MY MOTHER ALWAYS SAID I MARCHED TO A DIFFERENT tune and majored in nonsense,” says Thomas Fogarty. He was fresh out of medical school in 1961 when he IWI announced that surgeons were subjecting patients to unnecessary pain and he could prevent it. Doctors typically cut a knee-to-pelvis incision to remove vascular blood clots in the leg; Fogarty said they should instead cut only a tiny incision and insert a long, slender catheter up the vessel and through to the clot to its far side. Then they could inflate a tiny balloon on the end of the catheter and pull the clot loose. This would greatly reduce the risk of amputation or death.

Some surgeons dismissed the idea as the fantasy of a kid who hadn’t even earned his medical license, and his research supervisor had to be the first to try out the invention on a human. But it worked so well that surgeons began to wonder if less traumatic techniques could be developed for other procedures too. “It was really the beginning of less invasive surgery,” Fogarty says. He now holds more than 70 patents for his medical inventions.

The man who once stood out as a young medical revolutionary found himself in a very different position last December 8. He stood in the place of honor on the stage of the National Inventors Hall of Fame, where he and nine other inventors were inducted as the Hall’s Class of 2001. Longtime readers of Invention & Technology will have heard about the National Inventors Hall of Fame over the years but may have been surprised to see its name on the cover of this issue of the magazine. What’s the story? It begins back in 1973, when the Hall was born.

Many people deserve credit for the idea, but no one more than Isaac Fleischmann. Fleischmann was the director of public affairs for the United States Patent and Trademark Office at the time, a job created for him after he argued that the American public had too little appreciation for the importance of “protecting the products of our mind.” He made it his mission to increase Americans’ awareness of the impact inventors and inventions had had on the country, and as part of that, he argued, America needed some kind of formal recognition program to honor the most influential inventors, both living and dead.

The Patent Office joined with the National Council of Patent Law Associations to create the National Inventors Hall of Fame. The Hall inducted just one inventor its first year, Thomas Edison, who holds the record for patents earned, 1,093, and epitomizes what the founders thought the new institution should recognize. After that, the rules required that living and deceased inventors alike be chosen every year. In 1974, for example, Eli Whitney and Alexander Graham Bell were inducted along with the very much alive inventors of the transistor, John Bardeen, William Shockley, and Walter Brattain.

In 1985 the Hall introduced a bronze medal for its inductees, bearing profiles of Edison and Abraham Lincoln, himself a patent holder. Around the perimeter are Lincoln’s words: “The patent system added the fuel of interest to the fire of genius.” But through the early years almost the only people who knew about the Hall were patent attorneys and visitors to the Patent and Trademark Office, which maintained an exhibit in the lobby of its headquarters in Arlington, Virginia. The goal was always to establish the Hall’s own museum someday, and in 1987 its board announced that it was ready to launch a nationwide search for a host city.

One patent attorney particularly interested in that effort was Edwin Oldham, of Akron, Ohio. “I thought, ‘Why not Akron?’ ” he remembers. It wasn’t solely a matter of local pride. For a century Akron had been the rubber capital of the world, and it had invented much of what’s known today as polymer science. But when foreign companies took over most of the rubber industry in the 1970s, the city had been hit hard, losing much of its manufacturing base. Oldham knew that local officials were looking for new opportunities.

In a competition against Philadelphia and Newark, New Jersey, Akron won the right to be host city, and with great fanfare, the new National Inventors Hall of Fame building opened there on July 23, 1995. Public funds and private donations totaling $38 million had produced a home designed by the celebrated architect James Stewart Polshek, an Akron native best known these days for the new planetarium at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Polshek had produced a stunning 77,000-square-foot museum behind an expansive steel sail that instantly became the most distinctive part of the city’s sky line. Inside, a soaring atrium separated the Hall of Fame proper from an array of interactive science and technology exhibits.

Despite the exuberant opening and the accompanying flash of national publicity, the institution soon faded from the national consciousness and had trouble spreading the word about great inventors. To fix the situation, the board recruited David Fink, a former executive with Sony, Disney, and General Electric —and an inventor himself—to join the Hall in 1999 as president and chief executive officer, with the goal of transforming it into a truly national institution.

“I see a lot of value here,” Fink said when he took over. “The tale of invention is a great story that needs to be told. Our quality of life depends upon our inventors, and that’s a message that needs a national audience. It’s got to be more than just a museum in Akron.” He reorganized the Hall’s operations and began to develop national programs, and the institution now has three main initiatives in addition to its annual induction of inventors.

