The Prototype Process: What Invention Actually Looks Like
The accounts of how Bessie Blount built her feeding device prototype are worth dwelling on, because they provide a specific and vivid picture of what invention looks like when it happens outside of institutional settings.
She worked in her kitchen. She used plastic, boiled water to melt it, and shaped it using a file, an ice pick, and a hammer. She spent ten months on the first version, working primarily in the early morning hours — one to four AM — because her daytime schedule was committed to her physical therapy work.
This is invention as most inventors actually practice it: not the romantic image of a eureka moment followed by a clean engineering process, but the slow, iterative work of someone who knows what outcome they need and has to figure out how to achieve it with whatever materials are available.
The use of kitchen materials is not a deficiency — it is a specific creative constraint that Blount turned to her advantage. Plastic, which was still a relatively new and versatile material in the 1940s, could be shaped by heat and tools. The specific mold she needed for the mouthpiece component could be built from what she had.
Her husband, a physician, was reportedly not supportive of her extended late-night invention sessions. The tension between her commitment to solving this problem and the demands of her home life is part of the human reality of the work. She did it anyway.
The total cost she spent on materials was approximately $3,000 — a significant sum in the late 1940s, equivalent to several months of salary for many workers. This was her own money, spent on a device that the VA would eventually refuse to purchase.
The investment reflects how seriously she took the problem and how committed she was to solving it. She was not experimenting in someone else’s time and with someone else’s resources. She was investing her own.