Every field has its own hotshots, from basketball to the world of inventors. This year Arthur Fry and Spencer Silver, the inventors of the Post-It Note, are just two of the 16 ‘hotshots’ that will be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame this year, says The Washington Post.
On Wednesday, the group all participated in an official induction ceremony to the Hall of Fame, which was founded in 1973 by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations. There is a corresponding museum in Alexandria, featuring the 421 inventors — including this year’s class — who have been honored in nearly 40 years.
Somewhere in its 30-year history the Post-it has become the quintessential archetype of American ingenuity, a divinely inspired creation story (Fry first thought of attaching the adhesive to paper when he needed bookmarks for a church hymnal) meets a society obsessed with organization and to-do lists. Post-its have become the subjects of visual art, theater and Taiwanese soap operas.
After Fry’s church hymnal experiment, he sensed that there were commercial applications to a temporary adhesive, but no machine existed for him to produce prototypes. He constructed his own in his basement, knocking out a wall to import equipment. Fry and Silver refer to themselves as “IN-trepreneurs” rather than entrepreneurs because despite the millions (billions? katrillions?) of Post-its sold, the profits mainly stayed in house with 3M, their employer.
At Tuesday’s announcement ceremony there are other very big giants of very obscure industries. You have S. Donald Stookey, the father of the glass ceramic known better as Corning Ware (Patent No. 2,920,971). You have Yvonne Brill, the only woman to be inducted, creator of the electrothermal hydrazine thruster (No. 3,807,657), used to keep satellites in place in space. (Note: It took one woman to invent a rocket thruster, and two men to invent Post-its.) You have Jacques Cousteau’s grandson, there to be recognized on behalf of his granddad’s Aqua Lung (No. 2,485,039), later known as “Scuba.”
“We look for people who have done work that’s impacted society,” says Rini Paiva of the Hall of Fame. With more than 7 million patented inventions and only a handful of yearly inductees, some people’s stellar contributions take years to be recognized. They are the Susan Luccis of the inventing world.
“I always seem to be 10 to 15 years ahead of the curve,” says Ralph Baer, an engineer being inducted for inventing the video game console Magnavox Odyssey. Like this 3-D business nowadays, Baer says. He’s been beating that drum for decades. The Odyssey predated Atari by three years, which means Baer is indirectly responsible for every saved princess or Grand Thefted Auto in video game history.
And now? “I like to play the Wii games,” Baer says.
The spoils of being a Hall of Fame inventor are mostly intangible: Inductees get just a medallion and the respect of their fellow scientists, many of whom attended the Wednesday lunch ceremony. Previous inductees present included early developers of Lasik eye surgery, the inventor of tetracycline and the inventor of an indicator of glucose detection, whose work “led to the introduction of convenient dip-and-read urine tests,” according to a news release.
Photo by chris friese