Jerome H. Lemelson

American engineer

• Born: July 18, 1923
• Birthplace: Staten Island, New York
• Died: October 1, 1997
• Place of death: Incline Village, Nevada

The holder of more than five hundred patents, Lemelson is second only to Thomas Alva Edison as the most prolific American inventor. Lemelson was frequently in conflict with corporations that wanted to avoid crediting him for his inventions, which included components for a host of devices ranging from ATMs to videocassette recorders.

Primary fields: Computer science; electronics and electrical engineering; household products; manufacturing

Primary invention: Machine vision

Early Life

Jerome Hal Lemelson was born on July 18, 1923, on Staten Island, New York, the oldest of three boys. His father was a medical doctor who studied at Columbia University and worked out of his home. His mother was a schoolteacher trained at the normal school in Trenton, New Jersey.

Lemelson and his younger brothers first attended a small two-room school in which his mother had once taught and later attended public schools on Staten Island. He was fascinated by all things mechanical and was interested in inventing at an early age. As a teenager, he invented a lighted tongue depressor for his father. Lemelson attended New York University (NYU) but left before finishing to join the military in World War II. His engineering skills led to his assignment in the engineering department of the Army Air Corps. After serving in Alaska, he was transferred to Louisiana to teach auto mechanics to African American troops.

After military service, Lemelson returned to NYU, where he made up for lost time participating in a number of joint programs. He graduated in 1951 with a bachelor’s degree in aeronautical engineering and two master’s degrees, one in aeronautical engineering and the other in industrial engineering. While still in graduate school, Lemelson was employed by the Office of Naval Research to develop pulse jets and rocket engines.

Life’s Work

After graduating from NYU, Lemelson was hired by RepublicAviation in New York, where he designed guided missiles. At the time, he was sharing a small apartment with one of his brothers (also an engineer). Lemelson would fill notebooks with his inventive ideas and have his brother sign and date the notes after reading them, a step Lemelson recognized as essential to supporting future patent application claims.

In 1951, Lemelson witnessed the operation of an automatic metal lathe controlled by a punch-card system at a New York factory, inspiring him to create his most important invention: a universal robot that utilized “machine vision” to perform a number of actions, including moving and measuring products and inspecting them for quality control. The machine took him years to build. Between 1951 and 1954, Lemelson wrote patent applications for a flexible manufacturing system, an automated warehousing system, and a number of other inventions for industrial automation. He wrote all these patent applications based on his own legal and industrial research since he could not afford an attorney.

Lemelson also invented toys. He found that toy companies were more inclined to license his ideas and inventions because the companies needed a tremendous number of new products to meet the demands of a growing market. They also found it difficult to maintain their own research and development departments during the 1950’s. Lemelson patented a form of a toy cap, a propeller beanie, in October, 1953, and licensed a wheeled toy to the Ideal Toy Company.

The first of Lemelson’s many patent infringement cases involved his idea for a cutout face mask that could be printed on a cereal box. He had filed a patent and then presented his idea to a cereal company, which turned Lemelson down but three years later began printing the face masks on its cereal boxes. When he saw that his idea had been stolen, he sued, but the lawsuit was dismissed in district court and on appeal. The cereal company spent upwards of $150,000 on legal fees, whereas licensing fees would have cost about one-tenth that amount. During his career, he was involved in more than twenty patent infringement cases, most of which he lost.

Lemelson was a “workaholic.” Even on his return from his honeymoon in the Bahamas in 1954, Lemelson stopped at the U.S. Patent Office to do research. It was a stiflingly hot and muggy summer day in Washington, D.C. A chance comment overheard by Lemelson’s new wife, Dorothy, led to an idea for a video-filing system using spools of magnetic tape (later called videotape) to record documents. The documents on the tape could be viewed on a television set with a mechanism to freeze frames. Lemelson created the machine to operate the tape, and this machine also became the basis for audio and videocassette recorders.

