Canaan
As a seventh-grader in 2013, Slaughter enrolled in the Charles C. Gates Invention & Innovation Program, a year-long course designed to encourage creative thinking through the designing and building of a product.
Gates program director David Auerbach said coming up with an idea for an invention can often be the most challenging part for the 40 or so boys in the program each year. But not for Slaughter.
The now 15-year-old Slaughter identified a problem that he said needed solving. All cross-country skiers know the battle, he said: A skier tries to clip his or her boots into the ski bindings, but snow lodged under the metal bar on the toe of a Nordic ski boot prevents the binding from operating correctly.
“It’s a huge hassle to try and clean the snow out,” Slaughter said in a recent interview at the Valley News. “I have seen lots of people do creative things to get it out — stumbling around, kicking their boot against things. I haven’t seen an effective way that people have come up with to solve this problem.”
So Slaughter created the Nordic Ski Boot Personal Custodian, or N.S.B.P.C, a device that cleans snow out of the cavity of a cross-country ski boot.
The product, as it first started out, consisted of a flexible metal prong that was designed to be used with softer powder snow, Slaughter said. But the product later evolved into a thicker plastic prong, something that could hold up to hard-packed snow. The prong is affixed to the ski.
The user slides the boot toe over the prong to dislodge the snow from the cavity. Once the snow is removed, the user can easily clip into the binding.
“Now you have a hands-free way to get the snow out of your boot before you clip in,” Slaughter said. “It’s been a very educational process and I’ve learned a lot about how inventing works.”
In May 2014, Slaughter won second place at the Gates competition at Cardigan for his product. He received what program participants call a patent nod — a signal from the judges that a project is worthy of professional patent research.
Only a half dozen students or so students have earned that distinction over the program’s eight years, Auerbach said.
Cardigan students that receive patent nods often embark on the lengthy patenting process journey, but no student — until Slaughter — had been awarded a patent for their product.
The patent will officially be issued to Slaughter on Tuesday, just days after he is honored at this year’s ninth annual Gates competition.
According to a Yale Scientific article, the youngest person to hold a U.S. patent is 4 years old.
Now, Slaughter, along with his mother, Lindsey Klecan, and his father, Matthew Slaughter, are exploring sales options for the product.
Slaughter said he has since dropped the name he used for the product in class, and now more loosely referes to it as a “binding cleaner for Nordic ski boots.”
The younger Slaughter said he doesn’t want to sell the binding cleaner as a stand-alone product. He would rather integrate it into a binding, for example, which would entail licensing it or selling its rights to a binding company.
He is also researching ways to protect the rights of the product internationally.
“The majority of the market is overseas,” Jacob Slaughter said. “I only have legal rights in the United States.”
He currently doesn’t have any sales, but one day he hopes to profit off his invention.
In the fall, Slaughter will attend Thetford Academy.
“What a neat opportunity Cardigan has afforded us,” Klecan said. “It has been a tremendous learning experience.”
The Gates program operates at only one other school in the country, Graland Country Day School in Denver. Charles C. Gates, of Gates Rubber Co., graduated from the Denver school in the 1930s and gave Graland an endowment in the 1990s to offer the program.
About a decade later, the Gates Family Foundation provided Cardigan Mountain School with a similar gift. Diane Gates Wallach, the daughter of Charles C. Gates, sent one of her boys to Cardigan.
“She saw the true value of bringing the program to us,” Auerbach said.
Slaughter’s parents said they never expected their son to take his product quite this far.
Matthew Slaughter, who is the Paul Danos Dean of Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, said many boys come up with “neat ideas,” but belatedly discover that the product already exisits.
Jacob Slaughter himself ran into that problem when he was enrolled in the Gates program in sixth grade. He and his partner Jake Wennik created a mug with a compartment to hold snacks, but the pair later realized someone had beaten them to it.
Asked what he thought of his son’s accomplishment, Matthew Slaughter said, “I am a little biased,” with a laugh. He spoke highly of the Gates program.
“It is a great example of learning that is connected to the real world,” he said. “And it is pretty neat that they bring it into the middle school there.”
Jordan Cuddemi can be reached at jcuddemi@vnews.com or 603-727-3248.