Michael Persson, a patent attorney in Laconia, is well qualified to write about the subject of inventions, having personal hands-on experience with all things mechanical in his former career as a mechanical engineer.

Persson grew up in Woburn, Mass., and recalls spending time at the Weirs Beach Waterslide during the summers before he settled on the Lakes Region as the area in which he wanted to live. ``I made a lot of friends at Aavid Engineering and really liked this area,’’ he says. In fact he met his future wife through a relative who worked in the area and recalls that their first date was at Hector’s restaurant, which is located right next to the Lawson and Persson law office that he currently works out of at 67 Water Street in downtown Laconia.

He’s dealt with many clients helping them obtain patents for their inventions and says he’s very impressed with the vision, tenacity and rugged old-style Yankee individualism of the people he deals with.

"If they need something, they want to make it themselves. They don’t wait around for someone else to come up with a solution,’’ says Persson, who says that he’s really come to appreciate the old Yankee ability to be on the spot problem solvers through an almost intuitive sense of how mechanical things work.

"People often ask me whether I think that their invention will make them money and, when they do, I relate to them the story of one of my clients who was in the HVAC business and had developed a tool that greatly simplified the attachment of flanges used in the plumbing and heating industries.

"He thought that the tool was going to take off and I was also convinced that it would be very profitable for him. Unfortunately, for a number of reasons, the tools never took off and he made very little money selling them. A few years later, he came back to me with a simple change to the basic design of the flange that, if adopted, would make his tool obsolete. I looked at the change and saw a number of impediments to his making money from it.

"In fact, I saw so many impediments that I tried to convince him not to spend the money to obtain patent protection on it. Ultimately, he decided to apply for a patent and was able to license his invention to a major manufacturer, who paid him a significant amount of money for the rights to make the flanges,’’ says Persson.

Looking back on that he offers some advice for inventors:

First, don't "bet the farm" on any single invention, because there may be things that you are not aware of that will prevent you from profiting from it.

Second, always reexamine the basic premise behind your invention to see if there is a simpler way to solve the problem.

Third, just because somebody tells you that an invention won’t work or wont be profitable does not mean that they are right and you are wrong; even if that person is a patent attorney.

Fourth, just because an inventor fails with one invention does not mean that future inventions will also be failures.

Persson says that he enjoys the research which goes into writing his column because he’s always learning something new and getting fresh perspectives that he’s glad to share with readers of The Weirs Times.