Hasta La Ideas

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pCarlo Heckman was an Industrial Designer from Akron, Ohio whose work in the 1950’s went largely unnoticed until just recently./p

pHe was best known for his work with birthday candles. In the late 1950’s, Heckman was at a birthday party for his grandfather and was disturbed by the randomly placed candles on the cake. He immediately started working on a solution and came up with what he called the “Heckman Method.” This involved selling one long candle for every four short ones. People were warm to the idea initially but abandoned the method once they realized that more wax ended up on the cake this way./p

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pWith the relative success of the candles he took some time to write his first book, emA Practical Guide to Sticks: The First Ever Guide to Naming and Utilizing Nature’s Forgotten Gift/em. For the book, he categorized and named hundreds of different stick shapes and made suggestions for how they could be used in people’s daily lives. The “Two-Armed Wallach” could be used as a hanger, for example. Other notable sticks included the Stubbed Randy (used for mixing paint), the Left Handed Squire (toilet paper holder), and the Bonanza (best used as a coat rack). The book wasn’t very successful in the US but found a small following in Italy despite the fact that it wasn’t professionally translated./p

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