How Charles Johnson Turned an Idea

Into an Invention

When Charles E. Johnson Jr. ’98 came up with an idea for a one-handed game controller, he couldn’t have anticipated the 12-year odyssey he was beginning. Through patience, determination, smart networking, and a DIY spirit, his idea is finally coming to life.

By Bill Ibelle

Have you ever had an idea for a tool that would solve a real-life problem? Maybe you’ve wondered, “Why hasn’t someone invented that?” Maybe you’ve even thought, “I should invent that!”

Charles E. Johnson Jr. ’98 had one of those ideas. But instead of letting the idea become a passing thought, he devoted 12 years to bringing it to life.

It has been a roller coaster of elation and frustration, of breakthroughs and dead ends—all of which he powered through, fueled by unflagging persistence. “To me, each obstacle was just a problem I had to overcome,” says Johnson, who teaches history and social studies at Times2 Academy, a charter school in Providence.

THE SPARK

The idea came to Johnson when he was playing a video game—“Madden NFL”—with his cousin, who was born with only one hand.

“He couldn’t stop the blitz because there was no way for him to maneuver the two back triggers on the controller simultaneously,” recalls Johnson.

It just wasn’t fair. Johnson vowed to create an affordable, one-handed controller that would remap all the buttons so that a person playing with one hand could compete against a person using a traditional, two-handed controller.

But where to begin?

A standard game controller has 14 buttons connected to a maze of hair-thin wires. He would have to design and build a controller and rewire all those buttons in a new configuration for a one-handed person—hardly a set of skills developed as a history teacher.

But Johnson was not deterred. He set up a table in his spare room and molded a design for his controller out of clay and spare parts. Once he had the basic shape, he had to find the best ergonomic placement of the buttons. It was a little like playing Mr. Potato Head, using electronic buttons instead of noses and ears.

“I literally cut the 14 buttons off a conventional controller and used them to start designing my Frankenstein controller,” Johnson says. “When I finished my design, I showed it to a board member at my school who was a computer science professor at Brown. He said, ‘Great, now make it work.’”

FRANKENSTEIN LIVES!

Johnson didn’t have $10,000 to pay a 3D printing firm to manufacture parts. Nor could he run wiring through a clay joystick. So he went back to his spare room, fired up YouTube, and came up with a DIY plan.

“I started with a kind of art mud that’s the consistency of a milkshake and hardens in about 24 hours,” Johnson explains.

He poured the mud into a 4 x 8-inch box until it was about 2 inches deep, waited for it to congeal to the consistency of molasses, and placed his clay controller sideways on top of the goop, pressing it down gently until it was half submerged. He let this set overnight, and when he removed the clay model the next morning, he had a mold for half of his controller.

After repeating the process for the other side, he filled the two molds with liquid resin that hardened into clear plastic. Finally, he used a Dremel—a hand-held rotary grinder that looks something like a dentist’s drill—to hollow out each half, creating a plastic shell with a cavity he could run the wiring through.

He took the 14 buttons he had cut off the traditional controller and arranged them on his plastic shell so the most critical buttons could be operated with the thumb and index finger, which are a person’s two most dexterous digits. Because his model was much taller than a traditional controller, he had to lengthen all of the wires from the circuit board by 8 inches so they could reach the buttons. This was a delicate operation since the wires were the width of a human hair and, with two wires for each button, there were 28 of them.

So, he went back to YouTube to learn how to microsolder, then spent 12 hours trying to perform the operation, ultimately failing because he didn’t account for the different melting points of the wires and the metal clamps used to hold them together while he worked.

“What kept me going was a combination of stubbornness, determination, and wanting to help.”

­—Charles E. Johnson Jr. ’98

“I laughed so I wouldn’t cry,” he says. “Then I got a glass of wine and put on an episode of Kung Fu Panda. The next day I had to start all over.”

This was just one of the many setbacks Johnson faced during his project.

“The whole time, I was thinking, ‘This is pretty crazy.’ But I wanted to prove I could do it. What kept me going was a combination of stubbornness, determination, and wanting to help.”

His persistence paid off. With a few more months of tinkering, he got his Frankenstein controller to work and actually played a game with it. Victory was at hand. Or so he thought.

ONLY HALFWAY THERE

Johnson had proven his invention could work; now he had to find a way to mass-produce it. The first step was to get a patent. Without one, anyone he approached for fundraising or manufacturing could steal his idea and make it themselves. Once again, this was a subject he knew nothing about.

“To achieve success, you have to be able to network—and Charles excels at that,” says Annette Tonti, one of Johnson’s mentors, who is managing director of RIHub, a nonprofit business accelerator based in Providence, R.I.

While an undergraduate at URI, Johnson had worked at a Providence law firm. He contacted a lawyer he knew there, who introduced him to a patent lawyer in Virginia, who, as a favor, helped Johnson at a greatly discounted rate.

“Getting a patent typically costs $20,000 to $50,000,” says Johnson. “They did it for the $5,000 processing fee.”

The patent process took another two years, and when he finally obtained it, he had to figure out how to get investors. He started by spending several months writing a detailed business plan, which he entered in the Rhode Island Business Competition.

