What I Learned from One Success and One Hundred Failures

As an inventor, it’s fair to say that I had only one major success – the so-called “two-phase mouthwash”. It has gone by the name of Dentyl, Dentyl pH, Dentyl Active, Assuta, Orbitol Triple Action, and so on.

Oftentimes I would stand in stores in London and stare at the bottles on the shelf. For a scientist, it’s hard to believe that something you worked on for years in the laboratory is actually being sold in stores in many countries. My name isn’t on any of the products, but I am still a happy camper. My colleagues at the university know I invented it and are jealous. I guess that is the best reward. That, and making some money, of course.

The truth is that I have had many more failures than successes. To start, I didn’t want to be a scientist to begin with.

I was a lousy undergraduate science student. I once blew up a laboratory in our chemistry class. They still let me finish my degree. That was very kind of them. I wrote them a thank-you poem: “Now I know/That sodium/ And H2O/Don’t go.”

I actually wanted to be a musician and singer. I once met Leonard Cohen. I once sang with Donovan. I even appeared in a jazz festival. Once.  I’ve recorded two CDs. But no one has ever heard about me.

But what I wanted most of all was to write children’s books. I wrote my first children’s book when I was 23. Since then I have written dozens of books. But I have never had a bestseller, and I am not exactly a household word, am I?

I started experimenting as a young child (that is what young children do to figure out how our crazy world workds). My first experiment was trying to grow watermelon seeds in the Canadian winter. My father warned me that it wouldn’t work. He was right.

My second experiment was a social experiment, in the eighth grade. I pretended to talk to Joel Katz when we were supposed to be silent. When the teacher came to punish me, I explained that I was just pretending to talk, to see whether she would still punish me or not. She did.

When I was 18, I invented a blower to clear away leaves and debris from the trunks of lemon trees. I was a local hero to the head of the lemon grove. But we never patented the invention. It was while I worked on a kibbutz and we were socialists back then.

Only recently did I find out that blowers had been invented a decade or two before mine. Oh well.

My next invention was a pen for people who were missing a thumb. It never took hold.

But several years later, as a young investigator, I invented the QuadLoop, together with Ervin Weiss. Ervin is a dentist. I was teaching him how to plate bacteria on agar dishes the way that microbiologists have been plating bacteria for a century. Ervin thought that it wasn’t the best way to do it. Initially, I ridiculed him. “You are a dentist, you don’t know any microbiology, so why should I even be listening to you?”. Eventually I listened. Ervin was right. We invented the QuadLoop. It did take hold.

For many years, millions of QuadLoops were sold in many countries. You might think that this was a big success until I tell you a secret: they sold for peanuts (one dollar buys about 50 of them). The university received 5% of the royalties and shared 40% of the profits with us. In other words, for every million quadloops sold we shared about $300 after taxes. Enough for bubble gum and pens for people with thumbs.

But I was not perturbed by this failure. I went on to invent the Diaslide. It samples bacteria direct from urine samples and such.

I wrote a patent application. I was so proud of myself that I neglected to keep in mind what all inventors should keep in mind: that the moment your patent goes public, other inventors will look for ways to take your idea, circumvent it, and invent something that does the same thing.

I received my patent, but because I was full of myself (and in love with my idea), the claims were too narrow. Someone invented a different way of doing the same thing for less money and sold his invention to the same company that was selling mine. Ouch!

But I was not perturbed by this failure. I went on to invent a terrific deodorant bar soap that a Japanes company fell in love with. The head of the company was Mr. Yamakawa. I liked him a lot. He liked my soap and ordered a whole shipment or two.

In the meantime, the company making the bar soap closed its entire line of bar soaps, leaving me with a patent that I didn’t know how to manufacture elsewhere. And very sadly, Mr. Yamakawa passed away.

I still have a few bars of the soap, if you’re interested. But I don’t know how to make them, just saying.

But I was not perturbed by this failure either. I invented an upside down shoe spray. It worked better than the world leader. My friends in Japan ordered 15,000 units and asked me to air ship them so they would arrive in time for the tv show I was invited to.

I arrived in Japan in one piece, but not all the shoe sprays did. Two different companies made the bottle and the cap. They fit well under normal conditions, but in the belly of the airplane, with the low ambient air pressure, and the high pressure inside the bottles (they contained 65% alcohol), and the jiggle jiggle jiggle jiggle, some of them (well, a few hundred) decided to burst. The plane smelled really good for years.

I also made it to Japan in one piece. I learned a few words in Japanese and was on tv. Once. We never got another order.