How to Befraud One's Investors
July 18, 2018 9:53 PM   Subscribe

Another Kickstarter campaign revealed to be a fraud: How the "Be." battery-free toothbrush faked a demonstration video. Having already collected over $400,000 in donations, the backers have quite a bit of vitriol to dispense (the creators have already labeled the revelation "fake news", despite having immediately removed the incriminating video).
posted by Christ, what an asshole (62 comments total) 13 users marked this as a favorite
 
I bet a lot fewer people would have been keen to invest if they called it what it is: a wind up toothbrush.
posted by runcibleshaw at 10:09 PM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


I mean, technically, I already have a battery-free toothbrush.
posted by RobotHero at 10:19 PM on July 18, 2018 [86 favorites]


I bet a lot fewer people would have been keen to invest if they called it what it is: a wind up toothbrush.

They do tell backers it's a wind-up mechanical toothbrush. The fakery, if that's what it is, is that they seem to have taken a video of the toothbrush running for about 15 seconds before winding down, and looped it so it appears to run for more like a minute--long enough to brush your teeth. Or half of them, depending on how thorough you are.
posted by Orlop at 10:29 PM on July 18, 2018 [5 favorites]


Looks like Kickstarter suspended their campaign today.
posted by darkstar at 10:34 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


i don't understand what kind of wind up thingy would make this work so maybe someone can explain -- if it can run for 15s on one crank, is there a reason you can't give it....4 cranks to make it run for 60s? or 8 cranks to make it run for 2m like the kickstarter page says? i realize it must not be that simple, but what mechanical principle makes it hard or impossible to just....make it work as advertised?

(i'm not good with 'things.' i wish i were. i'm like, an idea person! maybe i should start a kickstarter)
posted by capnsue at 11:28 PM on July 18, 2018 [1 favorite]


So, have we decided that people who call things "fake news" are uniformly bullshitters now?
posted by entity447b at 11:44 PM on July 18, 2018 [21 favorites]


Capnsue, I'm pretty sure that the principle is akin to how, if my car can go 100 km on 5 liters of gas, then it stands to reason that it can go 10,000 km on 500 liters of gas, but I can't just put it all in at once. Or… something.
posted by DoctorFedora at 11:47 PM on July 18, 2018 [2 favorites]


Guessing it’s a small capacitor in the toothbrush so can only store limited amount of energy.
posted by Saddo at 11:49 PM on July 18, 2018 [3 favorites]


So, have we decided that people who call things "fake news" are uniformly bullshitters now?


It seems to be heading that way. Which is really unfortunate, because it’s a very useful term, applied to actual fake news hacks. They’ve just been really successful at co-opting the term and robbing it of meaning.
posted by darkstar at 11:50 PM on July 18, 2018 [7 favorites]


It may just be mechanically spring-wound, like a wind-up car or older alarm clock. I wouldn’t expect it to have a capacitor, or any electronic components. That may be why it’s limited — they might just not be able to get enough spring tension to drive the brush for more than 15-20 seconds using their materials. But this is just conjecture.
posted by darkstar at 11:53 PM on July 18, 2018 [4 favorites]


It seems to be heading that way. Which is really unfortunate, because it’s a very useful term, applied to actual fake news hacks. They’ve just been really successful at co-opting the term and robbing it of meaning.

It was quite discouraging how quickly and easily, by mere repetition, Trump was able to co-opt the vocabulary, which was introduced to describe literally fictional news items planted on social media (Clinton dying of cancer, etc), and to divert it to mean anything critical of him in the media, especially things that are true.

I believe that the phrase should be entirely abandoned to the Trump people, so that it's a tell that users of it are assimilated.
posted by thelonius at 12:40 AM on July 19, 2018 [27 favorites]


These fools may have poisoned the market too thoroughly, but for a lot less than $400,000 I bet you could design, prototype, and produce some of a pretty good batteryless toothbrush made along the lines of the old shakelight flashlights, which featured an led bulb powered by a capacitor which was charged by shaking the light as if it were a spray can you were mixing up.

The barrel of the light had a central tube which was empty except for a fair-sized rare earth magnet, with the outside of the tube wrapped in many turns of fine copper wire connected to a circuit which conditioned the power that was generated when the shaking caused the magnet to move back and forth through the coil so that it was suited to charge the capacitor.

