When It Rains, It Pours

Today in Tedium: Umbrellas are a good way to protect your head in case of inclement weather. Problem is, they’re not a perfect way. And that is made obvious by the fact that you’re sometimes hit by at least a little of the wet stuff even after you use such a device. If it gets windy (or even if it doesn't), their structural integrity breaks down easily, exposing users to rain. They can also be bulky, even unreasonably so. And they’re incredibly easy to forget and lose. For these reasons and others, this scenario is likely a common one: A person, frustrated by the device supposedly covering their head, thinks to themselves, “there has to be a better way,” runs to their garage, and starts working on a rethink of the device. Eventually, they form their idea, call up the big umbrella manufacturers, and go to the patent office, thinking their idea is unique. Turns out, they are far from alone. Today’s Tedium is about the exciting world of umbrella patents, because why the hell not? — Ernie @ Tedium

(SSG Robert Stewart/U.S. Army/Flickr)

Your umbrella innovation probably isn't as clever as you think it is

Since 1790, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has had a mandate to help register the ownership of products to specific people and companies.

For nearly as long, people have been registering patents for umbrellas and all sorts of other things of varying complexity.

And it has its own designation from USPTO. According to the government office, an umbrella is generally considered "subject matter comprising an easily-portable canopy type having a cover, a stick, and a framework comprising stick-supported ribs and stretchers for supporting or shaping the cover."

That fairly broad canvas of a design (along with the "subcombinations and appurtenances peculiar to umbrellas" covered by patent law) has been used and abused in thousands of ways over the years, especially in the name of pet owners.

In 2008, New Yorker scribe Susan Orlean highlighted the fact that the patent office received enough umbrella patent filings at the time that four people were on the umbrella patent beat in the federal government. A search of Google patents shows that, since Orlean's article was published in February 2008, 1,915 new umbrella-related filings have gone up in the USPTO database in the "Walking Sticks; Umbrellas; Ladies' or Like Fans" section, which is where umbrellas, fans, or other items on sticks appear.

And all those patent filings don't seem to actually impress the manufacturers of those umbrellas. Orlean explained why:

Totes Isotoner, which is the largest umbrella company in the country, stopped accepting unsolicited proposals several years ago. One of the problems, according to Ann Headley, the director of rain-product development for Totes, is that umbrellas are so ordinary that everyone thinks about them, and, because they’re relatively simple, you don’t need an advanced degree to imagine a way to redesign them, but it’s difficult to come up with an umbrella idea that hasn’t already been done. The three-section folding umbrella, for instance, which seemed so novel when it was first manufactured, in the nineteen eighties, was actually patented almost a hundred years ago.

But those long odds and cynical comments still haven't stopped folks from trying. In 2012, for example, a pair of Taiwanese designers took on the rain using a bold concept design it called the Rain Shield, which takes on sideways rain and avoids getting blown out of the way by wind.

(Despite the buzz it received, however, it has yet to hit the market in a meaningful way. Bummer.)

That's a good idea. A lot of other ideas are terrible, of course.

(Jon Jordan/Flickr)

Diagnosing the problems that keep poor-quality umbrellas with us

You have to wonder why, in an era when we can shove a computer into a watch, we've struggled to improve on this basic design in a way that's truly gone mainstream.

Sure, the basic design of the umbrella is pretty simple, and it's somewhat built to last. And the Totes exec quoted in the Orlean piece has a point about it simply being too common for a new design to break through.

On the other hand, while everything else on our person tends to get an upgrade, whether it's our phone, our shoes, or our personal style, umbrellas persist despite having a design that struggles at the one job it's been tasked to do. Why is that?

If I had to pin it on a single item, it'd be the fact that people don't want to actually pay for umbrellas. A 2017 MarketWatch piece quotes an umbrella store owner, an expert on the sector who recommends people spend $30 on umbrellas—which the piece notes is an adjustment, as most people spend less than $10 on a good umbrella.

That issue is not limited to the present day, either. Umbrellas and Their History, an 1855 book by William Sangster, noted that a lot of innovation was happening in umbrellas at the time, but consumer interest was nonexistent in most of these innovations, as Sangster explains:

Simple as the construction of an Umbrella may appear, the number of patents that have been granted within the last thirty years might have been enormous, and a small book might be written on them, so it is of no use to attempt, in our small space, to more than mention a very few of the various improvements in their manufacture. With very few exceptions the inventors have not been repaid the cost of their patents. This has arisen, partly from the delicacy of their mechanical construction, unfitted for the rough usage to which Umbrellas are exposed; but chiefly in consequence of the increased cost of manufacture not being compensated by the improvements effected.

There are probably a variety of reasons for this incredibly frugal state of affairs—for one thing, wetness is a temporary condition—but I would say a big one is that umbrellas are really easy to lose. In fact, thousands of umbrellas get lost each year in London's public transportation system—10,907 in 2014 alone, according to the BBC.

Sure, people should be better about keeping their stuff, but in a world where we use many of the things in our bags for multiple reasons, a bulky single-use device is going to be the first to lose out.

Charles Lim, the author of the site Crooked Pixels, suggests that it's this disposability that makes it unnecessary to redesign umbrellas at all. In fact, he suggests (while responding to yet another umbrella redesign) that a better strategy would be to buy the cheapest, tiniest umbrellas you could find—say, from a dollar store—and carry one on you at all times.

"So what do you do with an imperfect dollar store umbrella? You throw it out," he wrote on his blog. "It’s disposable, like a condom. Most umbrellas sell for 10-20 dollars. A small Dollarama umbrella is two dollars. At that price, you can buy more than one because hey, you never know."

Maybe all those weekend designers out there are solving the wrong problem. Maybe umbrellas need to be made of the cheapest, smallest, most recyclable materials one can find. And maybe we should just admit to ourselves that we're going to ditch them after a short period of use.

Maybe our inventors haven't caught up with where the market actually is.