It takes a special person, a mentality and dedication to develop a germ of an idea to an actual product.
My best effort, at the age of 14, was a device to, at best, concuss a rodent.
It consisted of a cork pushed into a hole next to a radiator pipe. I suspected this to be the route into the house from the farmers field behind by which said rodent was munching away at the family reserve of potato crisps in the top cupboard of a bedroom wardrobe.
The cork had a length of twine up to a pulley, taken from a Meccano construction set, which was tied to a large lead weight from my junior anglers set.
In theory displacement of the cork by the snack-voracious field mouse would release the plummeting missile with supposedly dire consequences.
I am the first to admit that I am not anywhere to be seen when compared to the inventive talent of Troy Hurtubise from Hamilton in Canada
Hurtubise rose to fame in the 1990s during his 15-year-plus effort to develop a suit which could resist bear attacks, apparently a common problem in Canada.
His "Ursus" project reportedly cost him more than $100,000 and incorporated chain mail, titanium, plastic, rubber, galvanised steel and – of course – a lot of gaffer tape.
His efforts were rewarded with an Ig Nobel prize for safety engineering and a mention in the 2002 Guinness Book of Records.
The idea for the Ursus apparently came to Hurtubise after he survived an encounter with a grizzly. Later, after seeing Robocop while in college, he conceived the notion of building an invulnerable research suit which would allow closeup interaction with bears in the wild.
The suit was put through a rigorous test programme. It shrugged off bullets, baseball bats, axe blows, arrows, and strikes from 300-lb treetrunk battering rams, often with Hurtubise inside. The Ursus also coped easily with a 50km/h collision with a truck. New Scientist quotes Hurtubise as saying afterwards "I've never had a bruise."
Finally, in 2002 the inventor was ready for a trial with actual bears.
After a 1300-lb Kodiak badly damaged an empty Ursus, bear handlers refused to allow Hurtubise to proceed, but he was permitted to go one-on-one with a relatively lightweight opponent, a 320-lb female grizzly.
Sadly the suit's appearance was so forbidding that the unfortunate ursine declined to attack, and New Scientist reported that the test was inconclusive.
Troy Hurtibrise was not deterred by this lack of endorsement for his Project Grizzly and continued to invest his own savings and resources into other inventions.
Firepaste
A white paste that, when dry, is flame and heat resistant. It has a consistency and texture similar to clay when wet and dries into a grey ceramic material which resembles concrete. The impetus for firepaste came from a failed fire test with the Ursus Mark VII where the metal exoskeleton heated up, popped the air bags and left Hurtubise with numerous burns.
Like Project Grizzly, Hurtubise has tested the material on himself.
For a demonstration for the media and military in summer 2004, he made a thin mask of the material, put it over his face, and aimed a specialised blowtorch at thousands of degrees directly at the mask. The temperature was intentionally much hotter than the temperatures reached by the Space Shuttle on re-entry. A thermometer located between his face and the mask measured no appreciable temperature change below the mask after nearly ten minutes, and the integrity of the material stood strong.
Angel Light
According to Hurtubise, the device makes walls, hands, stealth shielding, and other objects transparent. He also claims that beams from the device have the side-effects of frying electronic devices and killing goldfish. After testing the device on his own hand, Hurtubise claimed he could see his own blood vessels and muscle tissue as clearly as if the skin had been pulled back, but the beam caused numbness and he began to feel ill. He also claimed to be able to read the number-plate on a car in his garage from his workshop.
Trojan armour
In early 2007, Hurtubise made public his new protective suit which was designed to be worn by Canadian troops on active service in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Calling it the "Trojan Ballistics Suit of Armour", Hurtubise describes it as the "first ballistic, full exoskeleton body suit of armour."
Weighing in at 40 lbs, he claimed that the suit could withstand bullets from high powered weapons (including an elephant gun). Hurtubise published a demonstration video where 9mm, .357 handgun rounds, and a 12 gauge shotgun round were fired at the suit's vest from short range; The apparently uncut video shows no marks at all on the ballistic clay underneath.The suit also featured a knife holster and air conditioned helmet.
The suit had many features including a solar powered air system, recording device, compartments for emergency morphine and salt, and a knife and gun holster. He estimated in 2007 that the cost of each suit to be roughly $2,000 if mass-produced. It has been called the "Halo suit", after the fictional MJOLNIR battle armour worn by the Master Chief character in the Xbox and PC video game series Halo.
In early February, after failing to receive any offers to buy the Trojan, Hurtubise was declared bankrupt from the expense of creating the suit. He was forced to put the prototype up for auction on the global auction site eBay in the hopes that it would bring in enough money to sustain his family.
The auction reserve bid was not met.
There was a raffle for the suit on the Mission Trojan website, whose goal was to raise money for further prototypes and testing of the Trojan Suit to demonstrate its abilities for military applications. The suit was won by a Sara Markis of Florida who kindly re-donated it back to Hurtubise for work on his next prototype.
What a hero, I wonder what he is doing now?
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