Is this man responsible for inventing the selfie stick?

Wayne Fromm was on holiday in Florence in 2002, with his daughter Sage, when they ran into the classic tourist’s problem. They wanted a photograph of themselves on the Ponte Vecchio, but it was crowded, there was nowhere to rest the camera and they felt awkward about asking somebody else to take their picture. Being an inventor, mostly of toys, Fromm was not going to ignore the problem.

“We were just alternating pictures,” he tells me from Las Vegas, where he’s been attending this year’s Consumer Electronics Show. “So when we came back to Toronto I started thinking about how I could create something.” It would take Fromm a long time to perfect a telescopic pole and grip that you could travel with, but which would hold a camera far enough away without slipping, breaking or being too heavy.

“I spent a couple of years looking at umbrellas, taking them apart,” he says. “I was studying magnetic pickup tools. I was studying anything that had extendable segments and a rod. I just kept meeting one impasse after another.”

Finally, in 2005, he filed patents – later granted – for a device he called the Quik Pod (as in “quick tripod”). A brief recap on 2005: Twitter didn’t exist. iPhones didn’t exist. YouTube didn’t exist. If you knew anything about social media, you knew that MySpace was the future. Fromm had invented the selfie stick ahead of time. Far ahead. Probably too far, if we’re going to be honest.

Fromm worked tirelessly to promote his product. He made an infomercial. He demonstrated it on QVC. He tried to crack Japan. He tried Britain. He tried Germany. The Quik Pod got quite a bit of attention, including from Jay Leno. It made some money. But it never quite reached liftoff. “It was a success, but it was hard to get into the stores. The buyers in the photo industry just looked at it as a gimmick.”

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Nobody is saying that now. Hundreds of thousands of selfie sticks are selling all over the world, but few of them are Fromm’s. Search for “selfie stick” onamazon.com or amazon.co.uk today and you won’t find a Quik Pod anywhere near the first page. It’s an expensive product aimed at the semi-serious photographer. It comes with its own carry case with foam compartments, and relies on the camera’s timer to take pictures. Today’s Bluetooth-enabled versions, many of them Chinese-made, sell for less than £10 each, and by the bucket-load. Where possible, Fromm is trying to protect his patents, but the monopoly on monopods (the selfie stick’s formal name) appears to be lost.

And should it be any different? Now 60, Fromm stands a good chance of being remembered as “the man who invented the selfie stick”, not least because he’s the man saying that he did so. However, as he admits, people had stuck cameras on poles for years before him. Which raises the question, is a selfie stick really something you can invent? “In hindsight, it’s a simple idea,” Fromm admits. “But if you look at anything – a shoe horn, shoelaces – there’s nothing that wasn’t created by somebody … If it were not for my work over the 10 years, today’s selfie stick would not exist.”