The Journey from Stroking it Slow to Engineering the Perfect Pulse

That title might lead those with certain proclivities to think incorrectly about the subject of this episode. In fact, in this narrative-style episode, we look at the invention of an entirely new category of toothbrush that happened back in the early 1990's. 

It may be easy to see this particular toothbrush in a store and think nothing of it, but that's overlooking the 5 year journey that it took to commercialize it. Would you risk committing 5 years of your life to delivering a toothbrush that perhaps no one would want? No?

Well one man did. 

This story contains themes of:

1. Finding the right person or people

2. Solving your own problem

3. Doing what matters to your customers, so that they fight for you

A toothbrush may never match the grandness of the Eiffel Tower, or the prestige of getting to build the White City as described in other episodes, but this one is important because this kind of idea is illustrative of what most engineers should be looking for: a problem they have, that they can apply their skills to deliver, while at the same time needing to stretch themselves into something bigger in order to handle all of the challenges that success comes with. 

I like this story and I hope you will too. 

Thanks for listening to The Engineering Passion Express,

Brandon Donnelly

Transcript

SPEAKER_00: 0:00

Welcome to the Engineering Passion Express. I'm your host, Brandon Donnelly, and today we're going to talk about the story of a toothbrush, but not just any toothbrush, a very special toothbrush, one that I've used for years and that you likely have overlooked and have never thought about the invention of. The story begins in a periodontist's office in Seattle, sometime in the mid-1980s. There's rain on the windows, soft gray light, the kind that never quite decides if it's morning or afternoon. Inside the decor is beige carpet, laminated wood trim, plastic plants that haven't moved in years, and a faint antiseptic smell mingles with the sweet bite of fluoride varnish. The equipment hums with an analog whirr, motor suction drills, machines built before the microchip. And sitting in the chair is a man in a light blue Oxford shirt with a pattern that resembles something like graph paper. His elbows on the armrest, obvious that the shirt is thinner around the elbows due to being worn so much, likely because it's his favorite. And while he's sitting there waiting for the periodontus to come in, he's wondering why he has to be there at all. But then the periodontist does come in and gives him the bad news. He's got gum disease. The bleeding on his gums comes from bacteria that turns to plaque, which turns to a harder version called tartar, which then infects your gums and causes the bleeding. This isn't the kind of news that anybody ever wants to hear. And out in the world, there are two kinds of professionals. There's one like the periodontist that just delivered the bad news that says, you've really got to take care of yourself. You have to do a better job. The methods that you're using aren't enough, and you need to put in larger personal efforts. And there's a second type of professional out there, one that says, maybe the existing methods aren't working. Maybe it's not all on personal responsibility, but instead it's on creating a better system that people can use and get far better results. And over at the University of Washington, there's a professor just like the latter of those two professionals. His name is Dr. David Engel, and he knew, like most persistent problems, there is a root cause to everything. Letting them persist by continuing to use existing methods often does no one any good. He spent his time as an academic researcher trying to improve oral hygiene. Until then, oral hygiene was built on three principles people having access to the tools, in this case, toothbrushes, which at the time in the United States, there's really nobody that couldn't get a toothbrush. Number two, people needed to have access to knowledge of good brushing habits. This usually came from your dentist, or maybe your school did some sort of hygiene class, and that gave you the idea of the sort of habits you needed to have. But maybe if you went to a poorer school or one with a less rigorous curriculum, or you didn't have access to a dentist, you may not know these topics. And since we didn't have the internet, it wasn't as widespread. It wasn't something you could find on your own. The final piece of the puzzle was that people have to have the time and the will to apply these tools and best practices to get the desired result. The problem is, what if having all of that, the problem still persists? That's when better methods need to be found. And those better methods are what Dr. Engel was chasing. It's what researchers do, and more importantly, it's what innovators do. Remember, Dr. Engel, sitting in his office, was thinking about root causes. That's a dental joke. And he was thinking the same as the periodontist: that bacteria becomes plaque, plaque becomes tartar, tartar becomes infection and bleeding. Stopping the bacteria stops the chain. And what about stopping the bacteria? They are so tiny, they can slip between the bristles of your toothbrush. At that microscopic scale, they can hold on tight. People can harbor from 32,000 in a healthy mouth up to 20 billion in an unhygienic mouth with over a thousand different species of bacteria. It's estimated that each milligram of plaque contains 100 million of them. And most are between 50 to 200 times thinner than a human hair. Think about that scale. Toothpaste is made of tiny abrasive particles, often of silica, calcium carbonate, or hydrated alumina. If you rub it between your fingers, the toothpaste will just feel like a fine sand. And while this is small to us, to the oral bacteria, they are massive rocks, boulders really. And many bacteria can still hide between these and remain after the flood of the mouth rinse washes the boulders away. And Dr. Engel was thinking about this while also knowing at the same time of some recent electric toothbrushes that increase brush strokes and were proving more effective than traditional brushing. Those electric toothbrushes made sense because traditional brushing is around 150 strokes per minute. An electric toothbrush of the time could increase that up to maybe 2,000 strokes per minute, which is a significant increase in the amount of tooth surface that's being brushed for two minutes of brushing. All else being equal between traditional brush between traditional brushing and an electric toothbrush with increased brush strokes, it makes sense that the effectiveness would be increased. But thinking about scale, what if you had a brush that brushed 20,000 strokes per minute? What would that do? And how would that even be done? At some point that sounds absurd. Because if you had big strokes happening at 20,000 strokes per minute, you would disintegrate