WHEN JIM WYNNE WAS A BOY, HE SAYS, “I WAS PAR ticularly interested in Flash Gordon on television.” Most kids who watched those old movie serials probably wanted to be Flash Gordon, who was portrayed by the dashing former Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe. Wynne, however, wanted to emulate a different character. “There was Flash Gordon, and his assistant, Dr. Zarkov, was a physicist. They had adventures in outer space. They had death rays. A light beam would come out of a machine and blow things up.”

The young Wynne would pretend to be Dr. Zarkov by sneaking up on insects with a magnifying glass and then focusing the rays of the sun into a low-tech death ray. “I wanted one of those death rays,” he says. “Lasers weren’t even around yet, but I wanted a laser.” He eventually became a physicist and got his own laser. But instead of developing a death ray, he helped invent the exquisitely precise etching technique of LASIK surgery, which corrects vision problems by sculpting the cornea.

Wynne and his co-inventors—Samuel Blum and Rangaswamy Srinivasan—all then of IBM, are among the 16 new inventors about to be inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The group will be enshrined in a ceremony set for September 21 in Akron, Ohio, where the Hall is located. The story of their invention begins in 1980, when the trio was conducting laser research at the T. J. Watson Research Center in Yorktown Heights, New York. They started by etching plastic with an ultraviolet excimer laser, and the results were so precise they wondered if the same technique could work on tissue, giving surgeons a new tool.

The idea for a test came on Thanksgiving Day, when Srinivasan was looking for an excuse not to eat the turkey drumstick on his plate. “Turkey is not my favorite,” he says. The next day he took the meat to his laboratory, despite the fact that everything was closed for the holiday, and, there by himself, used the laser to produce the most precisely carved turkey ever.

Photos of subsequent tests on human hair proved the technique’s promise. IBM received a patent in 1988, and in 1995 the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approved the excimer laser to correct nearsightedness. Since then some five million patients have undergone what’s known as Laser in Situ Keratomileusis (LASIK) surgery.

Other members of the Hall of Fame’s Class of 2002 were selected for inventions that are equally important and recognized for their widespread cultural impact. Nils Bohlin, a retired engineer for Volvo, is being honored for inventing what may be the most significant safety advance in automotive history, the three-point seat belt. Volvo executives recruited Bohlin in 1958, when they wanted to make safety a selling point for the company’s cars. The former aerospace engineer had worked to design restraint systems for pilots, but drivers presented a special problem: “Regular people in cars don’t want to be uncomfortable even for a minute. Without consumer acceptance, no car company or government agency can mandate that you buckle up.”

Volvo’s Swedish customers embraced Bohlin’s design, the system used in virtually every car today. American consumers were less enthusiastic, however, so in the 1960s Bohlin made a trip to the United States to preach the value of seat belts. His highly effective public demonstrations featuring films of model cars that carried raw eggs were at least partly responsible for the fact that 85 percent of drivers use seat belts today.

Rodney Bagley, Irwin Lachman, and Ronald Lewis will be inducted for another automotive invention, the practical catalytic converter. The three researchers for Corning Inc. produced their invention under severe deadline pressure. When Congress passed the Clean Air Act of 1970, American automakers complained that the technology simply did not exist to allow them to cut emissions as much as the law mandated. In theory, catalytic converters could reduce pollutants, but converters that worked in the lab were too fragile, and their components were difficult to produce in mass quantities.

In a marathon effort to overcome multiple engineering challenges, the trio produced a sturdy ceramic substrate that packed the surface area of a football field into a small metal can. Platinum catalysts embedded in the substrate convert unburned hydrocarbons and toxic gases into water vapor and carbon dioxide. More than 500 million vehicles have been equipped with converters containing Corning’s ceramic substrate. “I’m very proud of it,” savs Lachman.

Raymond Kurzweil will be inducted for the Kurzweil Reading Machine, regarded as the most significant technological advance for the blind since the introduction of Braille in 1829. Brought out in 1976, it was the first computer to translate text into computer-generated speech, allowing visually impaired people to read almost any printed material. The Reading Machine was just the first of many Kurzweil inventions to rely on his discoveries in pattern recognition and artificial intelligence. As a futurist and the author of two best-selling books, The Age of Intelligent Machines and The Age of Spiritual Machines , Kurzweil is one of the nation’s most recognized science celebrities. “Being inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame is an important award to me,” he says. “I feel I am being recognized by my peers.”

Marlin Stephen Heilman, Alois Langer, Morton Mower, and the late Michel Mirowski will be inducted for inventing the implantable defibrillator, an invention that achieved a much higher public appreciation when Vice President Dick Cheney received one in June 2001. The invention was inspired in 1967 when Dr. Mirowski’s close friend and mentor Dr. Harry Heller died of sudden cardiac arrest during a dinner with his family. Dr. Heller had suffered a previous attack of ventricular fibrillation and had known another attack was likely, but treatment had been impossible unless he chose to remain in a hospital for the rest of his life. Since the first successful implantation in 1980, more than 300,000 patients have received the device, and it has been found to be 99 percent effective in treating sudden cardiac arrest.

Two inventors will be inducted posthumously for creating what is widely recognized as the first general-purpose computer, ENIAC . John Mauchly and J. Presper Eckert, Jr., led the team that created the Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer, which was a media sensation when it made its debut in 1946. Commissioned by the U.S. Army to calculate ballistic firing tables during World War II, ENIAC wasn’t finished in time to assist the war effort but it went on to help scientists learn about phenomena ranging from weather predictions and atomic energy to cosmic rays and thermonuclear reactions. It was 150 feet long, weighed more than 30 tons, and had more than 17,000 vacuum tubes. It became the foundation of every computer that followed.

Another inventor to be honored posthumously is Henry Bessemer, creator of the Bessemer converter. Prior to his innovation, iron was converted into steel through a slow, laborintensive process; in 1856 Bessemer created an automated procedure that removed carbon and other impurities by blowing air through molten iron. The cost of steel dropped dramatically, making it the material of choice for late-nineteenthcentury industrialists.

The last inventor to be posthumously inducted this year is Felix Hoffmann, who is credited with making the most popular drug of all time, aspirin. For centuries herbalists knew that an extract of willow bark was an effective treatment for pain, but the extract, salicylic acid, was difficult to make and caused severe nausea. Researchers found ways to synthesize it but the side effects remained. In 1897 Hoffmann developed an improved process that produced acetylsalicylic acid, rather than salicylic acid, which caused fewer side effects. Today more than 70 million pounds of Hoffmann’s analgesic are produced annually, and physicians continue to find new ways to use the drug.

The honorees for 2002 were announced at the headquarters of Hewlett-Packard, a sponsor of the Hall of Fame. James Rogan, undersecretary of commerce for intellectual property and director of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, spoke at the press conference that followed. “On behalf of everyone at the United States Patent and Trademark Office, we could not be more proud of the members of the Class of 2002 at the National Inventors Hall of Fame,” Rogan said. “These inductees gave us many great inventions, and they gave us more than that. They … embody the very thing that makes this country something to be proud of. If there’s just one lesson they can pass along to our children, it should be that all people possess the power to make the world a better place.”