COLUMNS
↓ MY PATENT STORY
Before there’s a patent, there’s an idea.
Before that, there’s a person with a problem to solve.32 May 2019 _ PopularMechanics.com
(2) LAST NAME (3) FIRST NAME (4) APPLICATION NO.(1) PAT E NTKirkham Jeff 9,168,044
Multi-Use Cleat
The Life-Sav ing
Rubber Band
A former Green Beret rethinks the
standard-issue tourniquet.
(5) I was Special Forces—a Green Beret, but I’m retired now. In
Special Forces we go into areas and we train and advise the
host country’s forces. I’ve done that all over the world. So when
we were in Afghanistan, a big part of that training cycle was
medical. The tourniquet we were being issued—we had a lot
of problems with it. We were ver y night-biased in how we were
working. You know: night-vision goggles; we wore gloves, dark
uniforms. The tourniquet we were being issued was black. You
had to feed some stuff through a little buckle, and it was very
difficult to use in the dark and, most importantly, under stress.(6) Then I rotated back to the States, where I’d end up training
other military units in my downtime. I was training a group of
Air Force pararescue—PJs. They’re very, very talented trauma
medics. I saw the very same problems that my Afghanis were
having, the PJs were having, too. I said, Wow, this isn’t a train-
ing issue—this is a design issue.(7) In what my wife likes to call a very expensive ego trip, I was
like, Well, I’m going to make something better.(8) I started out trying to use a belt. I thought, How many times
have you woken up in the middle of the night and buckled your
pants and didn’t even think about it?(9) Belts make horrible tourniquets. You can’t get the pressure.(10) I was probably at prototype ten or 12, and I was watch-
ing a TV show one night where a little girl was winding
a rubber band around her finger. Her finger turned
purple because it had cut off her blood flow. It was one
of those epiphanic moments.(11) Most tourniquets are called windlass-style tourni-
quets. You throw it over somebody’s arm, tie a knot in
it, throw a stick in there, and twist the stick. The stick
gives you a mechanical advantage. My tourniquet is the
Rapid Application Tourniquet, the RAT. You take the
looped end of the elastic material, wrap it around the
limb, then pass the running end through the loop and
pull it back on itself. It becomes a trucker’s hitch, so
you’ve got a mechanical advantage. Then you do three
or four wraps and tie it off on a built-in metal cleat.(12) I was sitting around with a PJ who’s a buddy, and I was
like, Man, I’ve got this tourniquet and I need a cool name
for it. And he was like, Well, it’s got to be an acronym,
everything’s a friggin’ acronym in the military. So we’re
like, What are the attributes of this tourniquet? It’s
simple, and it’s fast. Then we started thinking, What’s
another word for fast? We don’t want to call it the FAT.(13) I licensed it out to a separate company. They sold
thousands of them overseas. Then when I was wind-
ing down doing military stuff, and that company had
shut down, I started to wonder if I could do it.(14) There’s no better time in the history of the world to be
an entrepreneur than right now. Social media makes
everything so possible. Literally three months ago I
was talking to a guy in the mountains of India via Face-
book. He’s making a little metal part for me and I was
discussing how to do it. When has that ever been pos-
sible in the past? And then we’ve got DHL and FedEx
that somehow get to these tiny villages and it ends up
on my doorstep in Salt Lake City like two weeks later.(15) It’s a miracle, it really is.Tell us your patent story at [email protected].