This time, they’ve recruited the help of some of our very talented and always inventive Creationeers.  Judging from the photo (Jason Rogge with another Creationeer asleep in the car), our creative team has been working so hard that they’ve been having a hard time keeping up… or staying up!

We checked in with Davison’s Vice President of Business Development and Licensing to see what kind of pet product news we could dig up!

“We have lots going on,” said our VP, with the same sly grin he gives when he’s about to tempt us with big news.  “I am going to Bed Bath & Beyond this week… and PetSmart next week with Hugs Pet Products to discuss the Toys R Us pet line we are working on with them.”

While he didn’t divulge any more top secret information, we’ll be eagerly waiting to share the latest product news, just as soon as we hear it!

What we can share is the MASSIVE list of places where our team will be “trying longer” to get Davison-designed pet products on store shelves this fall!

In August alone, our team will be meeting with Walgreens in Chicago and Bed Bath & Beyond in New York, not to mention attending the C & S Fall Show, West Plains Vet Show and the MidStates Fall Show.

September brings more meetings and more trade show exposure.  First up is product review at Menards in Wisconsin; then, it’s off to the Siemer Enterprises Fall Show in Illinois, and back to Wisconsin for the Prince Distributors Fall Show.  Finally, it’s all the way to Las Vegas for the SuperZoo Show!

Product reviews and trade shows continue in October, when our team revisits Menards in Wisconsin and attends the H.H. Backer Christmas Show and Non-Foods Marketing Show in Chicago and Atlanta, respectively.

A Hugs Pet Products representative also spilled the beans on some upcoming Hugs products that you may see on the stores shelves at Bed Bath & Beyond and Petco this fall.

“Coming soon… Pugz apparel line [which includes] harnesses, coats, leg warmers and throws!” he said, also adding that the company is working on a line of cat toys, too!

With all of this awesome news from the road, we think our licensing partner summed it up best for us.

“As you can see, we are very busy doing everything we can to get in front of customers and prospects,” he said.

Stay tuned for more pet product updates and other exciting licensing news as our team hits the road to deliver Davison-designed success!

A typical project does not get a royalty agreement, sell in stores or generate a profit. While Davison regularly visits retailers and attends trade shows in a number of industries, it does not promise that any particular client product will be, or is likely to be, presented or discussed with a retailer or at a trade show.

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Born on June 8, 1867 to an educated man and a local schoolteacher, it was Frank Lloyd Wright’s set of Froebel Gifts, given to him at the age of nine, that he attributed his success as an architect to. Edgar J. Kaufmann, conversely, was born to a wealthy Jewish-German American family in Pittsburgh, in 1885. His business success was thanks to attending Shady Side Academy and Yale. Each man was fiercely stubborn and forward-thinking and their relationship would fuel some of Wright’s most prolific and largely un-built designs. At the center of their tumultuous and lifelong friendship was the industrial epicenter that Edgar called home:  Pittsburgh.

The Kaufmanns, Edgar J. and Liliane, owned a department store in downtown Pittsburgh, named appropriately, Kaufmann’s. Kaufmann’s was a consumer/cultural haven that housed, at one point or another, a hospital, a Carnegie Library branch, eight restaurants, a hardware store, an art gallery and an Elizabeth Arden salon. The department store was a hub of retail activity and even fostered public education. People could attend free exhibitions and lectures on a wide range of contemporary topics. Kaufmann’s even staged its own International Exposition of Industrial Arts, after the trend-setting exhibition of Decorative and Industrial Art in Paris in 1925.

Edgar Kaufmann, Jr. shared his parents’ vision to bring good design to the masses. He was an architecture apprentice at Taliesin, Frank Lloyd Wright’s summer home and progressive design school, when his parents decided to build themselves a new summer home. The Kaufmann’s owned a large parcel of land, several hundred acres, that they used as a mountain retreat for their employees. Unfortunately, during the Depression, the employees were unable to afford the $1 it cost to take the train to the Kaufmann’s retreat. Left with a large mass of pristine forest, the Kaufmann’s contracted Frank Lloyd Wright to design a summer home to overlook the 30-foot waterfall on the property. Wright, instead, chose to design the house to sit over top of the waterfall, blending into the hillside. It’s said the Kaufmann’s initial reaction was that you couldn’t see the waterfall from the house, to which Wright quipped, “I want you to live with the waterfall, not just to look at it, but for it to become an integral part of your lives.” He named it Fallingwater. Construction was completed in 1937, and the building immediately came to the attention of the American public. It was featured in a 12-page spread in The Architectural Forum, as well as TIME and LIFE. The Museum of Modern Art also debuted an exhibit about the house. And, thus, their relationship was cemented.

