As a kid, I remember hearing about my great grandfather Max Herskovitz's inventions and lighting business. My father, Roger Herst, never met his grandfather, but from the stories his dad told him, Max was a remarkable man. Alone and as a teenager, he came to the U.S. from Eastern/Central Europe (exact location uncertain). He learned English and built a large manufacturing business. A quintessential American success story.
I've always thought it was fun that my great grandfather invented such a common and mundane thing as the pull-chain light switch. Everyday we use countless technologies created by unknown inventors. Some were created by independent entrepreneurs and innovators, others by individual contributors within large enterprises. We don't even think about these things. We take them for granted. But, in their own way, each of these inventors left their mark on the world.
As my dad describes him, my grandfather, Ed Herst, also enjoyed tinkering with and developing new lighting fixtures. But, until recently I didn't know, or perhaps remember, that he filed patents on his ideas. Google's patent search lists two. The lamp reflector and a reading lamp. The later patent states, "it frequently happens that one person may desire to quit reading and go to sleep, whereas the other person may desire to continue reading. In such cases the conventional bed lamp does not provide any means of confining the field of illumination to one person while protecting the other person against the light rays." I can vouch for this and, as a result, almost every night I use a book light. Another seemingly trivial idea that, in a small way, changed the way I live... (Josh Herst, 2004)