Photo by Ken Munson. Hopewell firefighter John Nicol poses with his invention designed to help move hoses easier.

John Nicol's invention is a very simple-looking implement — it resembles a shovel, but with a flat metal hook at the end rather than a shovel blade. You wouldn't need it in your garage, and what you would use it for isn't immediately apparent. But Nicol's coworkers have found it to be very useful; it's become standard issue equipment in the city of Hopewell, and may even go into mass production.
Nicol, like his dad before him, is a firefighter, and has worked in Hopewell for the past 19 years. He also has some minor background in engineering.
"I come from an old-school family farming background," said Nicol. "You always have to make things."
Like most inventions, Nicol's device comes from a problem; in this case, the problem is moving fire hoses. When they hook up hoses to a fire hydrant, the firefighters have to make the water flow as quickly as possible, and that includes clearing out the bends and kinks that bunch up sometimes.
Unfortunately, doing that is not easy — anyone who's ever handled a five-inch-diameter fire hose can tell you that they're thick, heavy and difficult to move with your bare hands. Nicol came up with the idea of using some kind of tool to move them instead, but after calling suppliers and searching the Internet, he couldn't find one.
So he made his own, with scrap iron at his own house. According to Nicol, it works like a charm and takes a lot of effort out of the once-tedious process. It may seem like just a small improvement, but for emergency personnel like firefighters, every second can be important, especially when multiple calls leave them short-staffed.
"With our limited manpower, we need to make our job as easy as anything," said Nicol.
Nicol's coworkers liked the invention (called the "hose hook") enough that they got him to make three more for the other fire trucks in the city; it's equipped on all the trucks with the axes. Nicol didn't think of it much more than that, but his coworkers are now encouraging him to see if he can put it into mass production.
To do that, he has to apply for a patent, a complicated process in its own right. Although Nicol is aware of the possibility that a patent for a similar invention might already exist, preliminary searches haven't found any such thing. The process for even applying for a patent is also difficult, costing several thousand dollars, says Nicol. However, he's already earned some of that back, when the city awarded him $250 for helping to conserve city resources.
"I'm just sorry it took me 19 years to figure it out," said Nicol.

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