Camp Invention is the largest summer program of its kind in the United States. In 2001 more than 27,000 students 6 to 12 years old attended weeklong sessions in 35 states where they learned to cultivate their creativity and find new solutions to familiar problems. The camp expects to serve 100,000 students a year by 2004, and the Hall of Fame is developing an afterschool program called Club Invention and a preschool one called Li’l Inventors.

Meanwhile, the Collegiate Inventors Competition seeks out and honors the top student inventors at the best research institutions in the world. Last year 184 entries came in from 134 universities, most of them for work done by doctoral candidates. The 6 winners received cash awards of $20,000 each, plus $2,000 worth of equipment from Hewlett-Packard, the Hall of Fame’s largest private sponsor. Each winner’s adviser got $10,000. The third initiative, Invent Now Studio, is the Hall’s creativedevelopment department, which Fink opened last year. It has already tackled a range of projects, from TV programs and educational toys to books and science curricula.

The main program, of course, is the annual selection of new inventors inducted into the Hall of Fame. To date, 168 are enshrined there, and anyone can submit a nomination through the Hall’s Web site, www.invent.org. The only requirement is that a nominee must have a U.S. patent, though the finalists tend only to be inventors whose work has had a major cultural impact.

The inductees include many familiar names from the golden age of invention, like Samuel F. B. Morse, Charles Goodyear, John Deere, Nikola Tesla, and the Wright brothers, but the inventors who lend the most excitement to the annual induction ceremony are the living ones. Alas, inventors no longer command much celebrity, so many of them still don’t have widely recognizable names, but their inventions are usually familiar ones that have changed the world.

At the induction ceremony last December, for instance, five living inventors were honored in addition to Fogarty. The best known of their inventions may have been that of Patsy Sherman and Samuel Smith, Scotchgard fabric protector. Stanley Cohen and Herbert Boyer were named for their central role in the invention of genetic engineering. In 1973 they transferred genetic material from one organism to another with a process that became a basis for the biotech industry; Boyer used the process to co-found the very first biotech business, Genentech. J. Paul Hogan and the late Robert Banks were inducted for work they did at Phillips Petroleum in 1951, discovering an efficient process for producing the plastics polypropylene and high-density polyethylene, which are now everywhere around us.

The deceased members of the Class of 2001 produced equally influential inventions. Christopher Latham Sholes gave the world the first practical typewriter, making its keys not stick by scattering the most-used letters—the result being the QWERTY keyboard that we all still use today. Oliver Evans invented the high-pressure steam engine at the dawn of the nineteenth century, laying the industrial foundation of the United States and providing the New World with its first engineering mind to match those in Europe. Elijah McCoy, the son of fugitive slaves, couldn’t get an education in the United States, so he went to Scotland and studied mechanical engineering. When he returned, racial prejudice prevented him from finding a job in that field, so he became a railroad fireman. He realized how much time was wasted by stopping locomotives for frequent lubrication and invented an automatic lubricator that eliminated the problem. He was able to establish his own factory, and it turned out products based on the 58 patents he ultimately earned.

What does all this have to do with Invention & Technology ? “The National Inventors Hall of Fame’s noble charter is to tell the story of our great inventors. Invention & Technology has the same mission,” says Fink. The magazine has long been a favorite of many members of the staff, and its editor, Frederick Allen, serves on the Hall’s board. Fink has worked to develop media projects that can deliver the Hall’s message to a wider audience since his arrival in 1999, and when he heard that the magazine’s founding sponsor, General Motors, was ending its involvement, he suggested that the magazine and the Hall form a partnership. “The people who read Invention & Technology are exactly the kind of people who are most interested in what we have to say here,” he explains. “It’s a very natural fit.”

The magazine and the Hall negotiated a relationship that officially commences with this issue. Invention & Technology readers will learn more about the Hall of Fame’s activities in this column in each issue, and the Hall (or rather, the Hall’s supporters, through it) will help underwrite the magazine and help it meet its own long-standing mission in any other ways it can. In other words, each will strengthen the other.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame, a nonprofit organization, sees itself as devoted to a cause. Invention and creativity are humanity’s most powerful tools for making the world a better place, but they’re tools that aren’t used nearly enough. Too many young Americans become bored with science and math education, and they learn far too little about what the great inventors have done to create the world we live in. Fink and everyone else at the Hall believe that we who do appreciate the power of invention have a special responsibility to spread the word. Teachers, parents, and ordinary citizens all need to find ways to create a more welcoming environment for creative, inventive thinkers. These days there is no cause more important than cultivating the potential of the human mind. Everyone at the National Inventors Hall of Fame is pleased to be teaming up with Invention & Technology in getting out that message.