A couple of minutes of shaking was good for ~10-15 minutes of fairly bright light.

If you tuned it up by partially evacuating the central tube, say, so that more of the energy of shaking would go a beefier capacitor, I imagine you'd have more than enough power to run one of the toothbrush motors that already exist.

Like 12 years ago, there were lots of pretty good shakelights around, but when I went to replace mine and add some new ones about five years ago, I couldn't find a single decent one.

I do actually think machinations by Big Battery probably are to blame for that.
posted by jamjam at 1:40 AM on July 19, 2018 [12 favorites]


That video was so well done. He doesn't jump straight away into calling them fakes (ok ok except for the title of the video), but he just builds and builds and builds evidence and calmly concludes that based on all the presented evidence, it must be faked. Really good.
posted by like_neon at 2:01 AM on July 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


Wouldn't it be simpler to create a toothbrush with photo cell recharging? You could use mostly off the shelf tech. Eventually you'd have to replace the battery and that would create waste but you could delay that by optimizing the brush for energy efficiency. If you wanted to pitch the brush as being green, then have your company come with some sort of recycling scheme.
posted by rdr at 2:37 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


In other Kickstarter scam news, a boardgame that raised over $100,000 was discovered to have plagiarised massive amounts of text and rules. Thankfully, it was just suspended.

Stories like this make me angry, as someone who has struggled through several successful Kickstarter campaigns. Shit is hard, yo – but that's not an excuse to cheat.
posted by adrianhon at 3:48 AM on July 19, 2018 [8 favorites]


jamjam, I’d thought about that magnetic induction flashlight technology, too. There are problems with it for this application.

Lighting an LED takes much less energy than moving something with mass, especially once it is under load, being pressed against teeth. But also, magnetic induction flashlights are unfortunately not very efficient at converting mechanical energy input into electric output for the light.

Using mechanical induction (via shaking) for a toothbrush would be even worse than for the LED situation, because you would lose significant efficiency in the initial conversion from the mechanical shaking to the electricity, and then lose further energy via inefficient conversion from the electricity back to mechanical movement.

It would be far more efficient to keep the energy mechanical all the way through the process, to minimize conversion inefficiency/losses. Likely the best way to do that is probably to use either a wound spring or a flywheel to store the mechanical energy, which is why I suspect they are operating on the wound spring principle. But they just can’t seem put enough energy into a spring with a few seconds of twisting to store the energy needed for the time they want.

I’m wondering what happens to Kickstarter frauds...do they have to give the money back? Does there have to be a class action lawsuit? Can credit card companies claw back the donations? What if the money is already spent? Do the “inventors” go to jail for fraud or can they argue that they tried, but failed, in a good-faith effort? And why the hell would they post such an amateur bullshit video in the first place? So many questions...
posted by darkstar at 3:54 AM on July 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


That’s a great idea, rdr...that second article I linked in the comment above suggests a solar cell would be more efficient than a magnetic induction setup for a flashlight. It goes on to describe how a flywheel driven by a pull-cord could generate significantly more (though they don’t apply it to a toothbrush application).

I’ll stick to my Philips Sonicare. If I want to go truly green, I have a six-pack of Oral-Bs in the cabinet that require no energy input to use.

On reflection, the first two comments in this thread, by runcibleshaw and RobotHero, seem to have nailed this.
posted by darkstar at 4:03 AM on July 19, 2018


I don't think the fake toothbrush has a spring drive; that would plausibly run for fifteen minutes, although not on just a few cranks. I suspect the mechanism is nothing more than a flywheel attached to the guts of sn existing electric toothbrush. It literally starts slowing the instant you stop cranking.
posted by Joe in Australia at 4:43 AM on July 19, 2018 [4 favorites]


/r/shittykickstarters/ is full of things like this.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:44 AM on July 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


Shaking a toothbrush up and down to avoid having to move it left and right seems like a very Cargo Shorts version of robbing Peter to pay Paul.

