They say necessity is the mother of all invention. For Malibu’s Tom Hirsch, who has practiced in the same dentistry office on Civic Center Way for 41 years, truer words were never spoken.
Thirty years ago, Hirsch alighted on a solution to a problem that had pestered him for years: a lack of light in his patients’ mouths when he performed procedures on them.
Over the next two decades, Hirsch and his brother Jim, an industrial engineer, tinkered with and eventually patented a remarkable advancement in dental care called the Isolite System, and together they now head a company that employs 52 workers.
But creating this product was about as easy as a root canal and more discouraging than a mouthful of cavities. The self-made inventors flirted with bankruptcy, mortgaging their homes and that of their parents, all in the hopes that a dream would pay off big.
“It was based on need,” Hirsh, 67, explained of his technology. “There was never enough light in the mouth. There were shadows.”
Back in the early 1980s, Hirsch said, dentists conducting procedures on their patients used headlights on the ends of drills to see into the patients’ mouths. The headlights created shadows, though, making the procedures more difficult. Worse, the drills were attached to fiber optic cables, or bundles, that plugged into electrical outlets about six feet away from the patient. The bundles ran from $300 to $500, and they were fragile, much to Hirsch’s frustration.
“I kept rolling my chair over these bundles and breaking them,” Hirsch said. “I must have gone through six or seven of them before I realized something has to be done about this.”
The solution, he determined, was to put a light source inside the mouth: no more shadows. He just needed someone to design it. He turned to his brother, Jim, an industrial designer, to see what he could do.
“I remember the first thing I said to him,” Hirsch recalled. “I said, ‘Jim, I’m going to make you a millionaire. And you know what? You’re going to do all the work.’”
That was 1984. Little did Hirsch realize that it was going to take nearly 20 years to see his dream realized.
With Jim as the “design guy” and Tom as the “concept guy,” the original idea was to produce a three-piece mouthpiece (like what football players wear), that would provide light, suction, isolate the area being worked on and protect the patient’s tongue and cheek from cuts and prevent anything from going down the patient’s throat.
Eventually, with a bit of advice from a friend and fellow inventor, the two brothers decided to create it in one piece. During the early design years, the Hirsches went through about two dozen prototypes, each of which cost roughly $1,500.
None of them hit the right spot, and for about 15 years the project stalled.
Finally, in 2001, Hirsch and his brother had their “inventor’s moment,” akin to Alexander Graham Bell calling for Watson.
“We didn’t have any more money to make the one-piece prototype,” Hirsch remembered. “And I guess out of frustration, lack of funds, out of ‘I’ll show you!’ or whatever it was, Jim was using his design program and just hit ‘merge’ on the computer and forced the three pieces together. “
They tried it out. “It fit perfectly,” Hirsch said.
“By May 2002, we had a viable product,” he said. Now it was time to road test it. They took their new product to the California Dental Association meeting, and it immediately caught on. They sold 66 units that weekend.
“We sold each one for about $700 and afterward I was like, ‘Wow, we just made $42,000. That’s great!’” Hirsch said. “But I remember someone telling me something very important after that: ‘Don’t fall in love with your calculator.’”
They still needed to make them, and that required capital.
“We had to ask friends and family for money to get it started, mortgaged our houses, my parent’s house,” Hirsch said. “Three or four times we were on the precarious side of bankruptcy.”
The belief that the product would sell kept them going, though. Despite another design change that forced them to wait another six months before delivery of that first Isolite System, the brothers persisted.
The rest is history.
Since then, the company has grown every year, reaching annual sales of between 5,000 and 10,000 units.
Since starting out as a family affair—Tom’s wife did most of the bookkeeping—the company today has 52 employees. It outsources the manufacturing, but assembly, testing and shipping is done from its Santa Barbara headquarters.
“Everything is made in the United States,” Hirsch said. “We are very proud of that.”
Although the two brothers encountered setback after setback along the way, Hirsch said he has no regrets.
“I felt that if I had a need, every dentist would have that need,” he said.
