Liverpudlian Reg Furlong might well have cracked it at last.
He’s had a go at hunting submarines, a new way of gold-mining and running a strip show. Now his revolutionary KwikCab scheme is on the way to making him rich.
It will - he says - put an end to the world-wide frustration of queuing for taxis and squabbling over them when they arrive. When Reg saw an ad. in the Liverpool Echo to join the Royal Australian Air Force in 1972 he made his decision quickly. "I joined as a radio-tech. in Neptunes chasing submarines off Townsville, a lovely tropical city. I stayed in the RAAF for six years and when I was about to be demobbed I met a Frenchman called Bernard. He persuaded me to put my $3,000 payout into a nightclub - the first classy nightclub in Townsville. It had velvet wallpaper and chandeliers and Queensland had never seen anything like it. We called it The Terrace Club and it ran for 10 years before I sold out my interest."
Reg did the sound and lighting for the local Little Theatre before another ‘madcap scheme’ presented itself. He and his partner went gold-mining for six months spraying cyanide from sprinklers on to ore to leach the gold from it. "We were the first in Australia to do it and because you couldn’t buy the equipment we made it ourselves. We spent six months out in the bush in the heat hacking away and we were just getting somewhere when the worst monsoonal rains in 400 years hit us. Our gear was washed away down a river."
To add salt into the financial wounds, the recession followed and Reg said it was a good time to educate himself, attending university for three years and achieving a degree in economics. "I did nothing with it; I just wanted to prove I could do it, for my own personal satisfaction."
Next stop: the glitzy Gold Coast where fortunes could be made overnight - and just as quickly lost. "There, I bumped into an old friend who had a small club called ‘Rio’s’ that wasn’t doing much good; it wasn’t making him any money. He said: ‘Do me a favor and run it for me.’ It turned out the only way to make money with it was to turn it into a strip-club."
Reg, a man who chuckles a lot at his plights, admits that running a strip-club surrounded by naked ladies might sound like a male’s idea of Utopia, but the reality is different.
"It is a very, very stressful job. The first couple of weeks were OK, because all I could see around me all day were 40 naked women. After that I discovered they were also 40 neurotic women who used to nag me to death."
It was while he was feeling sorry for himself that he was sitting outside the club at four o’clock in the morning, waiting for a cab, that the idea struck him.
He had phoned a taxi company; but it refused his booking because there was a taxi stand opposite, which Reg explained was packed with late-night revellers. They told him to take his turn.
So Reg went away and invented ‘KwikCab’, a street terminal system that can be used to summon a cab with a coin in the slot. When a customer walks up to the box and inserts a $1 coin, it automatically dials the taxi company’s computer and the call shows up on the nearest cab’s computer. With the cab on its way to the box location, the customer receives a number issued by the box’s printer so nobody else can claim the booking; avoiding queuing in the rain, arguments over claims for the cab - and drunks.
The Gold Coast will have 200 KwikCab boxes and areas for their location in Melbourne, Sydney and Perth are being snapped up. Says Reg: "We have had thorough checks done on our patent application and there is nothing like it in the world. We plan to put about 10,000 units around Australia and then license other countries on a royalties-for-usage basis. I am on my way to the UK soon."
Each KwikCab box costs about $1,200 to produce. It is die-cast with an unpickable barrel lock and its computer instantly alerts base if it is being tampered with, is full of money, being vandalised or has not been used for some hours, creating suspicion. When Reg was demonstrating the invention to potential backers he inserted a dollar and a cab arrived before the printer had finished disgorging the numbered ticket. "They thought we had arranged it and it was a rip-off," grins Reg. "Now we’ve put in a faster printer."
It would particularly help overseas tourists with not enough English to call the taxi company and explain where they were waiting. "They don’t have to speak at all. The terminal tells the taxi computer where they are." This time, Reg firmly believes, he is really going to be rich.
