The Fearless Inventor

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"I'm extremely passionate about showing kids how they can manufacture all sorts of wonderful objects for themselves if they'll only be daring enough to jump in and attack projects without fear of failure," he says. "If you let the memory of your failures discourage you, you're in big trouble as an inventor." Describing his own childhood assaults on household devices, he jokes that "no Christmas toy ever made it past lunchtime with me, because I'd quickly tear it apart and try to improve on it."

Indeed, Griffith says he's been attacking both tools and machines ever since kindergarten. His smart rope, for example, emerged in part from his continuing frustration with equipment failure in kite surfing, a sport in which kites tow riders through the water on surfboards. Like some brainy, high-tech Crocodile Dundee, he seems to enjoy taking adrenaline-soaked risks; a notorious crasher of bikes, surfboards, and kites, he readily admits to having broken more than 20 bones. "I think that's just evidence of living a full life," he says. Yet he also regards the caricature of the beer-quaffing Aussie roughneck as "totally inaccurate." "Look, I really rebel against that stereotype, although it's certainly true that I fit it!" says Griffith, barefoot, before downing a beer with his interviewer.

Armed with patents in optics, textiles, and nanotechnology, Griffith says he's now positioned to begin realizing his "admittedly optimistic and idealistic" goal of bringing the benefits of tech­nology to the masses. After a tour of his humming laboratory, where laser cutters and milling machines vie for space with the latest computer, video, and optical tools, he leads the way to the top of the old ­Alameda Naval Air Station Control Tower--part of the defunct military installation that now serves as headquarters for Squid Labs and several of his spinoff businesses. He clearly gets a kick out of having transformed an abandoned U.S. military base into a lab that has produced multiple inventions for the benefit of the developing world. But for Griffith, it doesn't much matter where problems arise; he just likes to solve them. "Good design and good engineering are the same in the developed or developing world," he observes. "Low cost, high elegance, efficient, robust."

"This is an unbelievably interesting and exciting time to be an inventor," Griffith says. "Right now we're witnessing the birth of a new relationship between tools and materials--between information and physical structure--which has the power to make life better for everyone."