"Happy Harmony"

In Chicago last week the National Inventors Congress displayed a doughnut equipped with a handle for tidy dunking; an air-conditioned pie pan; a combination vanity case, walking stick, beach cape and umbrella. This is the organization which turned up in former years with a cow-tail restrainer (to prevent milkers from being switched); a funnel to facilitate the insertion of keys in keyholes; a mirror-maze mousetrap, hundreds of similar marvels.

Fifty thousand patents are issued in Washington every year. The vast majority of these are flops; most important inventions are made by hired technicians in industrial laboratories. But the average member of the National Inventors Congress is an obdurately optimistic freelance who never loses hope that he will hit on something magically profitable.

Very visible and very audible in Chicago last week was the Congress' beaming president, Albert Garrette Burns, who describes himself as "just 210 Ibs. of happy harmony." California-born 51 years ago, Albert Burns invented a lock for Model T Fords, sold 800,000. He worked in a tea and coffee store, directed a chamber of commerce, ran a wholesale business, managed a sanitarium and some textile mills, invented and marketed a successful bread-slicer. He joined the National Inventors Congress in 1928, became its paid president (at $3,600 a year) in 1931. His function is to aid, promote, protect, advise. Mr. Burns is proud when newspapers call him the "Nation's Gadget Chief."

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