Inventions on Demand

When the world beats a path to his door, the run-of-the-garret inventor is apt to be about as calm as a Rube Goldberg machine going double time. Denmark's Karl Kroyer is a different sort. Last week, shortly after New York's Martin Marietta Corp. snapped up the rights to make a Kroyer-patented, skid-resistant highway surface called Syno-pal in the U.S., the Dane seemed downright bored. "To make an invention is an intoxication," said he. "But the rest --to make it work, start production and complete negotiations--is one big hangover."

Dropout or Da Vinci. Some hangover. At 53, Kroyer is a millionaire several times over, supports a stable of Jaguars and race horses on the proceeds of more than 200 patents covering items from frying pans and bicycle rim linings to papermaking processes and ship-salvage techniques. He also has a $1,000,000 glass-and-steel research center near Aarhus and a staff of 60 en gineering assistants to ease the migraine of beating his brainstorms into workable plans.

Spindly and bespectacled, Kroyer's own background smacks more of a dropout than a Danish Da Vinci. A haberdasher's son who never went be yond grammar school, Kroyer even now winces at technical journals on the ground that "you risk reading yourself stupid." He explains his self-schooled skills by saying that "the recognition of a demand works on me like a magnet. I then set out to define the problems and correct them."

A demand of sorts first worked on Kroyer in 1942 when, at 28, he was idling along in a dull job as a salesman for the family firm. Struck with an idea, he designed a pair of triangles to be sewn into the droopy women's knitwear bathing suits of the day. The new wrinkle--first built-in bras ever to grace Danish suits--proved to be a standout at the beaches and a smash at the cash register.

Sugar & Stone. Before long, Kroyer was off on his own. Noting the wartime shortage of elastic, he invented an ingenious substitute of wire and thread, sold it to Danish textilemakers for $15,000. A flood of gizmos followed--bicycle rim linings made of woven paper, which bike-happy Danes found would save wear on tires, paper hammocks, one of the first pressure cookers to appear in Europe, even a skillet with special grease-catching depressions to improve frying of steaks. That lowly item has been cooking up brisk sales in Denmark and seven other countries for more than 15 years.

After the war, Kroyer plunged into candymaking--a short-lived venture that produced a long-term boon. Because of the sugar shortage, he had to come up with a cheap way of making glucose, and his process has since become standard in 52 plants around the world. That made Kroyer's reputation and gave him a top tinkerer's prerogative: he could practice his wizardry on demand, rather than out of desperation. More often than not, he says, "my inventions have been made because somebody came and asked me to make them."

Not surprisingly, Kroyer's creations have since run a mad scientist's gamut. Synopal originally sprang from a Danish asphaltmaker's plea for something to give blacktop paving the high night visibility and skid-resistance of rival concrete. Kroyer promptly invented a white, synthetic, quartz-like crushed "stone"--actually a form of crystallized glass--to do the job. Seeing other possibilities, he has sold the stone as brewery and municipal water filters, made it into bricks to build 50 gleaming white villas around Denmark, in hopes of promoting them as a status symbol.

Buildings & Brides. Another coup came last year when Kroyer was called upon to salvage a 2,700-ton steamer that had sunk in Kuwait harbor and could not be raised by conventional pumping. Though he had never raised any vessel bigger than a test tube, Lab-lubber Kroyer had the answer. He shot the hull full of pea-sized, high-flotation, plastic-foam pellets until it bobbed to the surface, pocketed a handsome fee of $186,000.

Potentially more economically important is an inexpensive "dry" papermaking process, which eliminates the heavy machinery and vast water supplies needed by current paper mills. The U.S.'s Kimberly-Clark and several other large paper companies have paid fees of $25,000 to inspect and run their own tests in Kroyer's pilot plant at Aarhus, may soon buy rights to use his manufacturing techniques. Inventor Kroyer sees no end to the possibilities, claims that the process can be used for continuous production of "almost anything from building blocks to bridal dresses." He has already run off several of the latter at a cost of $1.50 each.

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