Here is a trick for brushing your teeth even with a normal manual toothbrush that will make you feel like you just visited the dentist: rinse your brush, then re-brush your teeth (briefly) with the rinsed brush, occasionally re-rinsing it as you go. You’ll spend the next hour running your tongue over your teeth because they’re so perfectly smooth.
posted by DoctorFedora at 4:59 AM on July 19, 2018 [14 favorites]


It might be a direct-drive flywheel, which yeah, would be a terrible design. A spring at least would retain its stored energy when under a load that prevented the gear from turning. If a direct-drive flywheel is put under a load that prevents its main gear from turning...the flywheel just stops, and the system has no more stored energy at all.

Or, almost as bad, if the gear is uncoupled from the flywheel when the resistance to turning exceeds its power, then the main brush gear still stops while the flywheel just winds down.

In either case, their toothbrush that spins for 15 seconds under no load might not spin even one second once you pressed it against your teeth.
posted by darkstar at 5:12 AM on July 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


I've never had a toothbrush battery die on me, & I'm not really sweating the electricity from sitting the thing back on its base when I have an air conditioner and computer running. The fact that so many want this sheds light on the shadowy subculture of toothbrush nerds.
posted by broken wheelchair at 5:14 AM on July 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


I’ve just spent a fair bit of time on MeFi over the last few days reading about and discussing dishes, mattresses and toothbrushes. I am not sure why. But, I am prepared to believe there is a such thing as “toothbrush nerds”.

Human subcultures are nested fractally, indeed.
posted by darkstar at 5:18 AM on July 19, 2018 [10 favorites]


looped it so it appears to run for more like a minute--long enough to brush your teeth. Or half of them, depending on how thorough you are.

I think the solution here is just decide which teeth you like best and concentrate on those. Or use it several times sequentially. Whatevs.

Mostly I'm surprised that this wind-up toothbrush is a 21st-century thing. It really feels conceptually like an eighties Ronco product that somehow fell through a wormhole.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 5:44 AM on July 19, 2018 [9 favorites]


I'm very happy with the soviet-era nuclear toothbrush (зубная щетка ядерной) I picked up on the black market in 1997. It was a mint-condition Atlas M3X-3000 (NATO codename "Flossy"). It uses a radioisotope piezoelectric generator powered by nickel-63 to directly oscillate the brush, and should keep going strong until 2030 or so. Sure, the lead shielding makes it a bit heavy, but it didn't take long for me to build up my arm strength, and it really keeps my teeth smooth and shiny. Despite that, it can't seem to stop the bleeding of my gums. In fact, that seems to be getting worse.
posted by mondo dentro at 6:08 AM on July 19, 2018 [43 favorites]


The very idea of a toothbrush that uses stored muscle power to brush my teeth for me is inherently dumb when you consider I could use the exact same amount of effort to just rub a normal toothbrush against my teeth. Even if this worked exactly as advertised there's no conceivable way using this toothbrush could be easier than brushing with a dollar store toothbrush.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 6:11 AM on July 19, 2018 [8 favorites]


Now, if you used a pieziolectric generator in the handle of the brush, and brushed normally, the electronics could be used to add a high-frequency vibration effect. But not mechanical agitation itself.
posted by yesster at 7:42 AM on July 19, 2018


I am prepared to believe there is a such thing as “toothbrush nerds”. Human subcultures are nested fractally, indeed.

No doubt there are bristle aficionados.
posted by justsomebodythatyouusedtoknow at 7:53 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


No doubt there are bristle aficionados.

Of course, I only brush my teeth with the finest handcrafted boar's bristle, ivory handled toothbrushes (humanely obtained of course).
posted by jkaczor at 7:57 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


... and if left attached to the boar, there is no need for any newfangled, dangerous tesla electrical devices, a few gentle taps of encouragement to the boar and it does all the work...
posted by jkaczor at 7:59 AM on July 19, 2018 [9 favorites]


I think the real lesson here is than when faking videos, use still frames to avoid awkward jumps and make sure loops appear random, so that they are not as easy to detect. By the way, does anyone want to put money into my battery-powered... um... mouse?
posted by greenhornet at 8:15 AM on July 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Stay vigilant or something.
posted by urbanwhaleshark at 8:15 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


DoctorFedora: If you rinse your brush and scrub off all the toothpaste residue you are likely also removing the fluoride, which should stay on your teeth and help protect them. More info at the Guardian.
posted by zenon at 8:32 AM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


I use a basic toothbrush but we have electrics in the house and the selling point seems to be that the motion, speed, or some other difference in the way it works can brush your teeth better than you can by hand with fixed bristles. So changing shaking to spinning doesn't seem as crazy to me. It's like a hand crank dual whisk eggbeater. You could just use the energy to spin a beater around, but it's a different motion that you can't reasonably recreate without the crank and gears.

