Published March 28, 2001
A hydrogen-powered motorized scooter, computer hardware from potato chip bags, and a life-saving balloon on a fishing line are the creations of current and past honored inventors. Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) gave tribute to Brian Hubert, Dean Kamen, Thomas Fogarty, and Al Gross for their valuable contributions.
This year, MIT’s Most-Innovative-Techie Lemelson Prize for excellence in invention was bestowed upon Brian Hubert for his demonstration that rigid silicon, for making computer chips, can be replaced with an abundant, cheap and flexible plastic commonly used for packaging pretzels and cheese snacks. Hubert demonstrated the remarkable properties of aluminized substrate with a carbon polymer, like toner found in photocopying machines, as the chip circuitry. It could also be used to prolong the memory for digital cameras.
The all-printed computer chip design and fabrication is a new class of storage, retrieval, erasable and rewriteable memory. The carbon-in-polymer matrix can be applied by painting, spin coating, screen or block printing. Three-dimensional stacked memory arrays for ultra-high density data storage are possible. It’s faster than flash memory chips and retains its recollection of the facts after electrical power is turned off. Last year these devices were granted a US patent #6,072,716.
Hubert is a polymath engineering Ph.D. candidate and a concert pianist/ composer. Among his other inventions is a method for producing low-cost superconducting wire, and his “pick-and-place Nano Assembly” for microscopic engineering.
Methods for zero-resistance transmission of electricity have been experimentally studied since the 1980s. Such an increased-capacity wire, instead of copper, would save considerable power otherwise lost over long distances.
Superconductivity has been achieved experimentally in the laboratory at extremely low temperatures and high budget. Hubert’s approach negates these restrictions, naturally leading to the reality of levitated trains and hydrodynamic propulsion for ships and submarines, such as the “silent drive” portrayed in the movie, The Hunt for Red October.
Hubert’s uniquely flexible Nano Assembly System is more effective than other existing processes for moving piles of a few thousand atoms into pattern structures the size of individual viruses and proteins. His claim is that an entire genome DNA pattern, with its billions of pair threads, could be mapped from a drop of blood in just minutes.
Inventor Dean Kamen’s plan for a one-of-a-kind wheelchair, named Fred, and his six-wheeled motorized scooter, named Ginger, have captured the imagination of the Center for Collaborative Neuroscience at Rutgers University. Dr. Young, director of the center, calls it, “Totally intuitive. It zooms around like lightning just by leaning.”
These vehicles are powered by something called a Stirling engine, a light-weight hydrogen/electrical source. Bob Metcalfe of 3Com describes it as, “almost as important as cold fusion would have been.” The names, by the way, are Kamen’s tribute to Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, poetry in motion.
Scottish minister Robert Stirling obtained a patent in 1816 for a device called the Economizer, which NASA is now studying for powering space vehicles using solar. A commercially viable Stirling engine would be non-polluting, cheap, and sever the dependency upon oil production. Kovacs Janos, professor at Magyar Tudomanyos Akademia in Budapest calls Kamen’s invention, “a culture-changer.”
Last year’s MIT-Lemelson Prize of $500,000 went to Dr. Thomas Fogarty for his 1963 invention of the balloon catheter; and a lifetime achievement award to Al Gross for his inventions of the walkie-talkie, pager, and cordless telephone.
Twenty million patients have benefited from Dr. Fogarty’s Embolectomy Catheter. “The traditional approach to this problem probably would not have produced the concepts I thought of,” he said, “simply because physicians are trained in a rigid way.”
As an experienced fly fisherman, Dr. Fogarty devised his prototype using an ultra-thin balloon, tied with a fishing knot to a standard catheter, to be pushed through the artery to the occlusion and inflated once in place.
“It converted something from a major operation with multiple incisions done under general anesthesia taking up to four to five hours,” he explained, “to a 20 to 60 minute procedure done with only a local anesthetic.”
Dr. Fogarty is also a vintner, producing 15,000 cases of wine each year from his Palo Alto, California winery. Wine is good for the cardiovascular system, he proclaims. “That’s the preventive aspect of my interest in medicine,” he said.
Al Gross, during WWII, was given the challenge of exploding bridges by remote control. “That was a form of pager—for beeping the bridge to blow up,” he said.
As a civilian, Mr. Gross applied his remote-controlled trigger to send messages of a less incendiary nature. He was convinced that pagers would catch on big, and the first to use of them would naturally be by doctors and nurses.
“In Philadelphia, at a hospital convention, we set up the pager for demonstration to all the hospital administrators, doctors and nurses. They absolutely rejected the idea! They claimed it would disturb the patients, that the doctors would be disturbed at their golf game, and the nurses wouldn’t want to carry it.”
So be persistent, you inventors. It’s never too late to eventually sell a great idea.