Rashard Nelson spent the summer of 2008 in a chemistry lab in Washington, D.C. He was 19 and finally made the breakthrough on an invention that he had been working on for five years. The relief, he said, was immense.

“The whole situation took over my life. I became addicted to it, I couldn’t stop,” he said. “Everybody’s having fun, everybody’s going to parties and living the college life, and here I am going to a lab every day.”

Rashard Nelson tests his bronze cleaner. (Photo courtesy of RNelson Development)

Back in 2003, Nelson and his antique-dealing father had a problem — a pair of 6-foot bronze art deco lamps that had lost their shine. The two tried the various products to restore the lamps to their former glory but found that even the best ones required a hefty amount of manual labor — not ideal for small nooks and crannies. They wanted an instant bronze cleaner. They couldn’t find it, so they set about inventing it.

For four years Nelson worked with his father in their Brooklyn basement isolating properties and mixing formulas in between school and competing in track and field events. When he left to study at Howard University, he continued his research in his spare time until he finally perfected it.

The next step:  to license the polish and transform himself from a successful inventor into a successful entrepreneur.

It’s a dream plenty of  people share. In 2010, the U.S. patent office received 520,277 applications, an increase of nearly 40,000 from the previous year.

Although most applications come from large companies rather than individuals, Patrick Raymond, founder of the Inventors Association of Manhattan and former executive director of the United Inventors Association, believes that as the economy stumbled in recent years, layoffs and furloughs fired imaginations.

“When people have been laid off, the coolest thing you can do is make up your own job,” he said. “There’s a great deal of desire for independence, freedom, entrepreneurial energy — and inventing fits squarely with that trend.”

Raymond makes his living working with inventors. He runs his own consultancy, the Inventor Institute, where he advises today’s inventors how to turn their ideas into sellable products. Most of them, said Raymond, already have a day job and probably do not have any formal business qualifications.

“Independent inventors, about 70 percent of them,” he said, “invent a consumer product to solve an everyday problem that they themselves have experienced.”

They follow in a long tradition of American inventors. Benjamin Franklin grew tired of switching between two sets of glasses, so he invented bifocals. Thomas Jefferson was sick of craning his neck, so he invented the swivel chair. Inventors even get a shout out in the Constitution, which encouraged Congress to grant them exclusive rights to their discoveries. By 1836, the U.S. Patent Office had been established to deal with those rights.

Last year, the patent office, now the  U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, processed more than half a million applications for all manner of items: touch screen patents from technology companies, Internet credit card processing, surgical tools, household appliances, gardening items …  there’s a lot there.

While most applications come from big companies, Raymond said that there continues to be a space for the independent inventor. When the economy cratered, companies suddenly had to change their products.

“‘We need stuff to sell, and we need it yesterday!’ You had a renewed hunger on the part of companies,” he said. “Ultimately, it’s cheap or free research and development.”

Steve Pope is a product development manager at a company in Kansas called Faultless. Every day, he receives new ideas from independent inventors and decides whether to license them.

“There has been a definite increase in submissions in the past five years, but the quality has not gone up with them,” said Pope. ”Roughly one of one thousand ideas that we receive is a winner.”

Most of the time, the ideas that Pope receives are not very well developed, and so it becomes harder for him to make a decision. Inventors, he said, need to invest their own time and money into a product to see if there is a market for it, whether it can be manufactured properly and other basic things rather than just coming up with the idea and handing it  over to somebody else.

A  great idea is just a beginning.

Rashard Nelson found that inventing his bronze cleaner was just the first step. He had to reinvent himself as a salesman, sitting in on business lectures to find strategies of convincing investors that he was worth investing in while juggling his school work and sporting commitments.

In January 2010, while on a full scholarship and with a GPA of 3.6, complications with his fees arose at Howard University and he had to withdraw. As devastating a blow as that was, he now had the time to focus full time on his bronze cleaner and has gone on to make other cleaning products. So far he has not been able to make any money from them though he is in negotiations to license them. He makes his living working at Howard’s chemistry faculty as a researcher in chemical production.

It hurt, he said, not being able to graduate, but he has high hopes for the future of his products. Besides, he says, he didn’t do it just for the money.

“Just the fact that I did it myself, that means something to me. To know that this is something that’s never been done before and I did it. That’s definitely an honour.”

NOTE: This article has been updated to correct the names of the Inventor Institute, the Manhattan Inventors Institute and the United Inventors Association.

Email: ho2205@columbia.edu