In 1992, a local business paper profiled a Kennewick inventor. He had built a machine in his own shop because nothing on the market could bend awning tubes with the consistency he needed — and by the time the reporter visited, he had sold dozens of them to buyers as far away as Mexico City, Puerto Rico, and Calgary. His wife told the reporter he designed them in his sleep. He didn’t argue.
That inventor was Fred Durfee. My father.
The Pattern I Grew Up Watching
Dad’s tinkering started before school age, and by twelve he was the ringleader of a crew of boys who built their own clubhouse on poles — and wired it for electricity. What I absorbed from him wasn’t a gadget or a technique. It was a pattern: see the problem clearly, refuse to accept the bad solution, and build the better one yourself.
He didn’t set out to be in the tube-bender business. He set out to solve his own awning problem — and the solution turned out to be a product other people needed too. Decades later, when my own health challenges left me searching for tools that didn’t exist, I did exactly what I had watched him do. I built them.
What the Shop Taught Without Saying
The lessons that shaped me were never announced; they were just the way the shop worked. Failed attempts were not failures — they were information, set on the bench where you could learn from them, and nobody apologized for the scrap pile. A problem was allowed to keep you up at night; that was not obsession, that was the job being done in the only workshop that never closes. Designing in your sleep, it turns out, is hereditary.
And there was one more lesson hiding in that newspaper clipping, though I only understood it years later. Strangers in Mexico City and Calgary did not buy Dad’s machine because of marketing — there wasn’t any to speak of. They bought it because a genuinely solved problem travels on its own. If you solve something real, thoroughly, for yourself, the world has a way of finding out. That single insight has guided every product decision I have ever made: solve it for real first. The customer is watching whether it actually works, not whether it presents well.
The Same Story, One Generation Later
Every one of my patents traces back to a problem that refused to leave me alone — a sauna that couldn’t fit a real home, posture tools that weren’t shaped for the body, air and water technology that didn’t exist in practical form. The products came later. The pattern came first, and the pattern came from him.
When my health broke down, I went looking for a near infrared sauna that could live in a bedroom instead of demanding a renovation — it did not exist, so I engineered one. When I needed to restore my own spinal curves, the foam rolls on the market came in one size for every body — so I began manufacturing them in the diameters and densities spines actually vary across. Air that felt like outdoor air, water treatment that fit on a counter: each one started as my problem, refused the available answers, and became a solution other people needed too. Sound familiar? It is the awning machine, one generation later, pointed at health instead of hardware.
The Pattern, Taken Apart
Because the family pattern is really a method, it can be learned — and it splits into three teachable parts. See the problem clearly: not “saunas are expensive,” but “no sauna on the market sets up in a real home without construction.” The precision is the invention’s seed; vague complaints produce nothing. Refuse the bad solution: this is the step most people skip, because accepting the almost-right product is easier than admitting the itch. Every inventor I have ever met describes the same moment of deciding the workaround was no longer acceptable. Build the better one: imperfectly, at first, in whatever shop you have. Dad’s first bender was not his best bender. The building teaches what no amount of planning can.
I tell this story now because I meet so many people — especially women — who solve problems every day and never call themselves inventors. If that’s you, I wrote the Inventor’s Blueprint™ for you: the ten-step framework I wish someone had handed me at the beginning, from identifying a real problem through prototyping, patents, and commercialization. The 1992 clipping about my father lives on that page now, right where it belongs — at the root of the family tree.
The Inheritance You Can Practice
If no one handed you a shop and a pattern, you can still build the inventor’s eye deliberately — I have watched people do it, and the habits are teachable. Three that cost nothing:
Keep an annoyance journal. For two weeks, write down every friction in your day — the drawer that needs two hands, the routine that takes four steps where one should do. Most people discover they swallow a dozen solvable problems daily without registering them. The journal retrains you to register them, and registering them is nine-tenths of seeing the problem clearly.
Take things apart — including ideas. Dad’s shop taught me that nothing demystifies like disassembly. When a product almost works for you, articulate exactly where it fails and why the maker built it that way; the gap between their constraint and your need is where inventions live. A screwdriver helps, but the habit works on services, routines, and software just as well.
Build the ugly version this week. Cardboard, tape, a borrowed part — the prototype that embarrasses you teaches more than the plan that flatters you. Every finished product in my catalog began as something I would not have photographed. The families that pass down invention are really passing down permission to make the ugly version; give yourself that permission and the inheritance is yours.
What Runs in Your Blood?
Not everyone inherits invention from a parent. But everyone inherits something — a way of seeing, a stubbornness, a craft. The question worth asking is what pattern you have been practicing since childhood without noticing, and what it could build if you took it seriously.
Questions I’m Often Asked About Inventing
Do you need an engineering degree to invent?
My father never had one, and his machines sold on three sides of a border. What inventing requires is the discipline to understand your problem deeply — and the willingness to learn whatever the solution demands, whether that is welding, CAD, or patent claims. Credentials can shorten the learning; they have never been the license.
How do I know if my idea is worth pursuing?
Ask whether the problem is real for you — not hypothetically, but daily, annoyingly real — and whether you have genuinely searched for an existing solution and found them all wanting. An idea that survives both questions has the only qualification that matters at the start. The market research comes later; the honest itch comes first.
Should I patent before I prototype?
Build first, carefully. A prototype teaches you what your invention actually is — mine have never emerged from the shop identical to the sketch that went in — and patent claims written before that education tend to protect the wrong thing. Keep good dated records while you build, learn what is genuinely novel, then protect that. The Blueprint walks through the sequence step by step.
What if someone already invented it?
Then you have learned something valuable for the price of a search — and usually you have learned something better: their version has gaps, because you know the problem from the inside and they may not. Most of my patents improve on categories that already existed. “Already invented” is often where the real invention starts.
What would you tell someone with an idea right now?
Write it down tonight — the problem, the failed alternatives, your solution, dated and specific. Then take one physical step this week: a sketch, a cardboard mock-up, a phone call to a machine shop. Ideas are patient; momentum is not. The distance between the people who invent and the people who meant to is usually one small, unglamorous first step.
