Mech, I find your story VERY interesting. I can relate, in part, to the frustrations of being an inventor. I have my own invention and story but it has nothing to do with cars. Please read my story, it does have much to do with living the life of an inventor...
I am the inventor of "Heavy Metal Banjo" - which gets a laugh from many people, but I am serious and I spent a good ten years trying to prove to all of the guys spending $3000 and more for electric guitars for use in heavy distorted music such as metal that they were wasting there money because such a tone comes from electronics and fretboards, and to prove it I made the bold statement that I could get the same tone out of my banjo. Over almost ten years of working on this project I could finally get the SAME TONE out of my mostly unmodified GIBSON 250 5-string BANJO that expensive guitars such as a Fender Strat can. My range of octaves was limited to the higher notes, but I learned how to tune down real low and play along with most any ROCK KEY. I soon discovered that a SOLID BODY banjo could do what I wanted with no problem- But my goal was to make a regular banjo with it's drum-like head mounted, sound like a Fender Strat.
I had many hurdles to get over. I had to invent many little parts, and one very important part of which I was doing all I could to get it patented- I had many guitar electronics and banjo books to learn from, but it was just enough to get me started. Over a period of a couple years I was doing private patent searches when another banjo player gave me a link. It was a link to a US patent filed during the jazz era of 4 string banjos in the 1920's in which somebody else had ALREADY invented my super banjo-head mute which was not found in any store, nor found on any banjo I had ever seen, nevertheless somebody had THOUGHT of it decades before I had. Without this special type of head mute it is impossible to over-drive the tone of a banjo with a amp-speaker set up without a very loud whistling sound that would almost break your eardrums, a pure high tone constant feedback loop from the banjo-head and the amp's speaker, to a small degree it can be good, but not to the degree my tests gave me- that noise had to be removed..
In the end I proved my case, I do have MP3s of some of the better stuff that has me playing what sounds like old school heavy metal guitar (but it's not a guitar) and other well known guitar player's style. I used Bill Lawrence guitar rail pickups installed on the banjo's truss rod with holes cut in the clear plastic head mounting them about 1/8 inch from the strings, used plenty of guitar electronics for tube distortion, a cry baby wah pedal made popular in woodstock, and I invented a method to play using 3 finger picks and use the pinky finger for hammer-on notes. Many other things had to be made or done that I am skipping over. I sank a chunk of my life inventing this stuff. Nobody else until that time in the mid 1990s had ever came close to making a standard style bluegrass banjo with the plastic head on, capable of producing this tone.
When I finally realized a patent was not very likely, I searched into all sorts of ways to profit from this stuff. I thought at the very least I could get an edge on a gig and freak people out buy hiding the pickups under a white banjo-head and get on stage and start playing bluegrass and then WHAM convert over into some grunge distortion. I played in a few bars, I took my idea to big people etc.... I never made a dime on it, but I learned a lot. The last time I searched on Google for "heavy metal banjo" I could be found somewhere on the first page, now I may not even be on that page. Nevertheless I did get credit. It's too bad the kind of credit I got was not the kind I could use to pay the rent with.
What makes me happy is that I did something everyone said could not be done. It was a lot of work of trial and error until I perfected the tone and freaked out many people when they seen what I played and the resulting sound. I will always be proud of it, but I find people either love the electric heavy metal banjo, or they prefer the more traditional tones, OR like most people- they HATE BANJOS! haha
Don't let the idea that so far you have not made $$. You will leave a legacy behind and YOU will always get credit for your work, from all you have said here. And I get credit for my work, and never made more than a few $$ on sold MP3s- so I count that 0 profit. I expected to change the entertainment industry, yet many did not believe I was real, many thought I was tricking them, and others OFTEN said
"Why not just play a guitar?" ARGH... They never could understood that the whole point was to do something that everyone told me could not be done. Anyone that takes a standard banjo and drys to play like Metallica will need some serious modifications made to get the tone I did.
It all boiled down to no market for my invention. I do feel if I had came out with this stuff back in the 1960's it would of went over big time. But in the 1990's the world had changed too much. I keep looking for somebody to tell me "good job" and all I got was looks of sorry from people. I learned a lot though....
It's not about money$$. It's about doing something we are proud of so we know when our number comes up we left our mark on this world.
I love your story you are the man for the job. I think the problem is we have an army of inventors in the world. The good ideas sometimes are not really discovered until many years after an inventor gives up. Be happy that you invented something that has so much potential. You may very well see the day somebody sees the fruits of all of your labor. At least I feel YOUR invention has a much better chance of making $$ than my HEAVY METAL BANJO invention does!!
I NO LONGER LOOK THIS WAY! PEOPLE CAN CHANGE A LOT!!