As a third grader, Tahira Reid Smith ’00, ’04, Ph.D., was already thinking like an inventor. 

So, when her school, PS 97 in the Bronx, New York, held a poster contest where students were asked to depict something each of them wished he or she had, she didn’t draw a typical childhood fantasy. She designed a machine. 

Like many children in the Bronx, Reid Smith loved playing double Dutch. However, the game requires at least three people, and she couldn’t always find playmates. On her poster, she drew her solution: Two poles that swung a pair of ropes, a girl like her jumping in the center. Red, yellow, and green buttons controlled the ropes’ motion, allowing the user to play solo.   

She won the contest. “And then I forgot about it until I came to RPI. RPI was where the invention was born,” she said. 

“I needed to take a course called Introduction to Engineering Design. Someone I knew recommended taking the section taught by Burt Swersey, and I’m so glad I did. Burt was an incredible mentor to me, and as an inventor himself, he brought an entrepreneurial energy to teaching,” Reid Smith said.

That semester, Swersey challenged students to design a machine or device that pushed the limits of sports and recreational activities. Students then formed teams and chose one team member’s project to prototype. 

As Reid Smith sat with her notebook and contemplated what she would create, she remembered her idea from the third grade.

“It was such an ‘aha’ moment. I began sketching out my design, developing a morphological chart where I iterated on ideas for different components of the machine. I was experiencing flow,” she said.

Her design took up two pages of her notebook. Swersey left several comments on her design, including a particularly memorable note: “Wow.” 

Swersey, who was also from the Bronx and very familiar with double Dutch, encouraged Reid Smith, then a shy sophomore, to pitch her idea to her teammates. They went for it. 

When she and her classmates tested the machine in the classroom, someone snapped a photo. In the foreground, Reid Smith jumps the ropes while Swersey smiles proudly in the background.

“That was the day the machine first worked!” Reid Smith said. 

That image, and the story behind the automatic double Dutch machine, is now on display in the Smithsonian as part of an exhibit called “Change Your Game,” which showcases 60 sports technology inventions. 

“Change Your Game” is housed in the museum’s Jerome and Dorothy Lemelson Hall of Invention. Since 2015, The Lemelson Foundation has supported the Burt Swersey Inventor’s Studio. More recently, the endowment has extended to support externships, undergraduate research, and three courses where undergraduates imagine, design, prototype, and manufacture their own creations. 

“What I created in Burt’s course was just proof of concept, but I remember him telling me ‘Start taking orders for it. You need to bootstrap this thing!’ I left RPI with a love for design because of my experience with Burt,” said Reid Smith, who earned her doctorate from the University of Michigan and is now at Penn State as a professor of Mechanical Engineering and Engineering Design and an associate department head for Inclusive Research and Education. 

Swersey, who holds 14 U.S. patents and founded two companies, served as a lecturer in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Mechanical Engineering for 25 years. He passed away in 2015, but his legacy of nurturing young inventors lives on. 

“What is unique about Inventor’s Studio is that it allows undergraduates to become inventors. Our approach is rooted in our 200-year history of putting knowledge and tools in the hands of students so they can be creative and explore their own ideas,” said Asish Ghosh, director of the Inventor’s Studio and invent@Rensselaer program and a professor of practice in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering. 

More than 100 Inventor Studio students, 20 of them women, have filed provisional patents, and more than 25, three of them women, have started companies — all while undergraduates at RPI.

Last year, Reid Smith began working with California-based product design firm Speck Design and Pennsylvania-based Innovators Club for Women to bring the automatic double Dutch machine to market. She launched Jump Dreams Inc. earlier this year.

In 2000, when Reid Smith was still a student, the Today show, The New York Times, and Essence magazine covered her invention. Now, the buzz around Jump Dreams is building again. Reid Smith is featured in an episode of NOVA called “Building Stuff: Boost It!” which explores engineering as “humanity’s superpower.” Reid Smith plans to host an online meet and greet and watch party. For more information, visit her website.

“I had Tahira in my mechanical design class when she was a student here. She showed me an early prototype at the time and how she was applying concepts from the course to her design. I was impressed by her work, enthusiasm, and determination. I’ve continued to follow her career with pride,” said Antoinette Maniatty ’87, Ph.D., head of the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace, and Nuclear Engineering. 

“Recently, by chance, Tahira and I were at a session on Design Justice at a conference in Washington, D.C., and she told me about the exhibit at the Smithsonian. I made sure to go over and see it for myself. It is inspiring. Today, in her role at Penn State as a leader in design, education, and inclusion, Tahira embodies the Rensselaer ethos to break boundaries and work to build a better world,” Maniatty said.

Reid Smith hopes to see more women and people of color become inventors and, like her, draw on their lived experience in their work. 

“Stories like mine are still too rare,” she said. According to Invent Together, an organization that promotes greater access to inventing and patenting, only 13% of the world’s inventors are women. In the U.S., Black, Hispanic, multiracial, Native American, and Native Alaskan inventors account for less than 8% of patent-holders. 

The child of Jamaican immigrants, Reid Smith said her drive to learn and create was part of her upbringing and still motivates her today. 

“There is a Jamaican saying, ‘Nothing beats a try but a failure.’ This means being persistent, trying until you can’t try any more. Myself personally, I need to know I’ve exhausted all possibilities,” Reid Smith said. “That’s also my advice to students and all inventors: Anything is possible if you don’t quit. Keep going.”