Several of his inventions relate to warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders, camcorders, and the magnetic tape drive.
Lemelson was an advocate for the rights of independent inventors; he served on a federal advisory committee on patent issues from 1976 to 1979.
[8] He attended New York University after serving during World War II in the United States Army Air Corps engineering department.
He worked for the Office of Naval Research on Project SQUID, a postwar effort to develop pulse jet and rocket engines and then Republic Aviation, designing guided missiles.
[2] During the 1950s, he also worked on systems for video filing of data utilizing magnetic or videotape to record documents, which could be read either on a monitor or from stop frame images.
[1] IBM offered him a position running one of their research divisions, which Lemelson declined because he wanted to remain an independent inventor.
[1] While working during this period on complex industrial products, ranging across the fields of robotics, lasers, computers, and electronics, Lemelson utilized some of the concepts in these more "high tech" areas and applied them to a variety of toy concepts, receiving patents for velcro target games, wheeled toys, board games, and improvements on the classic propeller beanie, among others.
While watching and reading about the problems with the heating and subsequent oxidation on heat shields of rockets re-entering the Earth's atmosphere, Lemelson realized that this same process could operate on the molecular level when electrical resistance in a silicon wafer creates an insulative barrier and thus provides for more efficient conduction of electric current.
From this period onwards, Lemelson received an average of one patent a month for more than 40 years, in technological fields related to automated warehouses, industrial robots, cordless telephones, fax machines, videocassette recorders illuminated highway markers, camcorders and a magnetic tape drive.
[2] In his testimony before the Patent Trademark Office Advisory Committee, he decried what he believed as an "innovation crisis", and that the barriers, such as high legal and filing costs as well as failures of the courts to protect the rights of independent inventors, were creating a negative environment for American inventors and US technological ascendancy.
Combining with robotic devices and bar coders, this technology could be used to check, manipulate, or evaluate the products moving down an assembly line.
[20] Lemelson also sued a variety of Japanese and European automotive and electronics manufacturers for infringing on his machine vision patents.
He was controversial for his alleged use of submarine patents[22] to negotiate licenses worth over $1.3 billion from major corporations in a variety of industries.
[23] Partially as a result of his filing a succession of continuation applications, a number of his patents (particularly those in the field of industrial machine vision) were delayed, in some cases by several decades.
The ruling was upheld on September 9, 2005 by a three judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit under the doctrine of laches, citing "unreasonably long […] delays in prosecution".
On November 16, 2005, the full court declined to review the case, and, citing "prejudice to the public as a whole," extended the original unenforceability ruling to all claims under the patents in question.
[33] Lemelson himself always denied intentionally stalling the patent application process,[34] and asserted that he attempted for many years to get companies interested in his ideas, only to be rejected by what he termed the "not invented here" response.
As a result of such cases, US lawmakers were urged to revise patent law to constrain inventors who emerge after an extended period of time demanding large licensing fees.
On the other side were corporate executives who argued that because of those very delays they were absolved from paying him his due.Lemelson, named Engineer of the Year by readers of Design News in 1995, made many millions in uncontested licenses with a number of the world's most successful companies including IBM and Sony, among others.
[40] On Thomas Edison's birthday in 1998, the John Templeton Foundation, which recognizes "the incalculable power of the human mind," made a posthumous award.
"[41] Company managers know that the odds of an inventor being able to afford the costly litigation are less than one in ten; and even if the suit is brought, four times out of five the courts will hold the patent invalid.