“I did terribly,” he says. “I didn’t even make it out of the first round. I’d done everything wrong. I’d been at this for six years, and I was running out of steam. I was ready to put it on the shelf.”

LEARNING ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Johnson had hit another dead end. He had a crude working model of his controller, but he had no idea how to turn it into a product. He knew he needed help—so he turned to his alma mater.

“You can create an invention, but you need entrepreneurship to bring it to life,” says Peter Rumsey, chief business development officer for the URI Research Foundation. “It’s a proven formula: Invention + Entrepreneurship = Innovation.”

Rumsey was another mentor to Johnson, working with Tonti to guide him through the labyrinth of entrepreneurship.

Rumsey runs RISE-UP, a URI program that encourages students, faculty, and even community members to become entrepreneurs. The program is funded by a $2.4 million Office of Naval Research grant. The Navy runs the program in just three states—Rhode Island, Alaska, and Hawaii. Each of the three states has three critical qualities: strategic importance to the Navy, a relatively small population, and a history of losing many of its brightest young people to innovation centers like Silicon Valley, Boston, and New York City.

“We’ve been suffering a brain drain,” says Rumsey. “So, the Navy wants to build the local workforce by supporting innovative business that will keep graduates in the state.”

The Navy wants to support businesses with both military and commercial applications because that dual use makes them more sustainable. So, one of the first tasks was to broaden Johnson’s base of potential customers. Targeting one-handed gamers was fine, but it was limited.

With the Navy in mind, Johnson realized that VA hospitals and organizations like Wounded Warriors could be another promising client base. Physical and mental agility are key factors in the rehab process, and playing video games requires both.

Johnson had another revelation while testing his prototype with students and faculty at Times2 Academy.

“One of the students said, ‘This is great, I’ll be able to play “Mario Brothers” and eat Cheetos at the same time.’ That became a part of my pitch, along with gaming-while-texting.”

Another key aspect of the URI program is to create an environment for innovation.

“When you work in Silicon Valley and go out to a café with some colleagues, everyone in that café has a startup company,” says Rumsey. “Our goal is to create that culture at URI and, ultimately, across all of Rhode Island.”

Students in RISE-UP work in cohorts, in which people with different types of inventions learn from each other and critique pitches. For example, Johnson’s cohort included inventors working on deep-sea communications, a gel-based battery, and mobile technology for sidewalk repair.

Johnson’s inclusion in this group is evidence that the landscape of innovation has changed dramatically in recent years, according to Rumsey.

“It used to be that if you were an engineer, you had a huge advantage because you knew how to build things,” Rumsey says. “But with the growth of 3D printing, almost anyone can do that now. The scarce resource isn’t engineering anymore; it’s creativity.”

Programs like RISE-UP and resources like RIHub have also helped to democratize the entrepreneurial process.

“In the past, entrepreneurship was seen as a kind of magic that could only be performed by certain types of people,” says Rumsey. “That has been largely disproven. At URI, we’ve created a program that teaches the skills needed so anyone can become an entrepreneur.”

INTO MASS PRODUCTION

In addition to working on his customer base, Johnson had to get that failed business plan in order.

“It used to be that business plans were a hundred pages long with charts and statistics that no one would read,” says Rumsey. “Now, we create a one-page business model canvas that consists of nine boxes with key points on several categories such as marketing, sustainability, customers, product uniqueness, and more.”

In 2023, Johnson reentered the Rhode Island Business Competition with his reworked business plan—and this time he won.

Top and bottom views of Charles Johnson’s single-hand video game controller. They are now on the market through his company, Nhuad Controllers.

“Charles has risen to the top in virtually every business competition Rhode Island offers,” says Tonti. “He’s one of the best communicators we’ve worked with. When we first met him, he was a diamond in the rough that needed some polishing. But he has the raw talent for this—and not everyone does.”

Johnson still had to find a way to manufacture the product. Once again, it came down to networking. Rumsey introduced him to Joe Loberti ’88, M.S. ’90, an entrepreneur who teaches in URI’s Ideation Studio and serves on the RIHub advisory board. Loberti introduced him to Ed Machala ’77, whose company, International Precision Assemblies, operates several manufacturing plants in the Philippines. Loberti, Machala, and Rumsey all worked at American Power Conversion, now APC by Schneider Electric, in Kingston, R.I., helping to grow the company from a startup to a $3 billion company.

After testing Johnson’s prototype in the Philippines and Japan, Machala helped refine the controller for mass production and offered Johnson a revenue-sharing agreement so he wouldn’t have to provide large sums of up-front money to create all the necessary tooling.

Johnson named his controller Nhuad after a mythological Celtic warrior who lost an arm in battle. The first shipment of 75 controllers arrived at Johnson’s door just a few months ago, and he has begun distributing them to companies like Able Gamers, Hasbro, and Wounded Warriors. They will be available on Amazon soon.

“The best moment in this whole process was opening the box from the factory and seeing the first finished controller,” says Johnson. “It was a moment to celebrate. I’d been at it for 12 years and didn’t think I’d ever make it.”

PHOTOS: BEAU JONES, COURTESY CHARLES JOHNSON; ILLUSTRATION: ISTOCK