Jerome H. Lemelson - Biography

Biography

Lemelson was born on Staten Island, New York, on July 18, 1923, the oldest of three brothers. His father was a physician of Austrian Jewish descent. His first invention, as a child, was for a lighted tongue depressor that his father, a local physician, could use. He also ran a business in his basement as a teenager, making and selling gas powered model airplanes. He attended New York University after serving during World War II in the Army Air Corps engineering department. His experience with teaching African American engineers, in segregated units in the Army, led to a lifelong interest in civil rights and in particular promoting the education of minority engineering students.

After the war he received two master's degrees: in aeronautical and industrial engineering. He worked for the Office of Naval Research on Project SQUID, a postwar effort to develop pulse jet and rocket engines and then Republic Aviation, designing guided missiles. After taking a job as a safety engineer at a smelting plant in New Jersey, he quit because he claimed the company would not implement safety improvements Lemelson believed could save lives. This was his last job before striking out on his own as an independent inventor.

Lemelson's first major invention involved utilizing a universal robot, for use in a variety of industrial systems, that could do numerous actions such as welding, moving and measuring products, and utilized optical image technology to scan for flaws in the production line. He wrote a 150 page application which he submitted for his first patent, on what he termed "machine vision", in 1954. Parts of these automated warehousing systems he licensed to the Triax Corporation in 1964.

During the 1950s he also worked on systems for video filing of data utilizing magnetic or videotape to record documents, which could be read either on a monitor or from stop frame images. This process, along with mechanisms to control and manipulate the tape, were later licensed to Sony corporation in 1974 for use in both audio and video cassette players. During this period he also worked on a series of patents developing aspects of data and word processing technologies. He licensed twenty of these patents to IBM in 1981. IBM offered him a position running one of their research divisions, which Lemelson turned down because he wanted to remain an independent inventor. He also developed a series of patents on the manufacturing of integrated circuits, which he licensed to Texas Instruments in 1961. While working during this period on complex industrial products, ranging across the fields of robotics, lasers, computers, and electronics, Lemelson utilized some of the concepts in these more "high tech" areas and applied them to a variety of toy concepts, receiving patents for velcro target games, wheeled toys, board games, and improvements on the classic propeller beanie, among others. An exhibit of his toy inventions can be seen at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History.

This cross fertilization across disparate fields was typical for Lemelson, and can be seen in how he came up with ideas and patents for new ways of making semiconductors. While watching and reading about the problems with the heating and subsequent oxidation on heat shields of rockets re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, Lemelson realized that this same process could operate on the molecular level when electrical resistance in a silicon wafer creates an insulative barrier and thus provides for more efficient conduction of electrical current.

From 1957 on, he worked exclusively as an independent inventor. From this period onwards, Lemelson received an average of one patent a month for more than 40 years, in technological fields related to automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony's Walkman tape players. As an independent inventor, Lemelson wrote, sketched and filed almost all of his patent applications himself, with little help from outside counsel.

Lemelson was described as a "workaholic", and he spent 12–14 hours a day writing up his ideas. His notebooks, in which he wrote these ideas down, numbered in the thousands. Lemelson's younger brother said that when he and Lemelson were roommates in college, after they would go to sleep, the light would go on several times during the night and Lemelson would write something down. In the morning, Lemelson's brother would read and witness the several inventions that Lemelson had conceived of that previous night. His brother stated, "This happened every night, seven days a week".

Lemelson died in 1997, after a one year battle with liver cancer. In the final year of his life, he applied for over 40 patents, many of them in the biomedical field related to cancer detection and treatment, including a "Computerized medical diagnostic system" (U.S. Patent 5,878,746) and several "Medical devices using electrosensitive gels" all issuing posthumously. In 2009, 12 years after his death, U.S. Patent No. 7,602,947, a patent for a "Facial-recognition vehicle security system" issued in Lemelson's name.

Lemelson was a staunch advocate for the rights of independent inventors. He served on a federal advisory committee on patent issues from 1976 to 1979. In this capacity he advocated for a variety of issues, including protecting the secrecy of patent applications and advocating for the "first to invent" patent system. In his testimony before the Patent Trademark Office Advisory Committee he decried what he believed as an "innovation crisis", and that the barriers, such as high legal and filing costs to failures of the courts to protect independent inventors rights, was creating a negative environment for American inventors and US technological ascendancy.