Peter Florjančič
Inventor behind scores of gadgets who lived the high life and made and lost ‘truckloads’ of money
PETER FLORJANČIČ, who has died aged 101, invented some of the most ingenious and desirable gadgets and gizmos that make life easier, safer or just more fun, among them the perfume spray, the plastic photographic slide frame, and the stylish cigarette lighter used by 007 to spark up in numerous James Bond films.
Florjančič held more than 400 patents, earned and lost several small fortunes, claimed French, Austrian, German, Yugoslav and Slovene nationality, and liked to calibrate his life in the way other people tot up a shopping list.
“I’ve had five citizenships, 43 cars and the longest passport,” Florjancič noted. “The profession of inventor forced me to spend 25 years in hotels, four years in cars, three years on trains, a year and a half on aeroplanes and a year on board of ships.”
Among his most widely used inventions are the cigarette lighter with the side-mounted knurled cylinder system of ignition, a design he sold to Dunhill; the ski holder used in front of hotels at skiing resorts, and a treadmill for skiing similar to those in fitness centres.
In the 1950s Florjančič just failed to perfect a sort of precursor of the modern airbag for cars. Developed chiefly for the market in the Netherlands, where car accidents often end in water, his airbag was supposed to prevent the car from sinking. But in 1957 his prototypes kept exploding when deployed. It would be another 30 years before someone else cracked the problem.
Another near-miss for Florjančič dated from 1948, when he made a plastic zipper which generated much excitement in the fashion business. “We washed it, and everything was perfect,” he recalled. “Then we ironed the jacket – but we couldn’t get the zipper open any more, because it had melted. The champagne we had ready to celebrate, we drank in sorrow not in success.”
Florjančič withdrew the patent, and earned nothing from the plastic zip’s eventual triumph, when someone else reinvented it using tougher materials.
Peter Florjančič was born on March 5 1919 in Bled, Slovenia, then a fashionable lakeside ski resort. His parents ran a hotel patronised by many international glamorous figures of the day, including members of the then Yugoslav royal family.
A precocious child, he demonstrated an inventive streak at the age of six, when his mother rebuked him for wiping his nose on his shirtsleeve. Peter made a sheath of fabric which he slid over his sleeve, so that he could persist in this unattractive habit without incurring parental wrath.
When he was 16 he was the youngest member of the Yugoslav ski jumping team, and within another two years became the owner of a textile mill, where he honed his exceptional skills of self-promotion.
Conscripted into the German army, he deserted in 1943 and, pursued by the Gestapo, fled to Austria disguised as a skiing tourist, faked his own death in an avalanche and disappeared into neutral Switzerland.
In Bern he patented a weaving machine that could be used by disabled people – amputees or war wounded for example – which earned him 100,000 Swiss francs, enough to buy “a castle or two very nice houses”.
But Florjančič blew the lot living it up at Davos, the opulent ski resort, where he outspent the Aga Khan, and in Zurich, where he met his wife, Verena, married and had his first child. In the late 1940s he took his wife and daughter, Marion, for a short holiday in Monte Carlo, where he met Ilhami Hussein, the Pasha of Egypt, sunbathing on the hotel terrace.
A poolside incident in which Marion accidentally doused the Pasha with water led to him asking Florjančič if he could buy his cute little daughter from him; even though Florjančič declined to sell, the two men went into business together, marketing Florjančič’s inventions.
He stayed for 14 years. In his biography – only available in Slovenian as Skok V Smetano (“Jump into the Cream”) – Florjančič admitted that it was his ability to entertain at parties with his storytelling that proved to be his ticket to Monte Carlo’s high life.
Among those with whom he hobnobbed were Orson Welles, Rita Hayworth, Aristotle Onassis, Frank Sinatra, Salvador Dali, Coco Chanel, Charles Trenet, Gilbert Bécaud, a young Audrey Hepburn and the Canadian perfumier Elizabeth Arden. He once watched King Farouk, who had anchored his gold-plated yacht in the marina, order one million Swiss francs to be brought to the gaming table on a dozen plates.
Florjančič lived the high life too, caught in a social whirl so frenzied that he reckoned he wore out a tuxedo a week. For the nightly dinners and parties, he dressed his wife in Dior gowns, and Florjančič himself fleetingly appeared in a non-speaking role sitting alongside Marlene Dietrich at the roulette wheel in the 1957 film The Monte Carlo Story.
It was in Monte Carlo that Florjančič came up with his design for perfume atomiser bottles, which the cosmetic industry still uses. He had noticed women hauling heavy bottles of perfume out of their handbags and spraying themselves with scent by squeezing unwieldy rubber bulbs connected to a tube.
His own initial attempt at a compact perfume spray was far from perfect. “But then we developed the idea and it is popular up to this day. Everybody still uses this system.” Parfumerie de France praised his simple atomiser, and Florjančič signed a lucrative contract with the Elizabeth Arden company.
In 1961 he moved to Austria, where he opened his own factory and invented plastic ice-skates and, in 1969, plastic photograph slide frames. These sold by the billion over the following three decades, when Kodak, Fuji and Agfa started producing them, and remained a popular and useful product until the arrival of digital projectors. “Gold lies on the streets and you just need to dig it up with ideas,” he declared. “Ideas are like the shovel.”
Not that all Florjančič’s ideas unearthed pots of gold. Among the duds were patents for a drinking straw holder and an ice spear for chilling drinks. His broad belt to help couples dance in time together never quite caught on, nor did his shoe guard for drivers anxious to prevent their heels getting scuffed.
But he did come up with a machine for injecting plastic into moulds, his most successful moneymaking venture of all, which brought him the then stupendous sum of 1.5 million German marks. The money came – and went – “in truckloads”. For as usual with Florjančič, it seemed to run through his fingers. “I had seven houses and squandered them all … But I had a great time,” he recalled with a smile.
Florjančič believed that to succeed as an inventor one needed peace and quiet and a sense of playfulness, a quality he considered inhibited by modern schools and other educational institutions.
An example of his own childlike playful spirit (which chimed with his lifelong reputation as a ladies’ man) was an occasion in Italy when he played recordings of passionate sex in his hotel room for hours on end, in order to luxuriate in the other guests’ admiring glances the next morning.
He remained active in old age, continuing to win awards and attract investors. In 2006, at an international trade fair in Nuremberg, Germany, his water fitness device won first prize among 1,500 inventions.
Florjančič claimed never to have taken a single day of sick leave; nor did he save for a pension, which meant he was obliged to continue to work, doing so without regrets.
When advising young inventors Florjančič always stressed the importance of identifying practical applications for new inventions. “There are millions of inventors like me,” he told them. “But I was fortunate to come up with products that sell on the market.”
Peter Florjančič returned to Bled with his wife Verena in 1998.
Peter Florjančič, born March 5 1919, died November 14 2020