Inventor’s plea: Take my ideas, please

Leila Navidi

Inventor and portrait artist Vince Fodera, right, talks with Randy Williams of Las Vegas during Fodera’s “Inventor Olympic,” held recently at Boulder Station. Fodera says he has great energy-saving ideas if only someone would take them and develop them, even keep the money they generate. “I’m just trying to do something for the world here,” he says.

By Brendan Buhler (contact)

Monday, Nov. 24, 2008 | 2 a.m.

Leila Navidi

Among Fodera's ideas is the "Magnalith Concrete Flywheel," a device that is supposed to generate electricity using magnets.

Leila Navidi

A drawing shows the concept of Fodera's "Vacuum Thrust Engine," which the inventor hopes will be "properly designed and engineered" to power vehicles.

Vince Fodera is trying to be heard. If you listen, he’ll tell you how he’s trying to save the world.

With magnets. And vacuums.

He’ll show you how you could make a fortune off his ideas and he won’t ask you for a dime.

He just wants you to listen.

And that’s been the hard part, getting an audience.

For more than a year Fodera has been sending out sketches, fliers, post cards and pamphlets to newspapers, television stations and science magazines. They read like this:

“Did you see the movie ‘Flash of Genius?’ But I am giving it away free! Soon, I will be 80 years old. Society needs my inventions — Jobs need to be Created! Anyone is welcome to use my ideas and profit.”

Fodera’s ideas, if they work, could provide a nearly endless supply of cheap and clean energy and transportation.

But no one responds. Not even the television stations, where he delivered, in person, very comprehensive packages.

“I guess they’ve got other stuff to cover: rapes, murders, accidents, shootings, stabbings — you know, the important stuff,” Fodera says. “I don’t mean to sound sarcastic, but when you’ve got an individual trying to make a difference, isn’t there something in that?”

But Fodera was undaunted. He decided to produce an exposition, an “Inventor Olympic,” to display his ideas. He reserved a $250 space at Boulder Station the other day and sent the news out.

He set up his poster board displays — the hydromagnetic electric dynamo! the Foderagible luxury blimp casino! the vacu-car! — in the Merlot Room on the mezzanine level of the North Tower.

And he waited.

Fodera is a slightly built man of 79, silver-haired and bright-eyed in a pink shirt and a green sport coat.

A portrait painter for 35 years, Fodera decorated the room with, in addition to the drawings of his inventions and the heart-shaped red balloons with cardboard blimps tied to them, a few of his paintings — a velvety Frank Sinatra with a rainbow behind him, Princess Di with real rubies and pearls glued on for jewelry, and Tiger Woods watched over by a tiger, in the woods.

(This last painting Fodera intends to send to President-elect Barack Obama as a gift on behalf of all of Las Vegas.)

He got into his invention phase a few years ago.

Previously, he’d devoted his idle hours to musing on astrology and authoring a self-published monograph entitled, “Paraquantology: The Study of Thought Energy.” But then, he noticed the magnets on his refrigerator. How did they stay up there?

Finally, there was something to unify everything he had been thinking about. If astrology works at all, it must be the magnetic influence of the stars, and gravity must be a form of magnetism. And then when he bought a flashlight you charge by shaking, he knew he had the solution to the world’s energy problems.

The ideas propelled Fodera forward, and raced from idea to idea with the speed of a vacu-car.

(A vacu-car is a so-far unbuilt gas-electric vehicle Fodera has designed that would be driven not by its wheels but rather a large vacuum mounted in the rear).

Within a couple of years, not only had he designed the vacu-car, but also an underground, water-powered magnetic generator and a roof-mounted home version where water is pumped through a series of circular tubes, driving floating magnets through copper coils.

While there appear to be a few potential objections to some of Fodera’s inventions, like the laws of thermodynamics (you don’t get something for nothing, no free rides, etc., etc.), he assures me they’ll work out.

“Of course, they’ll have to be properly designed and engineered by brilliant people,” he says.

He’s just offering up the ideas, for anyone who wants to make them work.

He works on his ideas at least 12 hours a day, waking early and going to bed late, busy over the drafting board in the mobile home he lives in by himself. Although he still paints portraits, it’s been years since he retired from his day job designing graphics for the glass on slot machines.

Two of Fodera’s friends are here with him in the Merlot Room, waiting off to the side, watching him spread the good news of cheap energy extracted from the principles of the shake-shake flashlight.

There’s Doris, who’s wearing a nice pink dress and pearls and smiling sweetly.

There’s his friend and former boss, Steve, who smiles when Fodera explains his inventions. “I’m not smart enough to figure out half of ’em,” Steve says. “But the fact that he’s innovative and working on something is important, not whether it works or not.”

Despite all the time he spends sketching his inventions and refining his theories, Fodera tries to make time for his pals.

“My little friend here,” he says, pointing at Doris, “she says, ‘Come on over,’ but I’ve got to work.”

Steve takes Fodera to lunch and tries to convince Fodera to learn to use the computer Steve bought him.

The crowd in the Merlot Room, excepting Doris and Steve, has been sparse.

When a Sun photographer and reporter arrived, Fodera lit up and led them around the room, explaining each invention and idea in detail. Did we come because of the packet he sent?

Ah. Finally, somebody listened.

Then, toward the end of the afternoon another man arrived, tall and wearing a wool-lined yellow suede vest. At first he talked excitedly to Fodera about his plans for “a gravity device.”

Then the man in the yellow vest heard I was a reporter and subjected me to a long and loud lecture about how all foreclosures are illegal, a point he made by pounding on the wall and providing a vivid, hip-thrusting gesture of what banks are doing to homeowners.

I legged it to the elevators, where Fodera caught up with me, looking worried.

He said he didn’t know the man in the yellow vest and asked me not to let that man, that nut, ruin our afternoon.

Fodera held out his hands, palms up.

“Please don’t take him seriously,” Fodera says. “I don’t know why, I truly don’t, why every time I try and do something, every time, someone like that comes along and just throws a wrench in it.

“I’m just trying to do something for the world here. What’s so wrong with that?”