The Invention

Owen Doherty was seventeen, lived in east Belfast and had lost his house keys eleven times in a single year. His mother had counted. After the eleventh time, when he had to wait three hours in the rain outside his own front door, he decided that the problem was not him. The problem, he announced at dinner, was that keys had not been properly designed.

For the next two months, Owen spent every evening in the garden shed with a soldering iron, a box of old phone parts and a stack of library books on electronics. The result was a small plastic tag, about the size of a coin, that could be attached to a key ring. When you clapped your hands twice, the tag would beep and flash a tiny blue light. He called it the KeyClap.

It is often said that great inventions are born out of frustration, and Owen certainly felt that his was. He tested it on his mother's keys, his grandfather's keys and finally on the keys of Mrs. Quinn next door, who said it was the cleverest thing she had seen since the microwave. Mrs. Quinn's niece, it turned out, worked as a reporter for a local newspaper.

The journalist, a cheerful woman called Niamh, came round the following Saturday. She asked Owen how he had gotten the idea, and he told her about the eleven lost keys and the three hours in the rain. She asked whether he planned to sell it, and he said he hoped to one day, if he could find someone to help him. Then, almost as a joke, she asked if any big companies had shown interest. Owen laughed and said that he had sent an email to Kestrel Electronics, the famous technology giant, but that he didn't expect them to answer.

The article appeared on Tuesday under the headline "Belfast Teen in Talks with Tech Giant". Niamh had not exactly invented anything, but she had not exactly been careful either. In the article, it was reported that Owen "had been in contact with Kestrel Electronics" and that the company "was believed to be interested" in his device. By Wednesday, the story had been shared thousands of times online. By Thursday, it was being claimed on several websites that Kestrel was about to buy the KeyClap for a million pounds.

Owen's phone did not stop ringing. Classmates who had never spoken to him asked if he would buy them a car. A radio presenter asked him what he was going to do with the money. His grandfather told everyone at the bowling club that the family was moving to a castle. Owen tried to explain that nothing had happened, that he had only sent one email, but nobody seemed to want to hear that version of the story.

On Friday morning, a real email arrived from Kestrel Electronics. Owen's hands were shaking as he opened it. A spokesperson wrote that the company had read the reports with great interest. She explained, politely but firmly, that Kestrel was not in talks with anyone in Belfast about key finders, and that it was not planning to buy any device for a million pounds or for any other amount. She asked him to make sure that the newspaper corrected the article.

Owen read the email twice and then went to the shed, where he sat for a long time without switching anything on. It was his mother who found him there. She read the email over his shoulder and then pointed at the last paragraph, which he had been too upset to read properly. In it, the spokesperson added that the company's young engineers had found the idea "genuinely clever", and that Kestrel ran a summer program for young inventors. Applications, she said, closed at the end of the month.

Niamh's newspaper printed a correction the following week, in very small letters on page nine. It was not shared thousands of times. Owen did not mind. He was too busy filling in his application, which he finished at two in the morning and sent from the kitchen table.

The next day, he could not find his keys anywhere. He stood in the hall and clapped twice, and from somewhere inside the sofa came a small, proud beep.