- Name: Harlan Greenfield
- Patent Number: 10,023,447
- Patent: Wheelchair Accessible Forklift, a forklift with a flat platform that allows a person using a wheelchair to operate it and incorporates additional control mechanisms for disabled drivers.
I was a teacher for ten years at the James Rumsey Technical Institute in Martinsburg, West Virginia. I taught materials, distribution, and warehousing. We were very involved in a program called SkillsUSA that encourages education of a skilled workforce.
We had the opportunity to go to Washington, D.C., to petition our legislators not to cut funding for trade schools. Money was really hard then, and is still hard now. At a reception for SkillsUSA participants, the keynote speaker was a disabled veteran. His Humvee had hit an IED and blown his legs off. His message for the students was, “You’re young, you’re the future, and we need you to think outside the box so that people like me can work side by side with you.” One of my students looked over to me—they always called me Mr. G.—and said, “Mr. G., he could never operate a forklift.”
We went to a forklift junkyard and bought the forklifts we wanted, tore them down, then built the thing from the ground up.
A local business, Coty’s Auto Body, painted it for us pro bono. The owner, Coty Graff, is a vet. I hired a student who understood the electronics. I hired a student from the graphic-design program. I hired a student from the robotics program to build the remote control. And then I hired a graduate from the welding program.
I don’t teach anymore—because of budget cuts they shut my program down in 2015. Right now I am a tire salesman for a local tire distributor.
I was rejected four times. Each time the patent application went to D.C. for them to review it, they would find something that would be similar to something else.
You’re on the phone with the attorneys, and the cash register is going cha-ching, cha-ching, cha-ching. Finally, I told the attorney, you know what? This will be the last time. I’m completely out of money. You guys are the professionals. You should have caught this. Three weeks later I get a call that, hey, you got your patent.
Next to the wedding and children, I guess that had to be pretty close. When I got the phone call, I bawled like a baby. Then comes your next stress level: Okay. You’ve got the patent. Where do you go from here?
Everything has to be right. We’re going to hire a vet from the local VA with forklift experience to demonstrate it.
In 2015, I had the chance to audition for Shark Tank. There were 258 entries. They chose the top five. I was eight. And my invention isn’t clothing or children’s toys. Mine’s a $30,000 piece of equipment. To get that high on the list told me, you’ve got this. There’s enough interest out there that you just take it and run with it.
This appears in the November 2018 issue. Tell us your patent story at [email protected].
