Jerome H. Lemelson, a prolific inventor who became a hero to fellow inventors when he dared to force giant corporations to pay him for his ideas, has died.
Mr. Lemelson, 74, died Wednesday of liver cancer, his family said.
Mr. Lemelson, who lived in Lake Tahoe, Nev., was best known for the annual $500,000 awards he created to help redress what he saw as widespread exploitation of inventors. But in a career in which he obtained more than 500 patents covering technologies from automated warehouses to video camcorders and bar code scanners, he spent most of his life struggling to make ends meet.
To Mr. Lemelson, the American inventor was caught in a trap.
On one side were stubborn examiners and other Patent Office officials who dragged out the patent process for years, sometimes forcing him to divide a single idea into numerous separate and expensive applications covering different industrial processes before he would be legally entitled to collect royalties years after products and processes based on his ideas were in widespread use.
On the other side were corporations that cited those very delays as a reason they were absolved from paying him his due.
Even when the law seemed clearly on the inventor’s side, the legal system often was not. In the few cases when a struggling inventor could stay the course against well-financed corporate legal teams and win a jury award after years of expensive litigation, appellate judges unschooled in the nuances of patent law and unsympathetic to the independent inventor would find technical grounds to reverse the judgment.
In 1992, however, Mr. Lemelson forced a group of Japanese automakers to pay him $100 million for automated manufacturing systems based on refinements of the “machine vision device” he had invented almost 40 years earlier.
Several European and U.S. manufacturers followed suit, bringing Mr. Lemelson’s take to more than $500 million. But with General Motors and Chrysler waiting in the wings and millions more at stake, Ford Motor Co. mounted a vigorous legal resistance that continues despite a federal court ruling this year that rejected the heart of its legal position.
For Mr. Lemelson, who could hold forth for hours telling war stories of how he and other inventors had been cheated, the wonder was that he kept on inventing.
A slight, unassuming man, he became famous among friends for his ever-present notebook and his penchant for suddenly excusing himself while he scribbled down some idea that had just struck him, then asking those present to sign the notebook page as witnesses to his latest brainstorm.
A New York native, he began inventing early, developing an illuminated tongue depressor for his physician father and starting a model airplane business in his basement.
Before he went to college he was designing weapons and other systems for the Army Air Corps in World War II.
It is an index of his success that, when the last of his patent applications are finally granted, Mr. Lemelson will be second only to Thomas Alva Edison as the nation’s most prolific inventor.
