Invention

Like many great inventions, it began with a small, simple problem. It seemed that Steven Hrize just couldn't keep his mittens and gloves together - an easy feat for an 8-year-old, and one that didn't make mom very happy. "My mom would yell at me and I was always late for school, so I came up with this," Steven said, gesturing to the "glove catcher," an invention designed to enable him to hang on to his mittens. The invention is a handy rack of colorful clothespins that are attached to freshly varnished boards, which dangle by chains.

When Kelly Forsythe's 18-month-old cousin, Sandra, caught a cold last year, she started coughing. But the baby couldn't suck on a cough drop because she was so small she might choke. So Kelly, 12, of Gloucester Township, watched as Sandra's mother gave the baby a lollipop. From that observation came one of those ideas so simple everybody wonders why nobody had thought of it before. Kelly created a national prize-winning invention, the cough pop, a cough drop on a lollipop stick.

No matter what, Rusty the dog only lets guys named George with candy visit Pete and Thelma Mae Novak's little red-brick rowhouse. "That's George, Rusty. He's got candy for you," Pete Novak, 75, says to calm the growling, barrel-shaped mutt as a visitor - any visitor - enters the front door, under the faded green awning. Rusty's rotund physique would suggest that he has eaten a lot of candy, and maybe even a few guys named George. But he seems satisfied with the explanation, suddenly quits yapping and flops onto the living-room floor at Thelma Mae's feet.

By Kirsten Kaschock Coffee House Press. 286 pp. $16. Reviewed by Alison Barker By the end of Kirsten Kaschock's debut novel Sleight , questions abound. How does she do that - create a novel like a set of Russian nesting dolls, each whimsical creation housing a new wonder? And, can someone please do the performance art she invents - called "sleight" - in the real world? Most important: Why can't more novels use fairy tale to ask big questions? In Sleight we encounter part-living, part-inanimate objects called Needs and Souls; artists who apprentice as "hands" in secluded farmhouses; a girl's imaginary friend who is her late grandfather (as a young child)

Between eating chicken parmigiana and sipping black coffee, Frank Pocius spoke with passion about his recent invention at a booth at Omer's Diner on Route 130. "If it has this kind of impact on a small scale, then imagine what it would do across the country," said Pocius, 45, of Cinnaminson. As an algebra teacher at Moorestown, Pocius has been searching for a dozen years for a better way to teach algebra. Using his hands and eyebrows to emphasize his points, Pocius described how he changed the study of algebra from a "sometimes debilitating" ordeal into a pleasurable learning process that could give students the tools to understand far more difficult subjects such as physics and calculus.

Bob Hoeveler is 80 and has bum knees. In other words, the grandfather of five has excuse enough to quit mowing his lawn. Not that that's happening. "No man that has a tractor will ever give it up," Hoeveler declared during an interview last week, his John Deere LX280 parked nearby. That tractor is not only why he still mows his acre in East Bradford, Chester County, but also why he's still working. Hoeveler has just launched a small business from his basement, peddling a product he invented that he hopes will be considered a must-have by other riding-mower devotees: A stick-on container called the Tractor Holster.

Lou had many good qualities, but he clearly could not shoot a basketball. This was clear, on occasion, to Lou himself, and it was definitely clear to the guys who played on the other teams. But it was clearest of all to Andrew Kirkpatrick, who would set up his playground friend for open shots only to see those shots thud on the backboard or clang noisily against the side of the rim. "He used to rag on me all the time," Lou Valente said, "and then he came around with this crazy rubber band.

If your car breaks down on the highway at night, Karl Weber knows, you are in danger of getting hit unless you can alert passing motorists, but he does not think you should use flares. Karl, who is 11, gets very impassioned when he talks about the hazards of flares. "Flares can blow up in your trunk, and they can start forest fires, and they don't last that long, they can go out," Karl lectured a visitor. "My brother told me - he knows lots of stuff. " So when Karl's science teacher in April assigned three sixth-grade classes at Radnor Middle School the project of inventing something original and useful, he decided to build a safety device that could be used instead of flares to protect stranded motorists.

About a year ago, Susanne Johnston, a teacher at Germantown Academy in Fort Washington, put out a call for students willing to give up lunches and after-school time to try their hand at invention. Sixteen joined up. Little did they know their project would lead to a quest for a U.S. patent. Next week, the team will show off its invention, a handheld device dubbed Shop Talk that can read product bar codes aloud, at an event sponsored by the Lemelson-MIT Program at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Boston.

In your mad rush to get to work on time, you realize you left the lights on at home and the coffeemaker perking on the kitchen counter. What a waste of electricity. What a fire hazard. What to do? What if you could just sit down at your office computer, log onto the Internet, click your mouse a few times and hook up with your home appliances? From your office desk, you could turn off the bedroom lights, shut down that coffeemaker, and even scan some live video to check up on the baby-sitter.

