-Lee, a British software engineer and computer scientist, downplays his role in Internet history, asserting that when he created the World Wide Web, in 1989, he simply put together concepts already in existence.

His breakthrough vision was a system permitting computer users to share a common language to communicate over a network. Berners-Lee also designed and built the first Web browser.

He was motivated by a grand vision for what later became known as the information superhighway. Berners-Lee, however, did not take any actions that might have produced a Google-sized (GOOG) fortune for himself.

Botox
You might assume that use of Botox for cosmetic purposes originated in vanity-obsessed Los Angeles. In fact, the idea came from an ophthalmologist's office in Vancouver, British Columbia.

Eye specialist Jean Carruthers in 1987 was treating a patient for uncontrolled blinking when the patient requested an extra dose of the neurotoxin that Carruthers was administering to numb facial muscles around the eye. The patient noticed that the substance made her crow's feet disappear, and she asked Carruthers for a second shot that might eliminate the wrinkles on her forehead.

Carruthers mentioned the experience to her husband, Alastair, a dermatologist whose clients were eager for anti-aging treatments. Within five years, Botox was a blockbuster. Botox sales generated $1.3 billion last year, mostly for Allergan (AGN), the company that eventually acquired the rights to Botox and is worth $19.6 billion today.