There are so many of these kinds of things on crowdfunding sites that I will probably never support one. That's really a shame because I'm a tinker and I do want to support individuals and small groups inventing and improving things outside of giant R&D labs. I do wonder how many similar instances of fakery exist but aren't noticed because they are on much smaller dollar kickstarters.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 8:57 AM on July 19, 2018


A couple of minutes of shaking was good for ~10-15 minutes of fairly bright light.

It was? All I got was a glow like a birthday candle. I wouldn't have called it a waste of money, because it would technically work in an emergency when you were out of batteries, but I would have called it a last resort.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:10 AM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


What about one that ran off a stationary bicycle? Connected through a flex shaft like a dremel.
posted by RobotHero at 9:10 AM on July 19, 2018 [6 favorites]


MetaFilter: the shadowy subculture of toothbrush nerds.
posted by cooker girl at 9:32 AM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


Why am I even in this thread? I only have one tooth.
posted by loquacious at 9:38 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Yeah, if you can use a flexible shaft to power the toothbrush, you have all sorts of options. You’ll want a clutch, to keep it from stalling and/or wrenching your teeth out.

If you used a small two-stroke engine...
posted by Huffy Puffy at 10:22 AM on July 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


Why am I even in this thread? I only have one tooth.

well it's not called a teethbrush
posted by atoxyl at 10:45 AM on July 19, 2018 [17 favorites]


Huffy Puffy, you might be on to something. A good gas powered toothbrush isn’t going to leave nasty batteries in a landfill. I think you have the next evolution in powered toothbrushes!

(Just, uh, make sure to leave the bathroom vent fan running.)
posted by [insert clever name here] at 10:52 AM on July 19, 2018


This seems like it would make sense to have a toothbrush attachment for a KitchenAid, since people rarely need to brush their teeth and make meringue at the same time
posted by aubilenon at 10:54 AM on July 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


Have a reciprocating saw and want your teeth really clean?
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 10:56 AM on July 19, 2018


Hi hello, my partner is a toothbrush and toothpaste nerd. We currently have probably seven types of toothpaste (one of which is labeled "dentifrice" and strongly resembles Pepto-Bismol in color and taste) in the bathroom cabinet. There are charcoal-bristled bamboo toothbrushes for occasional use, alongside her preferred Curaprox 5460s which until recently were not available in the USA and had to be imported in bulk. We have two toothpastes containing non-FDA approved enamel strengtheners, Enamelon and UK/Canadian Sensodyne, and three flavors of Marvis. For a recent birthday, an artist friend painted her a flat-lay of oral care products in our cabinet.

Ask me anything. I use a ten-year-old Braun electric that inexplicably still works and the heads come from Costco or Amazon or wherever. I like waxed floss first and that weird fluffy stuff second.
posted by a halcyon day at 10:59 AM on July 19, 2018 [13 favorites]


What about one that ran off a stationary bicycle? Connected through a flex shaft like a dremel.

Arm use wattage has been quoted at 90 watts of work. But that is quoted in the context of shovel work - typically.

Legs of a 'fit' person - 200 watts.

The original soniccare used 2 NiCD battery AA size. Lets call that 10 watts when used. (2.5 Wh-ish for a cell)

Leg based should get you where ya want. The material to get you that might make Sheldon Brown happy, but I doubt the space and keeping it from rusting would be worth the effort. And the uneven power application of legs along that shaft might be disturbing when appliied to teeth.

