Jerome H. Lemelson

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Jerome "Jerry" Hal Lemelson (July 18, 1923 Staten Island, New York - October 1, 1997) was a prolific and controversial American inventor and patent holder.

1 Biography
2 Patents and controversy
3 Lemelson Foundation
4 Quotes
5 References
6 Notes
7 External links

[edit] Biography

Lemelson was born on Staten Island, New York, on July 18, 1923, the oldest of three brothers. He attended New York University after serving during World War 2 in the Army Air Corps engineering department. ^{[citation needed]}

After the war he received two master's degrees: in aeronautical and industrial engineering. He worked for the Office of Naval Research on Project Squid, a postwar effort to develop pulse jet and rocket engines and then Republic Aviation, designing guided missiles. After taking a job as a safety engineer at a smelting plant in New Jersey, he quit because he claimed the company would not implement safety improvements Lemelson believed could save lives. This was his last job. ^{[citation needed]}

For 1957 on he worked exclusively as an independent inventor. From this period on Lemelson received an average of one patent a month for more than 40 years, in technological fields related to automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders and the magnetic tape drive used in Sony's Walkman tape players. ^{[citation needed]} Lemelson died in 1997, after a one year battle with liver cancer. In the final year of his life, he applied for over 40 patents, many of them in the biomedical field related to cancer detection and treatment, including a "Computerized medical diagnostic system" (U.S. Patent 5,878,746 ) and several "Medical devices using electrosensitive gels" all issuing posthumously.

[edit] Patents and controversy

Jerome H. Lemelson was granted over 600 patents, ^[1] making him one of the 20th century's five most prolific patent grantees.

He was controversial for his alleged use of submarine patents to extract over 1.3 billion dollars from major corporations in a variety of industries. As the result of his filing a succession of continuation applications, a number of his patents, particularly those in the field of industrial machine vision, were delayed, in some cases by several decades. This had the effect of taking the industry by surprise when the patents in question finally issued; hence the term submarine patent. Lemelson's supporters have claimed that the bureaucracy of the Patent Office was responsible for the long delays. ^[2] The courts, however found that Lemelson had engaged in “culpable neglect” and noted that "Lemelson patents occupied the top thirteen positions for the longest prosecutions from 1914 to 2001." ^[3] However, they found no convincing evidence of inequitable conduct.^[4]

In 2004, Lemelson's estate was defeated in a notable court case involving Symbol Technologies and Cognex Corporation, which sought (and received) a ruling that 76 claims under Lemelson's machine vision patents were unenforceable. ^[5] ^[6] The plaintiff companies, with the support of dozens of industry supporters spent millions on this landmark case which observers watched closely for clarification as to whether contemporary courts feel the United States Patent and Trademark Office exists to serve the interests of big companies, small inventors, or to try to strike a balance between the two. To this day, the battle wages on in Congress as supporters of a weaker patent law, seek shelter from small inventors like Lemelson coming out of the weeds demanding large licensing fees.^[7] The ruling was upheld on September 9, 2005 by a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit under the doctrine of laches, citing "unreasonably long … delays in prosecution." ^[8] ^[9] Lemelson's estate appealed for a review by the full circuit en banc. On November 16, 2005, the full court declined to review the case, but, citing "prejudice to the public as a whole," extended the original unenforceability ruling to all claims under the patents in question. ^[10]. However, the judge also ruled that Cognex and Symbol did not demonstrate that Lemelson had "intentionally stalled" getting the patents. ^[11] "To his many detractors, (...) Lemelson's patents were in fact worthless. Lemelson, they say, was one of the great frauds of the 20th century". ^[12] To his proponents, "(...), Jerome Lemelson [was] a great philanthropist, [but] the value of his charitable work could not possibly match the value of his contributions to American society as an innovator and entrepreneur." ^[13]

While the controversy over the hundreds of millions he made over the machine vision patents is understandable, the fact that Lemelson, who was named Engineer of the Year by readers of Design News in 1995, made many millions more in legitimate, uncontested licenses with a number of the world’s most successful companies including IBM and Sony, among others, ^[14] lends credence to his impressive record as an inventor. ^[15] Lemelson was also honored with, among other awards, the induction into the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame and the recipient of the New Jersey Pride Award for science and technology; the Odyssey of the Mind Creativity Award, the Automation Hall of Fame Prometheus Award, and on Thomas Edison's birthday in 1998, the John Templeton Foundation, which recognizes "the incalculable power of the human mind," made a posthumous award.

[edit] Lemelson Foundation

Lemelson was a strong proponent of the independent inventor, and used some of his wealth to found the Lemelson Foundation, whose vision is to "celebrate and support inventors and entrepreneurs to strengthen social and economic life" in the U.S. and developing countries. To date the Foundation has given over $110 million dollars to numerous programs supporting inventors, innovation and entrepreneurship.

The Lemelson-MIT Prize, endowed in 1994 by Jerome Lemelson is awarded to inventors from the United States for outstanding achievement. The winner receives $500,000, making it the largest invention prize in the U.S. The Lemelson Foundation also supports the National Collegiate Inventors and Innovators Alliance, and the Lemelson Center for the Study of Innovation and Invention at the Smithsonian Museum, among other programs. The Lemelson Foundation is devoting a significant part of its charitable giving for the Invention for Sustainable Development Program. This program fosters and unleashes human creativity and invention to meet basic human needs and build sustainable livelihoods for the world’s poor people. To date the Lemelson Foundation has supported close to 50,000 American inventors, student inventors and grass roots inventors in the developing world. There are Lemelson Recognition and Mentoring Programs in Indonesia and India, and technology dissemination programs in countries such as Senegal, Tanzania, Bangladesh and Belize. As an example, a combined well drilling and irrigation project, funded in part by the Lemelson Foundation in Kenya and Tanzania, has been used to help start 30,000 new businesses which generate over 0.5% of Kenya’s GDP.^[16]

[edit] Quotes

Company managers know that the odds of an inventor being able to afford the costly litigation are less than one in ten; and even if the suit is brought, four times out of five the courts will hold the patent invalid. When the royalties are expected to exceed the legal expense, it makes good business sense to attack the patent... we don't recognize that the consequence of the legal destruction of patents is a decline in innovation...

-Lemelson, 1975, in a Senate hearing investigating the innovation crisis, cited in Tom Wolfe's (1987, p. 311) Land of Wizards essay about the life work and struggles of Jerome Lemelson