Kaufmann commissioned Wright to develop many other designs for him. Wright designed Edgar’s office in the department store. He was also responsible for a few other projects that, unfortunately, were never built, due to funding or zoning constraints. There was a parking garage that [was] to go next to the department store that looked a lot like the Guggenheim Museum. Then, a planetarium. He designed a twelve-story apartment building to be built into the side of Mount Washington; eight floors [were to be] above ground and four [were to be] built into the mountain. The design was seen again in 1990 when a Pittsburgh Architectural firm unsuccessfully attempted to complete the long-forgotten plans. It was his greatest un-built design of all, however, that could have changed the fate of Pittsburgh forever.

In the 1930s and ’40s, Pittsburgh wanted to revitalize what is now known as “The Point.” At the time, it was a bustling cluster of train yards, factories and an incredibly inefficient road system, bringing drivers over the Manchester and Point bridges in a way that left no room to account for traffic. The Allegheny Conference for Community Development became the force behind the changes that were to be made to downtown Pittsburgh. Edgar J. Kaufmann sat on the board and chaired the committee assigned to look into the problem at The Point.

By April 1947, Wright finished his first set of architectural drawings for the site. Wright’s first concept, which he presented under the title “For the Allegheny Conference—Cantilever Development in Automobile-Scale of Point Park, Pittsburgh”, called for a circular concrete and steel building of mammoth dimensions: one-fifth of a mile in diameter and 175 feet tall, the building would be capable of holding one-third of the city’s population. The entire structure was wrapped by a spiraling roadway that Wright called the “Grand Auto Ramp,” which accommodated traffic in both directions and would have been four and a half miles long. Wright’s drawings for the project were enormous: over eight feet long by almost five feet high.

The proposal was ultimately rejected because of concerns about the plan’s economic viability and architectural feasibility. There was also no plan for how traffic access to the bridges would be handled. The proposal also conflicted with existing plans to build a park at the site that would preserve the historic structures and artifacts, including the Fort Pitt blockhouse from 1764. Wright felt the urge for preservation was misplaced, saying, “As I see it, Pittsburgh needs no such Historian. Pittsburgh needs imaginative, creative sympathy for the living and I am eager to do something constructive and joy-giving for the Pittsburgh people. I thought that was my commission.”

Wright then did something that went against his very core in late 1947; he went back and changed his vision. He retooled the design and showed it to officials from the Allegheny conference at Taliesin in January 1948. The round structure from the original design was replaced by a 1,000-foot tower to be called the Bastion. Two stayed-cable bridges, which would require [the] use of pre-stressed concrete, an experimental material at the time, would cross the Allegheny and Monongahela Rivers, emerging from the arrowhead–shaped structure, which would contain a traffic interchange. The central tower offered a viewing platform and would project light and sound spectacles and give Pittsburgh a structure similar to the Eiffel Tower. Again, Wright’s proposal was rejected due to concerns with construction, materials and cost. The second proposal would cost upwards of $150,000,000 at the time, the equivalent of $1.45 billion today. The state was, at the time, spending almost that much, $100,000,000, on the Penn-Lincoln Parkway, or 376 as we know it today. Wright was furious, and wrote “… Is it impractical to spend several hundred million to further your culture ,which will survive good or bad, long after the Parkway has collapsed?”

The area was opened up for business development, revitalizing the downtown area of Pittsburgh, and The Point became Point State Park, preserving the Fort Pitt blockhouse and three bastions of the fort. The area also is open to recreational use, notably the Pittsburgh Regatta and the Three Rivers Arts Festival, which, together, bring thousands of people into the city each year. Areas adjoining the park that were condemned to permit commercial development are now home to thriving businesses, most notably Gateway Center. Although Kaufmann’s and Wright’s efforts to rebuild downtown Pittsburgh as a world class cultural and business center were unsuccessful; over the years, the area has become home to three major sports arenas, corporate headquarters, a cultural district with no less than five theatres and has helped Pittsburgh to be repeatedly named “The Most Livable City in America.”

Sources:  Frank Llloyd Wright Foundation, The Pittsburgh Post Gazette, Carnegie Magazine, io9, Wikipedia, Fallingwater, The Western Pennsylvania Conservancy

Images courtesy of Matthew Field and the Victoria and Albert Museum.

