To illustrate how most parents never return the holder a penny, consider my former father in law’s 1976 patent for a dental floss holder:
You might remember the old Johnny Cash song Boy Named Sue.
P. Lee Gilbert’s mother promised a neighbor named Phylis she’d name the baby Phylis, and when he was born in 1931 she kept her promise.
I actually met the woman who did such an awful thing, and when my future bride introduced me as being from Humansville she replied:
I never knew anyone from Humansville worth a damn!
But, I digress.
Eschewing using his first name in full, P. Lee Gilbert grew up to acquire a chain of a dozen small banks.
But around 1960, he was flossing his teeth one morning and wondered why there were no floss holders in tooth brushes. For years after that, he tinkered around in his garage trying to design a working model of a combination tooth brush flosser and found it wasn’t as easy as he’d imagined.
After 15 years of trying out different ideas and he finally hit on something that worked flawlessly. By then he was wealthy, and found a patent attorney who informed him there was no good chance of patenting an improved toothbrush (sort of like an improved mouse trap) but the floss applicator might be a novel idea.
After about $11,000 ($62,000 in present dollars) his patent was granted in October 1976.
Then he tried selling it, and found no luck at all. It seems the toothbrush makers had no interest in adding a flosser, and the makers of flossers were happy with their product the way it was. One company wanted $20,000 to tool up to manufacture a flosser toothbrush but Lee decided to cut his losses.
But he had a box full of patent paperwork and a few samples that were good conversation pieces.
He lived past 80, and when he died he still had a perfect set of teeth.
But so did his mother, who lived to be 90 and never flossed her teeth once in her life.
pipedia.org
Seriously? Great! Something I don't have that I have to look for now.... I blame you @TheIronMonkey! 
www.pipephil.eu
