Powers of invention
To independent inventors, Jerome Lemelson was a champion; to companies, a litigious tormentor
What do the Sony Walkman, VCRs, bar-code scanners, automated warehouses, fax machines, camcorders, robots, ATMs, crying baby dolls, and propeller beanies have in common? All appear in the patent portfolio of the late Jerome Lemelson, the most prolific inventor you've never heard of.
So far, Lemelson has 566 patents to his name, the most of any American inventor since Thomas Edison. And he continues to win new ones, even four years after his death at the age of 74, as dozens of applications filed in his last years work their way through the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. "He had a fruitful, creative mind that has made him a great role model to independent inventors," says Arthur Molella, director of the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution.
Yet his life also holds warnings for other inventors. He spent much of his later years enmeshed in lawsuits he filed to protect his patents from infringement. While the legal battles netted him a fortune, they hobbled his inventive spirit and made him an uncomfortably controversial figure. "He suffered high indignation for years on end," says Jack Gilstein, a longtime Lemelson friend and a former General Electric engineer.
There are those in corporate America who scoff at the notion that Lemelson actually invented much of anything. They portray him rather as a clever futurist who manipulated the patent system by filing early applications for ill-defined technologies, then amending his applications to reflect more mature technology as it came to market. "A lot of people who have good technical backgrounds in the fields of invention have commented that his patents are relatively trivial," says James Pooley, a Palo Alto, Calif., intellectual property attorney who has defended corporate clients against Lemelson patent infringement suits. Companies have paid to license Lemelson patents, he says, simply because "the proposed cost of the license was less than the cost of the litigation."
Black and white. Many of Lemelson's fellow inventors, though, see him as a technological visionary, a philanthropist, and a defender of inventors' rights. "It's all down in black and white," insists Molella. "Never did he purposely develop an invention simply to get into a lawsuit of some kind. You can see the development just going through his notebooks."
Born to a middle-class family on Staten Island, N.Y., in 1923, Lemelson, like many boys of his generation, became obsessed with aviation. He designed, built, and flew model airplanes and, after vision problems kept him out of the cockpit in World War II, designed weapons systems for the Army Air Corps. After the war, he completed master's degrees in aeronautical and industrial engineering.
He followed a traditional engineering career for a few years, but his mind worked best outside company walls. At first he experimented with toy design, but he quickly branched out into electronics, robotics, and magnetic storage. In 1958, shortly before the first of his two sons was born, he quit his last regular job and became a full-time professional inventor. He spent 16-hour days tinkering in his attic and scribbling in his ever present notebooks. But patent license fees were scarce, and his wife, interior designer Dorothy Ginsberg Lemelson, supported the family.
The big money started coming in beginning in 1964, when Triax Co. of Cleveland licensed Lemelson patents describing an automated warehousing system. In 1974, Sony Corp. licensed an audiocassette drive mechanism, and in 1981 IBM paid him $1 million for about 20 of his patents in data and word processing.
It wasn't just ingenuity that made him a success. At first reluctant to turn to the courts, Lemelson gradually learned his way around the legal system. Starting in 1957 with a suit claiming a cereal company had stolen his toy mask design, Lemelson filed more than 20 lawsuits to protect his patents. Although he lost more often than he won, a series of victories in the 1980s made him wealthy.
The money--more than $1 billion so far--enabled him and his wife to establish the Lemelson Foundation, which promotes invention and entrepreneurship, the $500,000 annual Lemelson-MIT Prize, the Lemelson Center at the Smithsonian, and other programs. Even his detractors give a nod of approval to that part of his legacy. And his supporters like to point out that Edison, too, fought bitter legal battles--yet it is his inventions we remember.
This story appears in the February 11, 2002 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.
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