Isn’t it funny how things go around sometimes?
Long ago I met my future wife after mooring up next to her. We spent the next few years being young ‘loveaboards’ and enjoying Narrowboat life. We then did the ‘house thing’ and 30 years later, after ending up with the neighbours from hell, we decided to return to Narrowboat life. We revelled in the freedom of it all again and, once we had got used to the space, settled down to the usual daily routines of boaty life.
One of these was the stove. The good old glow in the corner. It was while going through the usual faff of coming in and getting the stove going that I thought that there must be some way of improving this procedure. You know what it’s like - bits of paper, firefighters, carefully stacked kindling and the precarious balancing act of the coals. Then watching it all fall apart and trying to jiggle things about and re-stack etc etc only for it to go out and start again. It suddenly dawned on me that if it had a basket of some sorts, I could just bung it all in and it would take the faff and balancing act out of the procedure. I got the pliers out and made a rough prototype out of an old fire guard and, guess what, it worked a treat! I could not believe it! It worked and it was so simple. Suddenly, I had a stack of glowing coal that looked good and all I had to do was top it up. In fact, what I soon realised was that I could put an amount in that would last me all day with no constant topping up and no over-filling of the stove base. The pyramid of coal was no more! I could not wait to tell my wife when she came home. All we could do was sit and look at it! It was better than telly! Surely, I asked myself, there must be something available already? No - nothing. Nothing at all like it was available as a stove accessory for coal. I wanted to tell my acquaintances in my boaty world but it dawned on me that I may have stumbled upon a potential future income that needed more thinking about.
The original prototype lasted a week!!! I did not realise that metal burned! This meant getting into the qualities of materials. I learnt more about physics and metallurgy over the next few weeks than I had at school! Stainless steel and sturdy construction were the way forward. Another prototype - and this was the answer. Wherever we moored we would be off sneaking about in stove shops measuring grate sizes to get the most appropriate size for a mixture of stoves. Next it was off to Birmingham to have a chat at Birmingham Library with the Intellectual Property team and access to a free interview with a Patent Lawyer. All the while this process was going on it was the hardest thing to keep quiet! We were so excited with how it was working and improving our stove experience. Visitors to the boat were kept at a minimum whilst we tried surreptitiously to draw any attention away from our stove. We now could not imagine life without it! I was constantly trawling the internet and trade magazines in case I had missed it somewhere but, no, it appeared that we had definitely stumbled onto something.
The big leap was taking out the Patent Application and the costs, plus trademarking the name. We went through the usual ‘think of a name’ scenarios and decided that ‘Coalcage’ was what it was, and what it did, so decided that this was it. This is what we had called it from its inception anyway! I wanted it to be a UK product so searched for a supplier and, after few brush offs, I found my saviour up north and a fabulous Victorian family business who could produce the quality the product needed. Getting the first batch was so exciting as it suddenly became real. Boxes and labels agreed with a local printer and we were away.
It’s hard to believe that it’s taken two years to get this far!