By the early 1960’s, Lemelson had quit his engineering job in order to concentrate solely on his inventions and patent applications. During this period, he invented machines for injection molding, fax transmission, and a target game using Velcro-coated Ping-Pong balls. The cost of the patent applications and legal fees consumed so much of his income that the family was dependent on his wife’s income to pay the bills.

In the late 1960’s, Lemelson established the Licensing Management Corporation to market his and others’ inventions. Prominent among his clients were those seeking to market technologies based on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) space program, but opposition from large corporations reduced the profits substantially. This and a few other licensing companies Lemelson created were not very successful at this time. Lemelson had greater success in both licensing and patent infringement cases if the corporations involved were foreign. He successfully licensed his audiocassette-drive mechanism to the Sony Corporation for use in its Walkman (released in 1979).

Lemelson continued to invent until his death from cancer on October 1, 1997. He filed forty patent applications that year. Perhaps it is not surprising that these were for medical devices, as his mind was focused on ways that his own cancer might have been cured. Lemelson died in Incline Village, Nevada, at the age of seventy-four.

Impact

Lemelson invented and patented more than five hundred devices and processes during his lifetime, including toys, computer equipment, photographic storage devices, bar-code technology, an audiocassette-drive mechanism, operational systems for tape and cassette recorders, and a host of other inventions. His machine-vision technology had particularly wide-ranging applications; much of it stimulated other related inventions. Perhaps most important, throughout his life he defended the rights of independent inventors such as himself to be a part of the innovation and entrepreneurship necessary to advance the American economy.

Lemelson was criticized and opposed by major corporations, who had an interest in confining all innovation to their own research and development departments to avoid paying licensing fees. In Lemelson’s case, they were sometimes willing to spend more on legal fees than licensing fees simply to be able to drive independent inventors from the marketplace. Lemelson’s success in patenting his inventions and defending those patents was an important service for independent inventors. In 1993, he and his wife established the Lemelson Foundation, which funds programs to promote independent inventors around the world.

Bibliography

Brown, Kenneth A. Inventors at Work. Redmond, Wash.: Tempus Books, 1988. Lemelson is one of the inventors profiled in this collection of essays on inventors.

Demant, Christian, Bernd Streicher-Abel, and Peter Waszkewitz. Industrial Image Processing: Visual Quality Control in Manufacturing. New York: Springer, 1999. Explains Lemelson’s idea of machine vision and includes instructions on how to set up such a system.

Evans, Harold. They Made America: From the Steam Engine to the Search Engine—Two Centuries of Innovators. New York: Little, Brown, 2004. A general history of innovations that includes useful material on some inventions influenced by Lemelson.

Grissom, Fred, and David Pressman. The Inventor’s Notebook. 5th ed. Berkeley, Calif.: Nolo Press, 2008. A practical discussion of inventing, with some interesting insights on the patent process.

Horn, Berthold. Robot Vision. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1986. Offers a coherent discussion of the developing field of machine vision. Comprehensive coverage of the image formation process.

Langone, John. How Things Work: Everyday Technology Explained. Washington, D.C.: National Geographic Society, 2004. Provides clear explanations of how major inventions work. Includes a section on bar codes, a development claimed by Lemelson.

Lemelson, Jerome H. “Young People and Ingenuity—Our Greatest Natural Resources.” TIES: The Magazine of Design and Technology Education, March, 1995, 1-55. Lemelson argues for improvements to the patenting process and patent protection to encourage young people to innovate and invent.

Molella, Arthur, and Joyce Bedi, eds. Inventing for the Environment. Lemelson Center Studies in Invention and Innovation. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003. Describes the ways in which innovations, broadly considered, affect the environment and public health.

Port, Otis. “Inspiration, Perspiration—or Manipulation?” BusinessWeek, April 3, 1995, 56-57. Examines the controversial aspects of Lemelson’s patent infringement claims.

Tomaselli, Valerie, ed. The Cutting Edge. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. This general account of inventions includes important information on machine vision.