Hands-free Nubrella is twist on that old reliable umbrella
Posted on Monday, May 12, 2008
April showers could continue to the end of May, and your Burberry and your BlackBerry are already waterlogged. Perhaps you need a Nubrella.
Priced at $ 59. 94 (including shipping costs ), the hands-free umbrella is marketed as the ultimate tool for the modern rainedupon. Folded up, it’s the size and shape of an Olympic regulation archery bow. Then you pop it... right... er, wait, how does this thing — ah well, you can always log onto www. nubrella. com for a tutorial, and get that baby open in five simple steps.
Five ? But my current umbrella opens in — But is your current umbrella the “ultimate tool for the modern rained-upon” ?
“Hands-free changes the whole game,” says Nubrella inventor Alan Kaufman, who was running Cingular outlets in Manhattan when watching his wired and wet customers struggle provided inspiration.
Think of the 21 st-century possibilities. Chatting, waving, toting, umbrella-holding: four tasks that were never before simultaneously possible.
The Nubrella is worn with a harness, and closes around its user like a clear cocoon, guaranteed never to turn inside out. It feels secure and oddly soundproof. Someone is going to try to go over Niagara Falls in this thing, and they might succeed.
Progress !
Or is it ? The sleek umbrella has been around since Babylon and ancient Egypt — as seen in hieroglyphics ! — its engineering essentially unchanged, although man is a tinkerer. You have your collapsible canopy, you have your central supporting stick. You have umbrella hats, but those are more gags than ultimate tools, sold on a Web page next to a pirate hat and a pimp hat.
The “brolly” hit England in the 18 th century. The Brits took a while to warm up: An 1871 history reads, “Only a few years back those who carried Umbrellas were held to be legitimate butts.” For centuries people have been trying to build a better umbrella. The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office in suburban Crystal City, Va., has 97 on file from 2007 alone, 487 from 2002 on.
“Mostly, people want to improve opening and closing mechanisms,” says Robert Canfield, one of five patent examiners who work with classification 135. Classification 135 is the patent-office division that deals with tents, canopies, umbrellas and canes.
Canfield has been examining umbrella applications for about 20 years and has seen just about every umbrella under the sun, ranging from patent 6871616, Pet Umbrella, to patent 598687, Multicomponent Electric Stunning Umbrella.
Even the search for a handsfree umbrella is not new; the office has several applications on file going back to 1978.
Kaufman is not concerned, because he thinks that previous products have totally missed the point of an umbrella. Way back when the Egyptians invented the parasol, it was meant to protect from sun, not rain, and no umbrella in history has ever achieved perfection.
He believes so strongly in the Nubrella that he invested $ 400, 000 of his — and various family members’ — money in the product. So far he’s sold about 500. But to look on the bright side, at least one buyer is extremely satisfied. Skye Grapentine of Youngstown, Ohio, bought the Nubrella for her birthday after stumbling across it online. She likes walking, and she likes catching up on reading the newspaper when she walks.
“With an umbrella, you’re busy gripping it,” says Grapentine. Hands-free is great because “the less you have to worry about, the more you can get done.” Getting something done. Not the first thing that comes to mind when you think of walking in the rain.
Hands-free umbrellas might have been knocking around the patent office for 30 years, but they are an invention meant for now, for a society obsessed with multitasking, for a society in which everyone is connected but everyone is isolated, in their own world, in their own bubble, in their own Nubrella.
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