Jerome Lemelson; Inventor Held 500 Patents

Jerome H. Lemelson, the nation’s most prolific contemporary inventor, who held about 500 patents and used profits from his bar code scanner to encourage young inventors, has died. Lemelson was 74.

The iconoclastic inventor, who lived in Incline Village, Nev., died Wednesday in Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles of liver cancer, hospital spokesman Tim Blair said.

If additional pending patent applications are approved, Lemelson could become the American to hold the most patents since Thomas Edison, his son Eric said.

Unusual among independent inventors in that he made his living solely from royalties on his patented inventions, Lemelson invented high-tech mechanisms that translated into automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony’s Walkman tape players. He also invented some medical instruments, including a talking thermometer for the blind.

But it was Lemelson’s “machine vision device” that made him a wealthy man and enabled him to endow the annual $500,000 Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology Prize for outstanding inventors, hand the Smithsonian Institution its largest cash gift (more than $10 million) to establish the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation, and provide funds for MIT and other universities to encourage budding inventors.

“Every new American inventor is a potential new American business. By growing our own technology and rewarding American inventors with protectable patents,” he said in 1994 when he established his philanthropic Lemelson Foundation, “we create jobs at home and capture revenue streams throughout the globe.”

Lemelson, working out of his parents’ home in Staten Island, N.Y., first applied for a patent on his “machine vision device” in 1956. By the time it was finally approved in 1989, bar code scanning technology had been developed around the world and installed everywhere from supermarkets to automobile assembly lines. He collected hundreds of millions of dollars from Japanese, European and American companies that had used his idea.

As a child, Lemelson was fascinated by airplanes--so he designed and sold model planes in his basement. By World War II, he was designing weapons systems and aircraft-handling equipment for the Army Air Corps.

Lemelson earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees from New York University in aeronautical and industrial engineering. He stayed on for a time at NYU to work on the Navy’s Project Squid, developing rocket and pulse jet engines.

But as a young man, he set himself up as an independent inventor, first earning money by licensing and marketing toys and novelty items.

In 1954, when he was 31, Lemelson applied for his first patents--on warehouse automation and robot systems--and he quickly became a familiar customer at the U.S. Patent Office. When he married interior decorator Dorothy Ginsberg, the couple spent part of their honeymoon there.

Lemelson’s first major commercial success came in 1964, when the Triax Co. of Cleveland licensed his automated warehousing system. That was only the beginning. In 1974, he licensed patents for the audiocassette drive mechanism to Sony Corp. In 1981, about 20 of his patents in data- and word-processing technology were licensed to IBM.

Between 1992 and 1995, Lemelson licensed his bar scanning technology used in electronics and automobile manufacturing to more than 70 companies, including Sony, Apple Computer and Daimler-Benz.

Once he obtained patents, Lemelson was meticulous about enforcing them through the courts, often collecting millions of dollars from major manufacturers that were marketing his ideas.

He was often far ahead of his time. The Patent Office rejected his first application for a patent on the camcorder in 1977, Eric Lemelson recalled, “because the examiner said it was ridiculous to think that video recorders could be miniaturized to the size required for portability.”

A staunch advocate of protecting and encouraging independent inventors, Lemelson served on a federal advisory committee on patent issues from 1976 to 1979. He fought to maintain U.S. patent protections, including secrecy of pending applications and fixed-length patent terms.

Lemelson is survived by his wife, Dorothy; sons Eric of Portland, Ore., and Robert of Los Angeles; brothers Howard and Justin; and two grandchildren.