BIALKA TATRZANSKA, Poland - Just a few years ago, winter was a dead season for the Kotelnica Mountain, quiet under a quilt of snow. Today, Kotelnica vibrates with activity from ski fans who flock to the new resort, one of Poland's trendiest. The transformation happened in just a decade and reflects the inventiveness and enterprise seen in Poland since a market economy arrived with democracy in 1990. People in this 17th-century village at the foot of the Tatra Mountains in southern Poland were making a modest living on farming and sheep breeding, with additional funds coming from relatives who had gone, in a long-standing tradition, to the United States for work.

Newt Gingrich raises interesting questions, but he doesn't always have the right answers. Gingrich recently questioned the concept of a Palestinian nation, declaring it "invented. " Is that true? Yes - just as true as it is that all nations are invented or imagined. The concept of nation is relatively new in human history, having grown at least partly out of another kind of innovation: the movable-type printing press, invented by Johannes Gutenberg around 1440. To find buyers for their products, printers and booksellers found that it was good business to use a region's dominant language - say, the English spoken in London or the French spoken in Paris.

JERUSALEM - Palestinian officials reacted furiously on Saturday to Newt Gingrich's assertion that they are an "invented people," accusing the Republican presidential candidate of incitement and staging a "cheap stunt" to court the Jewish vote. Gingrich's remarks struck at the heart of Palestinian sensitivities about the righteousness of their struggle for an independent state and put him at odds not only with the international community but with all but an extremist fringe in Israel.

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa - Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney dived into his campaign's full-scale critique of rival Newt Gingrich on Friday, standing by top supporters who described the former House speaker as self-serving and mocking some of his ideas about science and technology. In return, top Gingrich backers described Romney's criticism as a sign of panic less than four weeks until the Iowa caucuses begin the 2012 nominating contest. Gingrich has risen to the top of Iowa polls in the last two weeks and is leading in some other states, too. While Gingrich kept to his pledge not to criticize his GOP rivals, he reignited criticism for being a loose cannon by referring to the Palestinians as being an "invented" people.

By Kirsten Kaschock Coffee House Press. 286 pp. $16. Reviewed by Alison Barker By the end of Kirsten Kaschock's debut novel Sleight , questions abound. How does she do that - create a novel like a set of Russian nesting dolls, each whimsical creation housing a new wonder? And, can someone please do the performance art she invents - called "sleight" - in the real world? Most important: Why can't more novels use fairy tale to ask big questions? In Sleight we encounter part-living, part-inanimate objects called Needs and Souls; artists who apprentice as "hands" in secluded farmhouses; a girl's imaginary friend who is her late grandfather (as a young child)

At age 41, Aaron Krause, a husband and father of 6-year-old twins, most certainly is old enough to speak for himself. Yet, it was his father who best explained why his son - frequent wearer of orange sneakers in honor of his beloved Philadelphia Flyers - has 10 patents and three more pending. "He's very clever and creative," Robert Krause, a retired cardiologist from Wynnewood, said of the middle of three children born to him and wife, Marilyn, a retired pediatrician. That's the child who, at 13, rewired telephone lines to get phone service in his bedroom when his parents wouldn't buy it for him. The child who, while still in high school, transformed the family garage into an auto-detailing shop.

HARTFORD, Conn. - Lee Davenport, a physicist who developed a radar device that helped U.S. and Allied troops win key battles in World War II, has died. He was 95. He died Friday of cancer in Greenwich, his daughter, Carol Davenport, said yesterday. Davenport was among hundreds of scientists who worked at the secret Massachusetts Institute of Technology Radiation Laboratory, even before America joined the war in 1941, to develop radar systems that would give the U.S. military an edge.

Ela I first interviewed Jason Cichonski when he was 24, and brilliantly helming the kitchen at Lacroix. Three years later, he's on the brink of opening his own restaurant, with dishes as inventive as those from his Lacroix days. Smoked french fries with honey malt? Green curry marinated olives? Brioche gnocchi with smoked caviar? Yes, please. His vision for the Queen Village space has exposed brick and raw concrete, warmed up with grainy wood tones. At the full bar, there's a focus on wines by the glass.

IF NECESSITY is the mother of invention, beer is its wild-eyed uncle. You know, the one who corners you at family reunions with his latest can't-miss scheme, one that will revolutionize society and earn a bazillion bucks if you want to invest a couple thou. No doubt fueled by a sixpack or two, inventors and assorted crackpots fill the archives of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with off-the-wall ideas to enhance consumption of our favorite beverage. Grand ideas such as: *  Party Goggles , application No. 12/927,974, by Bruce Riggs of Helendale, Calif.

What makes B.G. Kelley think that halfball is a Philadelphia game ("Halfball was wholly Philadelphia," July 7)? I was raised in New York during the Great Depression some 80 years ago. We depended on our ingenuity for games and playthings. Popular ball games used the pimple ball or the pink rubber ball. Since there were no rowhouses, our "ballparks" were the city canyons lined by six-story apartment buildings. We played halfball, stickball, stoopball, stepball, curbball, wallball, boxball, and punchball.