The flying machine was built of wood with room for a “pilot” to stand on the platform. My brother Barry, 6 at the time, was going to make the first test run on our driveway. My mom stood by with a camera. If Barry pumped hard enough, the force of the air might create a cushion within the plastic skirt at the bottom, and the flying machine would lift off over the concrete much like a hydrofoil over lake water.
At least that’s what my father—the inventor of this contraption—hoped.
Needless to say, the flying machine remained firmly on the ground, no matter how hard my brother worked. Dad, undaunted, returned to his study. Some version of the flying machine filled a corner of our Los Altos Hills garage for years.
As if Chitty Chitty Bang Bang weren’t enough evidence, I’m living proof that growing up with an inventor is fun. Now 82, my dad can boast (although he’s not the boasting type) of many innovative products, from a special “smart” pill dispenser to a collapsible tire-change tent, from a truly waterproof bathing cap to several medical devices. One of those, a blood pressure device for the thumb, generated enough profit to pay for a couple of family vacations before the company that bought it went belly-up.
As a little boy, my dad peered into the garage to spy on his own father, a lawyer who passed the bar without ever going to law school. Grandpa Harry’s real love was inventing. His slanting window, which flipped so that the top became the bottom and vice versa, would have allowed people to wash it without going outside. But since he had no resources to market his inventions, they never left the garage.
My father’s earnest tinkering started at age 10. Left home alone while his two older brothers and parents went to work, he designed a perpetual motion machine. On one end of a lever he glued a small rock, on the other end was a rubber band for resistance. Snap the rubber band and the lever would go up and down indefinitely. “I didn’t know anything about friction or resistance back then,” says Dad, who went on from the University of Washington to get a master’s degree in aeronautical engineering at Cornell and a PhD in fluid and solid mechanics from Stanford in 1957.
Though the perpetual motion machine didn’t work out, my father was characteristically undaunted, moving onto the next invention: a one-string violin created with a cigar box. (“It didn’t play very many notes,” he admits.) Next came a kayak, which “had a strong tendency to tip over.”
While most of us acknowledge problems or frustrations and find some way around them, the inventor views every roadblock as a potential project or product. Don’t like the way something works? Build it better. My father taught me that giving up was not an option. If one approach doesn’t work, there’s always a Plan B, or maybe just an improved Plan A.
When he retired from a 50-year career in research, my father relocated his favorite piece of inspirational art to his home office wall. It is a framed picture of a paperclip, which reads: “A great solution does not have to be complicated.” Reflective by nature, he also pondered what he had learned as an inventor and wrote a book to teach others how to realize their ideas.
It should come as no surprise that when numerous pitches didn’t lead to a publishing deal, Alvin H. Sacks took matters into his own hands. The Joy of Inventing–Just for the Fun of It is self-published.
Melinda Sacks, '74, is the communications director for the Stanford Center for Innovations in Learning.