your mouth. But what if you had smaller strokes happening much faster to the point that you're vibrating your teeth? And the vibrations cause the stuff to move and shake and release. That's what had Dr. Engel thinking. And luckily, Dr. Engel had a colleague, Dr. Roy Martin, in the bioengineering faculty. Dr. Martin had been working with crystals, particular piezoelectric transducers. A naturally occurring version of this is quartz. These piezzos or PETs take mechanical vibrations and convert them to electricity. But they can also work in reverse, electricity to vibration. Working together, Dr. Engel and Dr. Martin found their prototype toothbrush drastically increasing effectiveness beyond anything in the market. But everything about that was impractical commercially. We're talking about the 1980s. The internet didn't exist, at least not how we know it today. Instead, it was the heyday of trade shows and conferences. To find what you were looking for, you would go and present and meet with people. Academics presented at conferences hoping other academics would add opinions or build on their work or that a company would pick up on their research with a commercial application. In this environment, Dr. Engel and Dr. Martin are presenting their work on gum disease prevention through better teeth cleaning via ultrasonic brushing. They present their works on using piezos to create the highest strokes per minute toothbrush in existence. However, they illustrate problems with the size of current piezos, with safety from being electrocuted, and other commercialization issues. All of that didn't matter at all to a man in the audience wearing a light blue Oxford shirt that looked a little like graph paper with the elbows slightly worn out, likely from being his favorite. This man was in awe. He understood the challenges they mentioned because he dealt with them every day. Bringing products to market was his job. He was David Giuliani, a Hewlett-Packard engineer. David himself was the target audience, and he was the solution to the doctor's commercialization problems. However, Hewlett-Packard didn't make toothbrushes. They would need a company of their own and capital resources. And that would mean taking a leap of faith, becoming an entrepreneur, and foregoing the safety and stability of a job. But what else could he do? Did he want to keep seeing his periodontus for the rest of his life? No. And he bet that other patients didn't either. And that began the five-year journey. A journey made up of manufacturing challenges, regulatory approvals, and dentist skepticism. Most inventors imagine this will sell itself. But Giuliani had been around the block and knew that wasn't true. Existing manufacturers controlled cells controlled shelf space. Early investors wanted to know who will buy a$50 toothbrush. That's like$150 today. And while this category exists in the modern era, it didn't back then. So Giuliani had to overcome these objections with a combination of optimism, resilience, and a large dose of intellect. The toothbrush over time, so Giuliani had to overcome these objections with a combination of optimism, resilience, and a large dose of intellect. The toothbrush over time became a health device in his stories. The idea of vibrations in your mouth morphed into sonic cleaning. And over time he realized he had to make it clear that this was not an incremental change to the toothbrush. This was a fundamental leap. Over time the story came together in the form of a name. The Sonic Hair Toothbrush. Something that told the story in a single word. This was a health device about caring for yourself that used sonic cleaning technology to make your mouth the cleanest it had ever been. It was about gum health, not whiter teeth like every other brush and toothpaste on the market. It wasn't about 20,000 Hertz, but about bacterial destruction. This is where Giuliani transformed the invention. Rather than equations, he spoke in metaphors. But these choices took years to stumble upon. And after that, he still had to find his early advocates, turning skeptical dentists into full believers. After all, they would go into dentist's office and show them the academic studies about how clean it made teeth and about the number of bacteria. But there's something about experience that a study just can't match. If you've ever tried a sonic hair toothbrush, you'll understand how clean it makes your mouth feel. For a dentist to go brush his teeth and realize his teeth have never felt so clean. And this is a person who knows the best brushing habits, who knows to replace his toothbrush regularly, whose career probably stems on having a nice, bright smile and fresh, minty breath. After trying it on themselves, they can't believe how clean their teeth feel. What a sigh of relief for the business. Giuliani began to get orders from dentists' office and their patients who are being told how great this toothbrush is. And in that success is when the real challenges began. Demand outpaced manufacturing capacity. We need more space, more production space. Materials and vendors and supply chain resilience become factors in the business. Then with the realization that they are onto something begins. The fight for shelf space. Procter and Gamble and Colgate control this at almost every national chain in the country. How do you stop those deep pockets from shutting you out? As he sat there in his office in his light blue Oxford shirt that looked a little like graph paper, he thought, maybe you don't shut out those pockets. Maybe we keep doing what we're doing, we keep improving the product, we keep telling the dentists, we keep letting people tell their friends about how clean it makes their mouths feel. Maybe then the shelf will fight for us. And that's why the Sonic Air Toothbrush sits there today selling tens of millions of units annually around the world. Hello to everybody listening to this podcast. I'm your host, Brandon Downley, and I would like to take a second to just say I'm grateful that you're listening to the Engineering Passion Express. It's growing and becoming more successful, and I would like to make it even better than it is today. I have a number of ideas for new episodes that I'm working on creating. However, these episodes do cost money to create, to host, to edit, and this podcast needs support. There's a few ways you can support this podcast. Listening is a good start, but we'd also like you to ensure that you're following us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or YouTube or your favorite podcast platform. If you really enjoy some of the episodes, please share them with other engineers. I encourage them to also follow this podcast so that you can start some discussions. As I said, I'm truly grateful to you all that are listening to the Engineering Passion Express. I look forward to a future where we start putting out even more episodes. And I hope you do too. I'll see you on future episodes of the Engineering Passion Express.