Or, if somehow, mains electrical power is offensive as the way to brush the teeth and you still need a device that one can hold what was wrong with buying a damn solar panel and using it to power the standard electric toothbrush? Is there some world changing event which results in no more AA or 18650 style battery cells being made and $400K worth of people know about it?
posted by rough ashlar at 11:03 AM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


I am biased against the swirly electric toothbrush and believe the hype about the Sonicare, however this has no basis in a familiarity with facts. Does this study actually support this inculcated belief or is inconclusive?: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/9487838

I ask because the only reason I use the ultrasonic tooth brush is that my dentist told me it would be better for my gums. I don't really see the point of an electric toothbrush unless it is better than the manual kind.
posted by Pembquist at 11:20 AM on July 19, 2018


How about a big sling that you sit into (maybe as you settle onto the toilet, maybe freestanding). Your weight pulls the sling down and applies torque to a massive stone or metal flywheel mounted on your bathroom wall or ceiling. Another series of gears powers the aforementioned flex shaft. Or hell, put bristle on the rim of the flywheel and just bash your face into it like a grindstone.

Good thread here, btw.
posted by stinkfoot at 12:24 PM on July 19, 2018 [7 favorites]


Now that I think about it a compressed air powered toothbrush would make a lot more sense than one powered by a wound spring, I'm no physicist but some quick googling indicates it's probably possible to get a good brush in from one of those CO2 gas cartridges. A refillable air tank couldn't contain quite as much energy but that's fine as long as you've got a bicycle pump and a few minutes for vigorous pumping.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 12:29 PM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


still waiting on my stupid kickstarter cooler to arrive...
posted by ejoey at 1:07 PM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


God-dammit, we can't even get the most depressing and nihilistic recent version of the future right!
posted by TheWhiteSkull at 1:15 PM on July 19, 2018 [2 favorites]


One of the other reddit threads also argued convincingly that an earlier video prototype from the same team just showed a video of a regular electric toothbrush with a big clumsy 3D printed case covering it. It's such an odd thing to scam people about. Did they really think they could do it, and then panic?
posted by phoenixy at 1:27 PM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


The video where it's probably just an electric toothbrush reminds me of the Psuedo AI thread. There was a similar idea there, of "prototyping" something by faking it for the purpose of seeing whether there's a market for it.
posted by RobotHero at 1:34 PM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


Ask me anything.

How can I get the forbidden Sensodyne?
posted by thelonius at 1:35 PM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


made along the lines of the old shakelight flashlights, which featured an led bulb powered by a capacitor which was charged by shaking the light as if it were a spray can you were mixing up.

Tell me more about this battery-less toothbrush powered by brisk back-and-forth movement. :)
posted by AlSweigart at 2:15 PM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


My favorite part about this is how even if it worked as advertised it would still be stupid
posted by aubilenon at 3:17 PM on July 19, 2018 [5 favorites]


Ask me anything.

How exactly might one acquire these enamel strengthening pastes?
posted by yohko at 4:34 PM on July 19, 2018


How exactly might one acquire these enamel strengthening pastes?

You used to be able to buy them on the dark web, but these days they’re all spiked with fentanyl.
posted by dephlogisticated at 7:08 PM on July 19, 2018


"Thanks for watching, and stay...vigilant or something" is honestly a fantastic sign off.
posted by eponym at 7:13 PM on July 19, 2018 [1 favorite]


thelonius and yohko, they’re on Amazon, but they do take a bit to ship.

Sensodyne with Novamin
Enamelon
posted by a halcyon day at 9:24 PM on July 19, 2018 [3 favorites]


Now that I think about it a compressed air powered toothbrush

Most professional dental tools are based on compressed air systems.

(I can't remember exactly why I went down that research rabbit hole a few years back, I was looking for micro turbines I think)
posted by jkaczor at 5:44 AM on July 20, 2018


Rabit holed it: dental spec micro turbines are about 300$!
posted by zenon at 7:44 AM on July 20, 2018


So this weekend I used a batteryless flashlight that had a squeeze mechanism, something like this and it put me in mind of this toothbrush again. The flashlight only seems to last five seconds at a time, but the form-factor is designed so you can keep pumping it one-handed while using it. The "twisting the bottom" form-factor is an annoying design if you might run out while you're still using it, because you can't add a twist one-handed.

And I think this bottom-twist form-factor was dictated mostly by what they could attach onto an electric toothbrush for their "prototype" rather than what would make the most sense for an actual product.
posted by RobotHero at 9:49 AM on July 23, 2018


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