HAROLD AND THE SEA-MONKEYS:

As it happened, Signorelli von Braunhut was visiting Long Island that very afternoon to see her sister. We met at Timmons's office and then walked down to the Aegean Cafe ("Steaks Seafood Pasta") on Main Street for a luncheon. Von Braunhut is a very good looking woman whose age I was just too chicken to ask. But if she was 18, as she told me, when she started her film career in 1966, then she's about 70 now. She is trim and decades-younger looking in skintight jeans and an equally engaged V-neck top, reminiscent of the ageless Sophia Loren or Raquel Welch. She has an artful muss of dark hair framing a smile that's slow to form but amplified by flirtatious eyes that sparkled at the end of each sentence.

Over a salad, she said she was eager for me to understand the inventive genius of her husband, Harold. Beginning in the 1950s and '60s, he took out patents on 196 different inventions, gadgets and toys. That whole last page of zany novelties found in comic books for years was the domain of Harold von Braunhut. He also raced motorcycles under the name the Green Hornet. He was a sometime television producer and the agent for one of those guys who high-dived into a wading pool with 12 inches of water. He was a magician who worked under the name the Great Telepo. She said he also invented the Direct-a-Mat -- a device into which you punched your destination in New York City, and the machine told you the fastest subway route -- half a century before Google Maps.

Sea-Monkeys were von Braunhut's most lucrative toy (and still are: In 2006, according to the filings in this lawsuit, sales were $3.4 million). Part of what made Sea-Monkeys successful was a scientific breakthrough Harold von Braunhut claimed he achieved in the early years. In 1960, after observing the success of Uncle Milton's Ant Farm, von Braunhut first started shipping Instant Life -- simple brine shrimp that could travel in their natural state of suspended animation. This was the era when a good idea with smart marketing was the dream: D.F. Duncan's yo-yo, George Parker's Monopoly game, Ruth Handler's Barbie. Around the same time, the big-time toy company of the day, Wham-O, started selling a similar product called Instant Fish, which was an immediate dud.

"They didn't work because the formula wasn't thought through properly," Signorelli von Braunhut said. Wham-O's product was actually African killifish, which were supposed to come back to life when rehydrated. But they didn't. "So it really hurt sales for Harold, too."

Wham-O's 1960 failure led von Braunhut to reintroduce his creation with new science and a new concept. He worked with a marine biologist named Anthony D'Agostino, and using a process he flamboyantly called superhomeogenation, they created a hybrid brine shrimp that could more easily survive the United States Postal Service and be more likely to flourish after reanimation. They worked with the brine-shrimp species artemia salina, and because they made their breakthrough at Montauk's NYOSL, the New York Ocean Science Laboratory; they called their new hybrid artemia "nyos." (I contacted D'Agostino at his home, but his wife said he was seriously ill and couldn't come to the phone.)

According to Richard Pell, who maintains an aquarium of Sea-Monkeys at the Center for PostNatural History in Pittsburgh (alongside displays about spider-silk-producing goats and other attractions), "They were selectively bred in the early '70s so that they would have this extra long dormant cycle in their egg state, and they were able to increase that yield so that you get that satisfying swarm." Pell admits he's worried these days. "The new ones come from China," he said, "and they are technically not Sea-Monkeys because they don't come from that original culture developed by Harold and Dr. D'Agostino." 

Over coffee, Signorelli von Braunhut talked about this formula for altering the shrimp as one of her husband's greatest scientific breakthroughs, his greatest invention. Timmons himself jumped in to add that Harold's genius was with "the science to get them to live for a prolonged period of time." She agreed and said, "Yes, he went through tremendous efforts to make sure that they -- should I elaborate on that?" and then Timmons said, abruptly, no. Whenever the science came up, in fact, Timmons shooed me away.

Signorelli von Braunhut met her husband in the late 1960s, when she happened to be in the audience for a taping of a television program he was producing for the magician Joseph Dunninger. "Harold was such an exciting person," Signorelli von Braunhut said, explaining why she set her movie career aside. "Show business was kind of a tough thing, and I am not into all that myself. I liked being around Harold and the Sea-Monkeys." So she went to work for him, and later they married.

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