Men hope their invention will save lives of children who are lost
What would you do, if you heard that a Boy Scout was lost on a Utah mountain?
Some people might shed a tear, others offer up a prayer; some, if they lived close enough, might join a search party.
When two local men heard that 12-year-old Garrett Bardsley never made it back to his camp site in August 2004, they decided to invent something that could prevent that from happening to someone else.
“We felt we needed to come up with something that’s going to help rescue people. We thought about all the volunteers worrying, the parents worrying,” said Roger H., who, with his co-worker, Tony G., invented an apparatus that they think will do just that.
“With High Fly Alert,” we think that little boy could have been found in half an hour,” said Roger.
Their High Fly Alert is still cloaked in mystery because it is still in the prototype stage and has yet to find a manufacturer. But Roger gave a few clues.
“It has no electronics, no batteries. It’s fail-proof. If somebody actually bought this, it would not fail out in the field,” said Roger.
He and Tony are co-workers. Their idea developed, they said, as they talked over the concept that would be needed to alert searchers to a lost or injured person.
The two men have entrusted their invention to Invent-Tech, a company in Coral Gables, Florida they stumbled across while researching the patent process.
“This original idea is now available for licensing to manufacturers interested in new product development, especially in the safety products industry,” said a spokesman for Invent-Tech.
High Fly Alert made its first appearance Jan. 23 at a trade show in Orlando, Florida. And then only a digital rendition of it was shown to whet the interest of potential manufacturers. It will be given further exposure in Las Vegas, Nevada Feb. 9 through 12 at what is billed as the biggest trade show in the world.
Roger said he is hoping he and Tony will get “10 hits out of it.”
If 10 manufacturers do express interest and one should snap it up, do Roger and Tony expect to become millionaires?
“No, we don’t think we’re going to be millionaires,” said Roger, laughing. “I would like to say if this saves one person’s life, it’s worth it. I know a lot of people won’t believe I mean that, but it’s true.”
Tony added a laughing “but we’re hopin” before reiterating that both of them would just like to see High Fly Alert become a survival tool carried on everyone’s hip the way they carried their prototype when they tested it.
“It took us three months to get it all together,” said Roger. “We started on this back in March 2004 and by the end of June we had a prototype built.
“It was made to save people’s lives who were lost in the woods, people stranded on the side of the road, children lost at a fair or carnival,” said Roger.
“And it’s all because of this little boy, here,” he said, pointing to a picture he has of that 12-year-old Scout who was last seen August 20, 2004 in the Uinta Mountains of Utah.