Turn Signal Inventor Keith Taylor's Sad Tale: MyFoxAUSTIN.com

Turn Signal Inventor Keith Taylor's Sad Tale

Published : Tuesday, 18 Jan 2011, 9:01 PM CST
By CHARLIE LEDUFF
WJBK myFOXDetroit.com

The old saying goes that genius is one-percent inspiration and 99-percent perspiration. However, one Detroit inventor now realizes he should have spent at least five-percent on a good lawyer.

This is the story of a sweet, simple man on a dead end street caught between an airport and a cemetery. Here you either fly far away or you're buried, and Keith Taylor thought he had his ticket stamped.

FOX 2's Charlie LeDuff asked Taylor if he thought it would end up this way.
"Not in my wildest dreams did I think this would happen to me. If you told me this five years ago, I wouldn't believe it," he replied.

Back in the late eighties, a light bulb went off in Taylor's exquisite, unknown mind.
"I'm just a regular guy. The difference in me and inventions is I act on them instead of saying somebody should do that," Taylor said.

In his basement, the pastor's son invented the illuminated turn signal mirror.
A long and sad story made short, he patented his invention and crawled into bed with a supplier. He got paid, and he got out.

LeDuff asked Taylor how much he got paid.
"Around a hundred grand," he answered. "I bought a house for my mother in Troy."

The supplier went defunct, Taylor lost the house and had to move back to the neighborhood. Then a few years later, he saw his turn signal on a Mercedes, so he sued. He lost, the judge saying the Mercedes signal was different enough, but even the judge had to admit his lawyers were lousy.

"They took this patent and ran with it and never paid me," said Taylor.

LeDuff asked him if he felt cheated.
"Yeah, because I came to them in full confidence that they were going to work with me and help me, and they kind of just left me out of the equation," Taylor responded.

Now the patent has expired on his turn signal and Taylor has no more options unless Mercedes finds it in its heart to cut him a check. If they don't, they'll bury Taylor in the neighborhood next to his dear, old mother.
"You look at what his patent was, you look at what he contributed, and you see it's out there. The patent was held valid. The system just failed," said Dr. Ken Kohn, a patent lawyer.

LeDuff called Mercedes in Germany on Tuesday. Maybe they could help out. It is his 52nd birthday after all. However, nobody could be reached.
He was once a somebody. Now he's a nobody and nobody seems to care. There are a lot of people like that out there.
"This neighborhood has gone from middle class to under class," said Taylor. "I should get a quarter of a billion dollars from the ten major companies. $250-million."

Once his basement was full of ideas. The future was full of promise. Now all that's left are straws of hope. He even thought Obama might help him out.
"I don't think my name came up specifically, but I thought that was the general plan, that we (were) going to do right about this stuff. We (were) going to run this business right," Taylor said.

"It hurts too much to cry. Really, I can't cry," he added.