AeroPress
AeroPress inventor and engineer Alan Adler has been honing his inventing skills since he was 13 years old. That was when he came up with an idea for a useful tool: an electronic device for measuring minute displacements in structures. When he described his invention to an engineer, the engineer was flabbergasted to hear that a 13 year old had invented it. He told Alan that his creation was an existing device called a "strain gage" that had been invented the year Alan was born! So began Alan's lifelong inventing streak.
In Alan's early career he worked as an electrical engineer designing systems for high tech companies. He was fascinated by sailboats and taught himself aerodynamics so that he could learn to design them. His studies led him to design a radically light boat he called the Fast-40 which became a production series manufactured in Rockland, Maine. Alan also designed a 60-foot racing ketch he called Etosha, which was the first monohull to finish in the 1998 Singlehanded TransPacific Race from San Francisco to Hawaii.
But it was in the 1980s that the company now known as AeroPress was born. At that point, Alan was frustrated. The company that sold his invention, the Skyro flying ring, just wasn't manufacturing the product to the standards he'd hoped they would. When Alan invented the groundbreaking Aerobie™ flying ring, which went on to set a Guinness World Record for farthest thrown object at an incredible 1,333 feet (406 meters), his wife Irene suggested that he start his own company in order to manufacture and sell his new invention just the way he wanted. So in 1984 he founded Superflight, Inc. to do just that.
Aerobie is a trademark of Spin Master Ltd.
Over the course of two decades, Alan cemented Superflight’s reputation as the go-to company for thoughtfully designed, meticulously engineered high performance sporting goods by introducing 18 total products to great acclaim. In 2005 he changed the company name to Aerobie, Inc. after recognizing that millions of people knew the company by its Aerobie brand.
In 2003, Alan embarked on a new adventure - a dramatic departure from the company’s progress until that point. Dismayed by his own bad experiences with home coffee makers, and inspired by a conversation about how difficult it was to make a single cup of good coffee, Alan began to experiment with ways to do just that. He spent months studying the coffee brewing process to determine which variables affect the taste of brewed coffee. Once he understood the ideal conditions for brewing a cup of coffee, Alan set about designing a manual coffee press that would brew coffee under those ideal conditions. Two years and over 30 prototypes later he finalized the design and introduced the AeroPress coffee maker at Coffee Fest Seattle in November 2005. The AeroPress coffee maker has earned rave reviews for the delicious flavor of the coffee it brews.
Today, Alan holds over 40 patents. He has designed instrumentation systems for military aircraft, nuclear reactors, and submarines, a paraboloid lens for telescopes, and dozens of flutes in addition to his boats and Aerobie products. Along with the course on sensors he taught for Stanford University's mechanical engineering students, he has given guest lectures on engineering design, aerodynamics, and inventing at NASA, Google, Caltech, Princeton, UC Davis, and The Royal Aeronautical Society in London.