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Even a great man is still a regular Joe. Or in this case, Leo.
 
Leonardo Da Vinci was history’s greatest polymath: sculptor, musician, mathematician, anatomist, cartographer, writer, painter, architect, scientist, engineer, geologist, botanist and, of course, inventor.  He was also a regular guy and a working stiff.  He had to write his own grocery lists, doodled with new pens and even sloughed through writing a resume.  Of course, like most of what he achieved, even these seemingly mundane tasks were extraordinary.
 
Here at Inventionland, we use a device that we’ve borrowed from Edison: The Inventor’s Notebook.  If you read our blog regularly, you’ve no doubt heard us talk about Edison’s notebooks before.  Well, it turns out that he wasn’t the only inventor to use small notebooks to journal his ideas and advances.

In a new book, historian Toby Lester says that Da Vinci used to keep a small notebook hanging from his belt and [he] would make a note “whenever something caught his eye,” or begin “sketching furiously.”  Like Edison, Da Vinci filled lots of notebooks with everything from drawings, to writings, theories, inventions, sketches, and even the mundane “to do” list.

Tucked away in one of his notebooks from approximately 1490-1510, is a list containing both things to do and things to pack for an upcoming trip. On his “to do” list:

·      Describe the tongue of the woodpecker and the jaw of a crocodile
·      Give the measurement of the dead using his {my} finger
·      [Calculate] the measurement of Milan and suburbs
·      [Find] a book that treats of Milan and its churches, which is to be had at the stationer’s on the way to Cordusio
·      [Discover] the measurement of the Corte Vecchio and the Castello (The courtyard of the Duke’s Palace and the Palace itself)
·      Get the Master of Arithmetic to show you how to square a triangle (Editor’s note: I think this refers to an algebraic problem that first appeared in the writing of Heron in the 1st century A.D. whereas a square is inscribed inside of a triangle and the lengths and area of the triangle are used to [define] the length, and thus the area, of the square)
·      Observe the holes in the substance of the brain, where there are more or less of them
·      Get {my} anatomy books bound
·      Ask Benedetto Portinari (a Florentine Merchant) by what means they go on ice in Flanders (perhaps a reference to ice skating)
·      [Ask about] the measurement of the sun, promised me by Maestro Giovanni Francese
·      Get hold of skull

And what [did] the great Leonardo Da Vinci take with him?

·      Boots, stockings, comb, towel, shirts, shoe laces, penknife, pens, gloves, wrapping paper, charcoal
·      Spectacles with case, firestick, fork, boards, sheets of paper, chalk, wax, forceps, pane of glass
·      Fine-tooth bone-saw, scalpel, ink-horn
·      Nutmeg (which he may have actually needed to buy at the store)
 
Being Leonardo Da Vinci, you’d think that it wouldn’t be necessary to have to write a resume to get a job.  Even when he was living, he was known for his talent in many, many areas, and often [was] called upon by the rich and powerful in Europe.  That didn’t stop him from having to write a resume in 1482 at the age of 30 for Ludovico il Moro, Duke of Milan.  It obviously worked, as 13 years later, the Duke hired him to paint what would become his second most known work on the wall of the refectory of the Santa Maria delle Grazie; Da Vinci’s Last Supper.  This was his opening paragraph:
 
“Most Illustrious Lord, Having now sufficiently considered the specimens of all those who proclaim themselves skilled contrivers of instruments of war, and that the invention and operation of the said instruments are nothing different from those in common use:  I shall endeavor, without prejudice to anyone else, to explain myself to your Excellency, showing your Lordship my secret, and then offering them to your best pleasure and approbation to work with effect at opportune moments on all those things which, in part, shall be briefly noted below.”

A scholar and a gentleman choosing to sell himself, not by comparing himself to others, or listing past achievements and why he would be a better hire, but rather explaining his talents and what he could do for the Duke.  Which, being Leonardo Da Vinci, was a lot.  He designed the first machine to allow man to achieve flight, the submarine, gun powder missiles, canons, battleships… the list goes on and on.  In fact, most of the devices that Da Vinci drew sketches for would not be invented or produced for centuries!

It just goes to show you, if you’ve got an idea for something, be sure to write it down!  It could be very important to history one day.

[Sources: NPR, The Daily Mail and Cenedella.]

Credit for the resume photo:  “Courtesy of Leonardo3 from Hoepli edition 1894-1094 – www.leonardo3.net.”

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