(Photo: Eliot Shepard)

Three years ago, germ-fearing model turned inventor Christine Goulden, 25, watched a homeless man walk into her subway car and rub his hands all over the pole and walk off. “Next thing you know,” she says, “kids come on and they’re sticking their mouths on it. I was just skeeved out!” So Goulden (pictured) came up with Metrogrip, a suede-and-nylon strap that is flipped over a subway handrail, eliminating bar-hand contact. The avian-flu scare made her think she had a gold mine—until she found out about TranStrap, a rival product from Stan Dolberg, a Boston inventor. “He actually e-mailed me,” says Goulden. “Like, ‘Oh, I wanted to let you know that I didn’t know about you beforehand. Good luck.’ Whatever. My Website had been up for a year.” But Dolberg says, “Up until a month ago, when I came upon a blog where she mentioned TranStrap, I wasn’t aware that she existed.” Meanwhile, TranStrap appeared on NY1 and channels 5, 7, and 11 in one day, leaving her to just post complaints about it online. Goulden is pressing on, recruiting cute friends to give demonstrations on the subway. “People want to see someone else using it first,” she says. “No one wants to be that weird girl on the train using the strap.”

Related:

• Archive: “Intelligencer”
• Articles by Jada Yuan
• Table of Contents: November 28, 2005 issue of New York | Subscribe!