To Gain Entry, One Need Only Change the World

Sometimes, when retired ceramics engineer Irwin Lachman sees the cars buzz past his Santa Rosa home, his mind races back to the old laboratory and all those crazy experiments.

In 1975, Lachman helped invent the catalytic converter, a device that removes toxins from automobile exhaust. Decades later, he still recalls the hundreds of misguided attempts before he and two co-creators--in a quest to perfect a honeycomb design--could claim that they’d finally gotten it right.

“It’s amazing, when you stop to think about it,” said Lachman, 71. “The catalytic converter has cut pollution by 3 billion tons worldwide and 1.5 billion tons in the U.S. alone. But it took a lot of work to find the solution. I think successful inventions come from keeping your mind open. If you don’t, you can easily overlook answers right there in front of your face.”

Lachman’s creation is standard equipment in millions of vehicles worldwide, yet the career inventor has gained all the public standing of an obscure answer on some board game trivia quiz.

But officials from the National Inventors Hall of Fame say Lachman’s two long years in a Corning, N.Y., lab should account for something, some small nod of respect from the public at large.

Today, in a ceremony at Hewlett-Packard Co. headquarters in Palo Alto, the Ohio-based nonprofit hall of fame will announce its 30th class of inventors, this year recognizing Lachman and seven other inductees whose contributions range from everyday aspirin and the automobile seat belt to laser surgery and the implantable defibrillator, which helps prevent sudden cardiac arrest.

The award doesn’t mean instant marquee status. Winners receive a medal and recognition at the hall of fame’s museum in Akron, Ohio.

But officials hope the award shines a spotlight, even briefly, on this eclectic and overlooked lot--the itinerant tinkerers and blackboard scribblers who dream up the newfangled contraptions and remarkable technological breakthroughs that society mostly takes for granted.

“People know the gadgets that are part of our everyday life, but they don’t know the name of the person who came up with the idea,” said Donald Keck, an inventor and hall of fame president. “For some reason, inventors aren’t celebrities in our society.”

To date, 168 inventors have been recognized, often posthumously, by the hall. They include the famous, from Thomas Edison (the light bulb) and Eli Whitney (the cotton gin) to John Deere (the common plow) and Willis Carrier (air-conditioning), to the obscure, such as William Lear (the car radio), Willson Greatbatch (the pacemaker) and Andrew Moyer (the mass production of penicillin).

Each year, the U.S. Patent Office in Washington issues 175,000 patents from 360,000 applications. A new patent is issued, on average, every six minutes, but only a few ever hit the marketplace, let alone enter the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Waiting in the wings are such longshots as the edible tie pin, the bed-wetting alarm, the heated ice cream scoop, the gravity-powered shoe air-conditioner and the combined earthquake sensor and night light.

Requirements for a U.S. patent specify that an idea must be “new, usable and not obvious.” But officials say the real work for an inventor often begins after the government’s stamp of approval is issued.

“You may come up with a wonderful idea, but so many people don’t do their homework and devise a marketing and business plan,” said Ruth Nyblod, a spokeswoman for the patent office.

The patents themselves are also expensive--costing about $4,000, excluding attorney’s fees.

“The inventions come from every sector of society,” said James Rogan, the Bush administration’s undersecretary of Commerce and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, which co-founded the Inventors Hall of Fame in 1973. “They come from college labs and from garages. They arrive as CD-ROMs and scrawled on paper bags with pencils and crayon.”

The youngest inventor to receive a patent is a 4-year-old Houston girl whose parents say she devised a Houdini-like way to get inside child-proofed doors and cabinets. The patented device could be used to help people with arthritis better grip objects.

No matter how absurd an application might seem, the office professes to take each one seriously. “But some of them do make us laugh,” Nyblod said.

Those would include the underwater golf swing training device, the urinal that tells users when they’re missing the mark, the grooming aid that gauges the exact desired length of a necktie and the fly swatter with sound effects.

Entry into the Inventors Hall of Fame is a bit more exacting and usually requires that a device has somehow changed society.

This year’s winners include Nils Bohlin, a Volvo engineer who in 1962 invented the three-point automobile seat belt, and the late Felix Hoffman, who in 1899 patented aspirin after experimenting to find a way to alleviate his father’s arthritis pain.

Past inductees include Charles Kettering, who in 1909 patented the automobile ignition; John Ericsson for his 1839 patent of the propeller and Douglas Engelbart, who in 1968 patented the now-ubiquitous computer mouse.

Also included is George Mestral, who in 1955 patented Velcro. “He stumbled across his invention one day after he went hunting and found all these burdocks attached to his clothing,” recalls Keck, 61, a 1993 inductee for inventing the low-loss optical fiber in telecommunication and computer technology.

“He put the burdocks under the microscope to see how they affixed themselves to his pants. Then he reproduced the effect with man-made materials.”

Raymond Kurzweil in 1976 accomplished another breakthrough when he patented the Kurzweil Reading Machine, which scans printed material and is considered the most significant advancement for the blind since Braille.

The MIT graduate, another inductee this year, says it wasn’t all smooth sailing for his machine, even after receiving his patent.

After being featured by Walter Cronkite on his news broadcast, Kurzweil was to demonstrate his contraption live on the “Today” show. But the machine broke down shortly before air time.

“Our chief engineer took the thing apart--there were parts strewn all over the place--and some nervous TV guy came up and asked if there was any problem, and we said ‘No, no. We’re just making some last-minute adjustments.’”

Just before the show began, the engineer slammed it on the table.

“It started working right off,” recalls Kurzweil. “And that taught us all an important lesson: Technology often has a mind of its own.”