ABOUT US
Meet the Inventor behind the SpillNot
My name is Joshua Millstein, and while studying physics at UCSC during my undergraduate years, I worked in the physics lab and was fascinated by the demonstrations. However, I thought the amazingness of these concepts could be brought to people in a fun and exciting form that anyone could enjoy, even people who are not physics students.
That’s when I first realized that a gadget like the SpillNot, could not only demonstrate cool physics but also be fun and useful in everyday life.
Later, when working as Mathematical Statistician at the National Marine Fishery Service, NOAA, I told a colleague about the idea, and he said, “it would definitely be successful if it worked, but it would never work.” That was a challenge that inspired me even more
The Process
The first proof-of-concept prototype (piece of wood with a coat hanger and a shoestring — the one on the far left) took me about a half hour to make, plus a couple hours for the glue to dry. Then there was a clay version, a beeswax version followed by two-part resin in a silicon mold, then a series of plastic machined versions before making the first one that was good enough to sell from plastic injection steel mold.
Although the end product may look simple, a lot of thought went into the question of how to achieve a simple, strong and functional design.
One of the ironies of a patentable invention is that it must be non-obvious, but a mark of a great invention is that people say, “why didn’t I think of that?”