Inventions: To Build a Better Pill Counter

No people gulp more pills than Americans. Each year the nation’s 65,000 pharmacies and 7,137 hospitals fill a billion prescriptions, mostly pills. Amazingly, in an era when men walk on the moon, millions of high-priced man-hours are wasted counting all the pills by hand. Riches have long awaited the inventor who could devise an automatic pill counter.

This idea struck Harry Roseberg, a California tinkerer who was scratching out a living as a salesman, as he watched a pharmacist count pills one day in 1962. For a start, Roseberg borrowed $40 from a brother-in-law, Irving Zeiger, and began buying materials to create a pill counter. Eventually he came up with a device that consists of a plastic turntable and a counterrotating gearlike disk. Pills are dumped on the turntable, forced into line by the disk, automatically spaced out for counting by a tiny photoelectric cell, and dropped into a pillbox.

When Roseberg tried to sell the invention to several major corporations, including Fairchild Camera & Instrument Corp., he met only indifference. Reluctantly, he turned again to Zeiger for financial help. They formed “RX COUNT Corp.” in Hawthorne, Calif., produced 75 pill counters, and leased them to Los Angeles County drugstores for two years of testing and refining. Roseberg and Zeiger concluded that leasing would be more profitable for them and more convenient for many druggists, who are reluctant to buy new equipment outright.

Last winter, armed with testimonials from druggists, the two men contracted with McKesson & Robbins Drug Co. to market the pill counter nationally. Now 1,900 salesmen are distributing leases at $17.50 a month. RX COUNT has already signed 1,724 leases and its revenues are running at an annual rate of almost $362,000—just for openers. Negotiations to produce and lease the counter are going on in Canada, Europe, South Africa and Australia. Rose-berg, now 56, is talking about a model that will also package the pills, type the labels and present a bill to the customer.