The device, the size of a transistor radio, utilizes a flashlight battery and two needles, which are sunk 1½ inches into the fruit. The meter measures the resistance to the electrical current passing between the prongs. The riper the melon, the more porous and more resistant it is to electricity. Unfortunately, the gauge, which will retail for roughly $30, won't be ready for mass-marketing this summer. Anglin worries that piercing an unripe melon could result in spoilage and contamination, so he's now refining his invention in his San Jose, Calif. garage. He hopes it will produce accurate readings by just pricking the rind.
Anglin learned electronics via a correspondence course while loading coal during the Depression for 40¢ a ton. Soon he was fixing local radios, sometimes making house calls of three or four miles on foot. "I'd charge 50¢ or a dollar to do the job and thought that was great," he says. By 1950 he had his own TV repair shop in Coal Fork, W.Va. The neighbors' needs sparked his first invention—a lightning arrester to protect a TV set when the antenna was struck by a bolt. He sold 300,000 before larger companies began marketing a similar product.
It wasn't until 1975, though, after Anglin had suffered six heart attacks and discovered he had black lung disease, that he got serious about inventing. By then he and his wife, Pauline, had moved to San Jose, where he continued repairing appliances. He sold the business when he became sick and began turning out gadgets. One improved the picture on old TVs, another is a substitute for jumper cables with plugs that fit into the cigarette lighters of both cars. And that's only the start of his inventions, he says. As the melon-loving Anglin knows, ripeness is all.
Saved by the Bell Reunion
The hookups, the meltdowns, the memoires
The case reveals what was really going on what they think of each other now!
