Inventor David Jaros wasn't one to complain about liquids that messily spurt from soda bottles: He did something about it.
By BILL DURYEA
Published August 27, 2004
[Times photo: Scott Keeler]
Outside a Chevron gas station in Indian Rocks Beach, inventor David Jaros, 37, demonstrates the difference in flow between a regular bottle and one retrofitted with SmoothPour. Guess which is which.
Jaros’ invention consists of a short straw attached inside a soda bottle that lets liquid pour out in a steady stream.
Shane Robinson, 29, of Largo, right, watches David Jaros demonstrate the absence of “chugging effect” when liquid is poured from a bottle with SmoothPour.
INDIAN ROCKS BEACH - The crowd through the Chevron station on Gulf Boulevard in the middle of the morning is made up predominantly of tradesmen who have their heart set on a personal pizza and a Mountain Dew.
Getting out of the truck, the last thing they expect to see between them and the door is a strapping guy in black wraparound shades and a sleeveless T-shirt leaning over a small counter and running what appears to be a seventh-grade home economics experiment.
"Sir, can I get your opinion on something?" Dave Jaros asks, reaching for one of the two 2-liter Sprite bottles that he has filled with water. "It's something I've invented. I've come up with a way that completely eliminates the chugging effect when you pour a drink."
For some reason (Could they really care about the "chugging effect?") they stop.
"When you pour the old way it's kind of messy," Jaros explains. "It splashes. See?"
At this point in the demonstration, the person watching usually says something along the lines of, "Okaaay," as if they're not entirely certain that this isn't an elaborate scheme to make them look bad in front of a hidden camera.
Then Jaros reaches for the second bottle.
"I wanted to make something that wasn't going to add any cost to the product. It couldn't require any extra materials. So I added a small air intake in the neck of the bottle," he says, pointing to a segment of plastic straw.
"Now look," he says, pouring from the second bottle. "Look how fast it comes out. It's twice as fast. Mine comes out like a water hose."
Indeed, the difference is apparent. There's none of the hesitant flow as liquid and air muscle past each other in the bottleneck like schoolkids in the hallway.
Just to drive home the difference, Jaros puts his fingertip over the straw; the liquid returns to its old "chugging" ways. "Old . . . new . . . old," he says, removing and replacing his finger.
Having witnessed the payoff of the demonstration the construction guys nod appreciatively, as if their bodies had been taken over by infomercial scientists.
"I hate having to pour any kind of bottle," says Shane Robinson, 29, who wears his beard pulled into a whip-thin tail. "I even pop a hole in my beer can so I don't get that chugging thing."
Another young man complains that "when the bottle chugs it knocks over the cup."
A waiter points out that it will probably "cut down on the foam, too."
All three sign the petition Jaros presents them, asking for their support in his efforts to market his invention. Everyone signs the petition.
Most people might frown at the way bottles chug. They might even become occasionally annoyed. But how many people in the world would bother to do something about it?
* * *
The origin of the idea for SmoothPour (patent pending) is obscure.
Jaros is affable though a little cagey about these kinds of questions, because he's worried about giving his competitors any insight into the way his mind works. He won't, for example, divulge other problems he's tackling because, as he says, "You don't want people to know that it's even possible for them to solve. I believe people didn't even know this was solvable."
Of course, it's also possible that no one cared, but the fact remains that sometime in the fall of last year Jaros applied his considerable imagination to ending the "chugging effect."
Jaros doesn't lack confidence. "I'm an engineer," he said to himself. "I should be able to do this."
He was surprised to find that even a summa cum laude engineering degree from the University of Central Florida could not crack the code right away.
"I started from a cap mentality," Jaros says, in a manner that conveys how crazy that must sound. "The cap would have a tube attached that would go inside the bottle. Opening the cap would break the tube and let the air in."
That idea was a flop for a couple of reasons. One, it was too complex. Two, it required customers to do something to make it work and "people don't want to do anything," as Jaros knows. "It can't be anything extra."
Last October Jaros was watching a Bucs game. He doesn't remember which one, perhaps because his mind, at least subconsciously, was occupied with solving the "chugging effect."
At one point in the game he got up to freshen his glass of Sprite. As he went to lift his 2-liter bottle, he looked at the glass. The straw poking up over the rim suddenly looked like Excalibur rising from the lake.
