Hold On™ (1994)

 My first foray into commercial products...

Once upon a time, before cell phones and before cordless phones, telephones were plugged into the wall.  In 1989, I lived in a 5-story condo where each room was on its own floor. Every time I wanted to continue a phone conversation in a different room I'd have to put the phone down, run upstairs, pick up the extension, run downstairs, hang up the original phone, run upstairs, then continue the conversation. That's a lot of running.

I envisioned a solution where you just plug in this device into any phone outlet in the house and walk away. If you ever wanted to put a call on hold, just press the # button and hang up. The device hears the sound and then grabs the line. Then go to the other room and pick up the extension; this device will sense the drop in line voltage and disconnect. Easy, right?  

 I built a working prototype and hung it on my wall just for show. I used it successfully for years.  

I thought maybe I could turn it into a commercial product.  A patent search revealed that someone had already thought of the idea (not unusual), and in fact their design was better than mine as it didn't require an external power supply, and used coils to make a resonate filter - the sound energy of the "#" button was enough to engage the hold circuit. Talks of licensing the patent stopped after my investor got cold feet.

 A few months later another company came out with essentially the same product, and they sold 100,000 units in six months. Was it because it was a better mousetrap and the world recognized its brilliant simplicity and beat a path to their door? No; the main appeal was the cheezy “music” the callers would hear while on hold: a square-wave approximation of Beethoven's Fur Elise.  (It sounded much worse than this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kfQqW4ouNLg )

 Before I gave up on the idea and moved, on, I had an idea of how a TV commercial would get the idea across.  I did a “storyboard” of the commercial which reads kind of like a graphic novel.  You can read it below:  (And as with every other image in this blog, you can view a larger and sharper version by clicking on it.)