Allen Dong can look at a wooden paddle, a bicycle pump, or a
kitchen grain mill and see an array of tools invisible to most
people. A lot of inventing has to do with picturing, or
imagination, Dong says. It also has to do with being flexible
and not seeing an object for what it is but for what it can be.
Sometimes the object has the potential to feed an African
village. Dong, a part-time irrigation specialist at the
University of California at Davis, uses his spare time to invent
low-tech, low-cost machinery with high value for Third World
farmers. Since 1983 Dong has completed half a dozen designs,
including a vacuum packer built around an inexpensive bicycle
pump, a hand-operated soybean thresher that uses a wooden
paddle, and a hoe whose blade Dong has creatively filed to make
it grab and remove weeds more efficiently. For each invention
Dong has eschewed patent rights--and the money such rights would
bring--and placed the design in the public domain. He has freely
distributed design blueprints through mag