When Lawnie Taylor set out to develop a bleach that is kind to cotton, he had no inkling that the detergent industry had written off the idea as impossible. An inventor and former US Department of Energy physicist, he pressed ahead with experiments in the laundry room of his home in Germantown, Maryland.
Eventually he arrived at a recipe that whitens cotton without destroying it. He was granted a US patent in 2005, and this month the James Austin Company is due to start selling the product under licence.
It sounds like just the sort of enterprise that patent systems…
