So it’s getting dark, it’s getting cold, and it’s getting wet. It’s a dreary time of year, so it’s just the right time to put something cheerfully garish out on your lawn:

These are ideal lawn decorations! They’re big and bright, and yet pack down into small boxes for storage. They set up in minutes and come in a thousand different styles from tame to wild. They move – the dragon’s wings flap and the sandworm’s tongue rotates. They can have simple lights, or flashers, or even projectors inside for patterns.

What’s surprising is that they were invented quite recently, in the early 2000s. The initial versions were made of plastic and inflated with a hair dryer, and those flopped, literally. The earliest successful one I could find was an eight-foot snowman from 2001:

This was an early testing of the market. It shows all the key features: a built-in fan on legs, internal lights, and a nylon body with loose seams. The seams and the nylon are critical – they let the air out of every part of the structure, which keeps it fully inflated. They may have been inspired by the dancing inflatable advertising figures called Tube Men that you see by car lots. Those were invented in LA a few years earlier.

A key part of the design was getting a reliable fan that would work outdoors in any weather, and that took a while to get right. The fan on this one was really loud. They tuned it up over the next several years with better graphic designs, and had a big hit in 2004 when they made an inflatable snow globe with styrofoam snowflakes flying around inside. They trademarked the term Airblown Inflatables, and were off. You now see them everywhere around Halloween and Christmas, and there are a dozen fan clubs on Facebook. There are fanatic collectors who have thousands of them, since one of the bugs in human cognition is obsessing about gathering stuff.

So who invented all this? The main maker is Gemmy Industries of Coppel Texas, a suburb of Dallas. Non-Gemmy versions appear to be private labels done by them for the likes of Home Depot and Walmart. It’s privately held and pretty secretive. It was founded in the 1984 by one Dan Flaherty to make ballpoint pens and then novelty items like plush dolls. He has some design patents on things like picture holders in aquariums and water guns. Their first big hit was Big Mouth Billy Bass in 1999, a rubber fish on a plaque that would sing “Don’t Worry Be Happy” and “Take Me to the River” while mouthing along and wagging its tail. They sold millions of those, and I actually got a singing lobster version.

Their earliest US patent on inflatables is US6,644,843, “Inflatable figure assembly”, filed in Jan 2002 and granted in Nov 2003. It only expired last year, so that’s why no one else can make these, at least not yet. The inventor was Tsai Chen-Chang of Taiwan. He only had one other similar patent, and it was assigned to Gemmy at about the same time. There’s also a Tsai Chen-Chang who patented a lot of circuits for driving LCD displays, but that’s a very different skill set and he doesn’t appear to live in the same town, so it’s probably someone else.

Gemmy has lots of other patents by Taiwanese people, so the technical development appears to be done there. The actual manufacturing is in China, since it needs a lot of cutting and sewing. These are fun products, but have to be cheap to succeed. The graphic design is done in Texas, and often uses licensed images from the likes of Disney. Linked-in shows 126 people currently employed at Gemmy, with a mix of designers, marketeers, and product distribution specialists. That’s not that big for a firm that puts out millions of items a year in hundreds of styles.

So this is an interesting global collaboration: US media design and marketing, Taiwanese technical talent, and Chinese manufacturing. It took some high-tech in the form of neodymium permanent-magnet motors for the fans, which only came out in the 90s. It also took a lot of political maneuvering to open up China in the late 90s, and those conditions may not last. Yet while they do we can brighten up these darkening nights!