Patents Run Out, but Not His Ideas
Charles Walton, obscure inventor, was quoting Linus Pauling, lionized genius. “Pauling said, ‘How do you have a good idea? Have a lot of ideas and keep the good ones.’”
Now 82 years old, Walton had at least one great idea in the 1970s. He connected a low-power radio transceiver to a door latch and embedded a coil of wire in a sandwich of playing-card-sized plastic wafers. Brought within range, the resonating coil signaled back to the source, springing the latch. The system would become one of the earliest successful uses of a technology known as RFID, or radio frequency identification.
Thirty years after Walton’s invention, RFID is about to come on in a big way as a means to mark and track shipments of goods as far as the point of purchase and even beyond. Wal-Mart Stores Inc. has ordered its top 100 suppliers to tag certain shipments with RFID devices by Jan. 1. Other big retailers are likely to follow suit, helping to drive the cost of so-called smart tags from their current 25 to 50 cents each down to a nickel.
If the trend takes hold, the annual global market for RFID technology could quadruple from its current $1 billion over the next few years. Walton won’t participate in the jackpot, however: His last RFID patent expired in 1999.
“Another two or three years would have been nice,” he says, noting that the 17-year patent term in effect when his rights were issued has been extended to 20 for more recent breakthroughs. “But I’m not exactly bitter,” he adds, “because my experience has been very good.”
Besides, as a general purpose inventor, Walton favors patents running their course. “You wouldn’t want General Motors to tie something up for 30 years,” he says.
Walton earned several million dollars in royalties during RFID’s first wave, when it became a common security application. Some of the money went into expanding the Los Gatos hillside home he had bought earlier as an IBM Corp. executive. From a rooftop balcony, Walton sweeps his arm over his spectacular view of the landscape from San Jose north toward San Francisco. “There’s Silicon Valley,” he says.
As a ham radio hobbyist with an electrical engineering degree, Walton landed in the Army Signal Corps during World War II. Later, at IBM, his first patents covered ways to convert analog signals to digital, a crucial step in the development of computer-controlled systems.
In 1970, his IBM career peaking, he and some friends brainstormed how to exploit their technical know-how. Walton contributed the insight that radio waves could stimulate a passive receiver into generating a signal the source could recognize. “We thought about locks and keys right off the bat,” he recalls.
Walton worked up a model door, perhaps a foot high, that would open when his plastic card was brandished nearby. The partners brought the model to Schlage Lock Co., but the first demonstration flopped: Schlage’s chairman, fiddling with the gadget, had wedged the door so tightly shut that it resolutely refused to respond to the waving card.
Schlage (which in 1974 became a unit of Ingersoll-Rand Co.) eventually agreed to pump $25,000 a month into Walton’s company in return for shares. The sum paid the team’s expenses as they worked to refine the technology enough for Schlage to market the novel electronic locks.
Although the locks cost hundreds of dollars per door, security-conscious customers valued the system’s ease of use and its ability to not merely work a latch, but to deliver information about who had opened a door and when. At nuclear power plants, for example, the system could tell supervisors whether personnel were still inside the facility during emergency scrambles.
In 1974, Walton appeared on “What’s My Line,” where a demonstration of his remote control door so impressed the program’s host that he could be seen exclaiming on camera: “I’m a son of a ... !”
For the next couple of decades, RFID grew slowly. The cost of cards dropped along with the price of semiconductor chips, which had replaced Walton’s coil. But bar codes continued to be the technology of choice for tracking packages and shipments because they were much cheaper than RFID tags, even if they functioned only at very close range and were easily rendered illegible. Wal-Mart’s initiative is an acknowledgment that the technical advantages of RFID are finally about to outweigh the cost.
Walton, meanwhile, remained known largely in communities around San Jose for the annual student essay competition he endowed on the subject of peace. (“If you’re going to solve a problem, why not solve a tough one like why we have wars?” he says.) Then, in June, a feature in the San Jose Mercury News chronicled his pioneering role in RFID and the unfortunate timing of the patent expiration.
That’s not to say that Walton had retired. There’s scarcely a facet of his daily life that doesn’t spark a new idea. When the subterranean windows of his outdoor koi pond kept clouding over with algae, he ginned up an underwater algae scrubber. The prototype is a common scrub brush spun by a propeller motor at the end of a long rod. (He has been working with local boat-maintenance contractors to develop it into a professional algae-cleaning tool.) An active racquetball player, he even designed a marked ball that helps the eye anticipate a shot’s trajectory.
A lifetime of coaxing engineering solutions out of kernels of ideas has bequeathed him the conviction that studying a problem closely is always worthwhile, even if it fails to yield immediate answers.
“In circling a problem and looking at it from all sides, you may come back to the place where you started,” he says. “But you always end up with a lot more knowledge.”
Golden State appears every Monday and Thursday. You can reach Michael Hiltzik at golden.state@latimes.com and read his previous columns at latimes.com/hiltzik.
