Back in February I had the wonderful experience of sitting in on a casting call for a new PBS seris that launches this weekend called Everyday Edisons. The show will follow 7 inventors through 14 weekly episodes as their inventions are taken from rough idas to store shelves by an expert tea of industrial designers, engineers, marketing experts and web designers.

I’m working with Louis Foreman, the Creator of Everyday Edisons, on a book project that will be a tie-in to the show and he invited me down to see one of their casting calls for the second season in person. And what I saw was tremendously interesting. The lines began forming early in the morning and by the time the first staff members arrived to set up, there were already hundreds of inventors waiting outside the studio in lines winding down the sidewalk, filling out registration forms on clipboards and carrying products of all shapes and sizes. By the time I arrived at about 10AM, a couple hundred inventors had already pitched their ideas and the halls were buzzing with inventors talking with each other about their ideas and showing off their gadgets.

To handle the large volume of inventors and make sure everyone had plenty of time to pitch their ideas, they had six screening rooms, which each had 5-6 product marketing experts, patent attorneys, and manufacturing gurus (the show paid to fly in more than 50 experts for the casting call) to assess each idea’s potential. If the inventor’s idea was clever enough to get through that first round, they were invited into the studio to pitch their idea in front of the cameras and the Everyday Edisons judges for a shot at getting onto the show.

I stayed for a few hours sitting just off stage in the studio watching inventors pitch their ideas and found their passion and inventiveness compelling. One person I saw tryout for the show had spent more than $80,000 on his prototype. Another had flown in from Atlanta to show off his invention. Others had gadgest they had pieced together from what looked to be spare parts in their garages and one literally had an idea scrawled on a napkin. Louis told me that no matter how many inventors show up, they always make sure that every person gets a chance to pitch their idea, meaning that the show’s creators often end uup staying from 7AM until well past Midnight to accomodate everyone.

The show will be available to over 340 PBS affiliate stations and will beging airing this weekend (here in San Diego it airs on Sunday the 29th at 12:30PM on KPBS Channel 15) and I highly recommend checking it out if you have the chance.