He looked at the bottle. He looked at the straw. "My mind put these two things together," Jaros says. "I had a little eureka moment."
The straw happened to be one of those bendable hospital straws; he promptly cut a section off. He heated the straw with a lighter and glued the slightly melted plastic to the inside of the bottle so it curved along the neck and down the shoulder.
When he poured with the modified bottle, he discovered, as he expected, that the straw permitted air to enter the bottle unimpeded while letting the liquid stream out the remaining 95 percent of the opening.
"I looked at the bottle and I said, "That's a million dollar bottle.' "
The principle is a simple one. Nature likes equilibrium. When liquid rushes out of a bottle, air must replace it so that the pressure inside the bottle is the same as the pressure outside. But the liquid and the air fight each other in the narrow opening of a bottle neck.
Not long after, Jaros' mother, Martha, dropped by his place in Indian Rocks Beach for a visit. "Mom, let me show you something I think I should get moving on," she remembers him saying.
He gave her the demonstration. "I said, "Dave, this should go over really big.' "
As he often does, he asked her to keep the details secret. She honored the request and wouldn't even tell her husband, Stephen. His curiosity was piqued and so the next time he and Dave were together, out for a meal at Landry's Seafood House, Mr. Jaros pressed for details.
"Dave, you tell your mother, but you won't tell me?"
" "Dad,' he said, "I don't want to talk about it in public.' "
* * *
Jaros, 37, is the third of three brothers, all of whom have pursued fairly traditional careers. As a young boy, growing up in suburban Maryland, Jaros appeared set on a similar path.
He begged for his own paper route, his parents say. "You never had to wake him up," his mother says. "5:30 a.m., even on a snowy day, you'd hear him pulling on his boots and heading out the door. "And in those days you had to collect from your customers every month," his father says. "He didn't mind. He liked having customers."
Jaros was as competitive as he was industrious. In high school he set about equaling his older brother's track and field records even though he knew he was not as innately speedy. In his senior year at King High School in Tampa he walked onto a varsity football team that was expected to contend for a state title and started on the defensive line.
When he decided to transfer to the University of Central Florida because of its well-regarded engineering department, it seemed he had chosen a career. But after a couple of years with Martin Marietta doing defense contracting, Jaros opted out.
"As an electrical engineer, you could write your own ticket," his father, who has spent a career in the computer industry, recalls telling him.
"Dad, I can apply it to so many things," Jaros responded.
It's hard to see how the degree applies to some of his moneymaking endeavors, though he does do Web page design. Currently he is doing a nice business in miniature 21-year calendars that he sells for $1 on his Web site inventionreview.com.
"They're the world's smallest usable calendar," he says, adding that he needs to resubmit his invention to the people at Guinness Book of World Records to get their official imprimatur.
"So far I've sold 30,000," he says.
When the Internet became hot in the '90s, Jaros had the presence of mind to purchase thousands of domain names. "He probably owns a couple of thousand names he hasn't sold yet," his friend Tom Whalley, 43, says. "He's made tens of thousands of dollars already."
Add all this up and you have a classically American combination of ingenuity and business savvy. A cross, perhaps, of two of Jaros' heroes, Nicola Tesla, who discovered alternating electrical current (far more efficient than Edison's direct current) and Ron Popeil, the man who made Ronco a byword for cheap products people didn't know they needed but seemingly couldn't do without.
"Pocket Fisherman," Jaros says, as if that one product name conveys everything you need to say about Popeil. "How many millions of those did he sell?"
The future of SmoothPour, of course, depends on Jaros' ability to make people believe they need this invention. He needs to show that, to borrow Popeil's marketing logic, simply having a fishing pole in the car isn't convenient enough. You have to have one in your glovebox.
"It's such a revolutionary idea my main focus is letting people know about it," Jaros says. He's gathered several hundred signatures outside the Chevron station.
Ultimately, though, he'll have to convince beverage companies that they need his idea to sell more drinks. Let Jaros' math speak for itself:
"With this invention you can pour a glass in 4 to 5 seconds." Jaros estimates that it took 8 to 10 seconds to pour a glass of soda the old way. "A 2-liter bottle you can pour in 15 seconds. The old way was 35 seconds. If you're a mother with several kids that might save her a minute and a half a day every day. Multiply that by millions of bottles and millions of people across a lifetime," pausing to let the significance sink in.
