Stanley Mason, who died December 6 at 84, invented an astonishing array of household items, including the disposable diaper, the squeezable ketchup bottle, the granola bar, microwave cookware, Mentadent foaming toothpaste, self-heating shaving cream, the "Wow" Playtex plastic underwire bra, and a cluttered attic of others.

Working through Simco, the Weston, Conn., research and development think tank he started in a two-story barn, Mason consulted for dozens of America's largest companies, which turned to him for ideas for new products. He did nothing to discourage journalists from labeling him "The Wizard of Weston," and he reveled in the implied comparison to Thomas Edison.

Like "The Wizard of Menlo Park," Mason spent as much time figuring out what consumers wanted as he did actually inventing.

"Edison's greatest invention was not the electric light or the phonograph," Weston told the Associated Press in 1989. "His greatest invention was the product development laboratory."

Mason, who also taught innovative thinking at the University of Connecticut School of Education, said he thought corporations tend to stifle inventiveness, and he wore it as a badge of honor that he had been fired several times.

His favorite firing occurred at the American Can Company in Greenwich.

"One day the chairman called me to his office," Mason wrote in a 1998 article in the New England Journal of Entrepreneurship. "I thought it was for a raise."

"I understand you are working on a disposable diaper," Mason quoted the chairman as saying. "Don't you know that no one will ever use a disposable diaper? We got along without you before you came, and we'll get along after you leave. Good-bye."

"You should always be fired in America," he told the Fairfield Business Journal in 1998. "That is how you get ahead."

Raised in Trenton, N.J., Mason began inventing things not long after he left diapers himself. At 7, he figured out how to turn clothespins into fishing lures and sold them to friends for 26 cents apiece. A few years later, he sold them slingshot rifles of his own devising. He claimed to have read the entire Compton's Encyclopedia by age 10.

Mason said he was inspired by his father, who developed the first electric chair for the state of New Jersey. He was also close to an uncle, a bookbinder who lived with the family and took Mason on field trips to walk Civil War battlefields and to row across the Delaware River like George Washington.

As a teenager, Mason worked at the Trenton Free Public Library, which happened to be one of 12 regional depositories for the U.S. Patent Office. After he graduated from Trenton State, he found work as a draughtsman at the American Steel and Wire Company. In 1942, he was the subject of a national Associated Press story after his car was the first in the country fitted with a synthetic rubber retread, a strategic wartime achievement.

Mason joined the Army Air Corps as a fighter pilot, and later a flight instructor, and served in Europe. After the war, he worked as an aircraft engineer for the Martin Aircraft Company, helping to design troop transports.

In 1949, in response to his own growing family, he came up with his first design for a form-fitting disposable diaper. "My wife asked me to put the diaper on the baby," he told the Seattle Times. "I held up the cloth diaper, and it was square. I looked at the baby, and it was round. I knew there was an engineering problem."

While it would be decades before a contoured disposable diaper would be successfully marketed, Mason later used the same idea to develop a form-fitting sanitary napkin, and once again used his own daughter to model it.

He worked in product development for several companies, including Armstrong Cork and Hunt-Wesson Foods, where he was in charge of packaging and new products.

In 1973, he founded Simco, which had eight permanent employees and a roster of more than 100 consultants he would bring in for special projects.

Among his first successes was microwave-safe cookware, which he developed in conjunction with a toilet manufacturer with expertise in ceramics. Masonware became a big seller and made a fortune for its inventor.

A dizzying array of products emerged from Simco, including an easy-to-open, stringless Band-Aid package; surgical masks; plastic dental floss and a new dental amalgam system; adult Depends diapers; a new method for making cat litter; a self-heating pizza box; a sonic method of sealing chip packages; hair dye; designs for Tupperware; and invented packaging for Pepperidge Farm cookies, baby wipes, shampoo, and on and on. When his daughter's dorm room was robbed, he developed a doorknob mounted burglar alarm.

"What I try to teach, and what people take for granted, is that everything around us was invented, designed, or developed by some person," he told the Business Times of Hartford in 1990.

At the behest of the Norwegian government, Mason once attempted to market sardines to Generation X consumers in single-serving packages that marinated the fish in salad dressing. It apparently fizzled. Another project that met with limited success was his dream of stemming dependence on foreign oil through the use of the fruit of the Chinese tallow tree. The tree grows in marginal soils, but its bean-size fruit can be processed into diesel fuel, edible oil, and cattle feed. He claimed it smelled like honey when it burned.

At first, Mason failed to garner much government enthusiasm for the project, and when he testified in a spacious congressional committee room, he said, "It was like trying to brief a bunch of hummingbirds in an airplane hangar." Although he eventually garnered government funding to grow test crops in Hawaii, not much came of the project. In recent years, the tree has been the subject of eradication programs in several states.

Mason continued to fly airplanes, both for business and pleasure, and also liked to sail in Westport Sound. An obsessive researcher, he rarely did anything purely for pleasure. "In the hospital, he was lecturing nurses that he had worked on suction design," his daughter, Susan Mason Jager, said.

Stanley I. Mason Jr.

Born August 18, 1921, in Trenton, N.J.; died December 6 of a heart attack; survived by his wife, Charlotte, his children, Douglas Mason and Susan Mason Jager, several grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and a brother, John Mason.