HOW MUCH CAN A SIN gle inventor change your life? Utterly, according to the experience of at least one person at the National Inventors Hall of Fame’s induction ceremonies this year, on May 13 and 14. The 2005 inductees included C. Donald Bateman, for his groundproximity warning system, which has made aircraft landings far easier than before and saved countless lives; Robert Gundlach, for being the lead inventor who took xerography from an almost completely impracticable idea to an everyday necessity; Dr. Leo Henry K. Sternbach, for his invention of Librium and Valium; Les Paul, for the solid-body electric guitar, which ultimately gave birth to rock ’n’ roll and thus a new cultural world; and Dean Kamen, best known for the Segway personal transporter but inducted for his AutoSyringe, which has transformed treatment for many diabetics. Kamen’s most dramatic invention may be neither of those. It’s his iBOT, a kind of seated Segway on four wheels, which can climb up and down stairs. With that remarkable capability, it has the potential to make wheelchair-access limitations virtually nonexistent for many thousands.
Yet the most dramatic story of a life’s being changed was the one told when Sir Alec Jeffreys, who created genetic fingerprinting, was inducted. Jeffreys was unable to attend; in his place stood Kirk Bloodsworth—the first person to serve time on death row and be freed by DNA evidence. Bloodsworth was convicted in 1985 of the rape and murder of a nine-year-old girl outside Baltimore. He spent almost nine years in prison, two of them under a death sentence. While incarcerated, he read a book that told how a murderer in England had been caught through the use of Alec Jeffreys’s brand-new technology. Bloodsworth figured that if such a thing could convict a guilty man, it could clear an innocent one, and he spent years fighting to have that happen before he was ultimately completely vindicated. He said at the ceremony in Akron: “I literally owe my life to Sir Alec’s work. If not for him, more than 100 other innocent people would still be spending years in prison for crimes they did not commit. … He is not only my friend, he is my savior.”
Those were the living inventors. Eight deceased ones also became part of the Hall of Fame: Matthias Baldwin, for his pioneering inventions in early railroading; Clarence Birdseye, for his method of flash-freezing food and, by extension, for engendering the whole frozen food industry; Leopold Godowsky, Jr., and Leopold Mannes, for Kodachrome, the first successful color film; Garrett Augustus Morgan, for a safety hood that was a forerunner of the modern gas mask and the first three-way traffic signal, impressive accomplishments for anyone but astounding for an African-American almost a century ago; Jacob Rabinow, for breakthroughs that established the field of optical character recognition; Glenn T. Seaborg, for work in nuclear chemistry; and Selman Waksman, for early antibiotics, including streptomycin, the first drug effective against tuberculosis. Waksman even invented the word antibiotic itself; his latest legacy may be that the world now barely even remembers all the suffering and death from tuberculosis alone that disappeared because of his revolutionary work. Lifechanging indeed.
—Frederick E. Allen
