Once upon a time, you couldn’t own your own phone. You had to rent your phone every month from the phone company. That means it was illegal to take the phone apart and modify it. Which is exactly what I did when I was ...
Green Phone (1972)
Telephone Answering Machine (1975)
Today we have Facebook and Twitter and Youtube when you’re
bored. Back in 1975, all we had was a
telephone.
When I was 15 I built a telephone answering device. These were
quite illegal at the time - it was to support a “dial-a-joke” (you dial a
number and hear a prerecorded joke or a funny...
Touch Tone ® Pad (1976)
Once upon a time, there were no cell phones. If you wanted to make a phone call outside your house, you had to find a Pay Phone, which the phone company had installed pretty much everywhere. To make a call, you’d put in a dime (later it was a quarter, unless it was a long distance...
Time Machine (1978)
In high school, a
friend of mine was making a movie about time travel, and I volunteered to build
him a time machine (well, it was a prop).
This "Time Machine" used LEDs to count up and down - the
months would reset after 12, and the days would reset after 31. It was all
hardwired with flip flops...
Dedicated Autodialer (1979)
When Sprint and MCI entered the alternate long distance market, accessing their services was a pain: You had to dial the local number, wait for their machine to answer, dial a 5-digit access code, then dial the area code and number you want...
Shoe Phone (1980)
In my 20's I made the Guinness Book of World Records by building
the world's smallest telephone -- it was so small it would fit into the sole of
a Nike running shoe. This was in 1980, before cell phones, and before cordless
phones were arou...
Fake Car Phone (1980)
Before cell phones, there were radiotelephones. In your car. They were big. Only rich people could afford them. And when I was in college, a friend wanted to impress his new girlfriend. So I built him this completely fake car phone with all the bells and whistles: The "Teletronics"...
Camera Controller for Time Exposures (1982)
Once upon a time, back in the days of film, long exposures (like of the picture below, which was taken at 2:00 AM using a 20-minute exposure) were very much a trial-and-error process. First you had to put your camera on a tripod, and set your shutter speed to “a very long time”. It...
Speech Synthesizer (1984)
Having machines talk has been a goal of inventors since the 17th century. But primitive speech synthesis systems didn't start to appear until the 1970's. In the 1980's a speech synthesis chip finally became available and I used it to make a portable "talking machin...
Remote Control for Seniors (1985)
My grandmother, in her later years, would spend her days sitting in her living room chair either reading or watching TV.But she had a difficult time using the TV’s remote control. The buttons were tiny, were mushy (she didn’t really know if she was pressing it with sufficient force), the...
Answering Machine with Speech Synthesis and Touch Tone ® Decoding (1985)
When I was in college, I built the most advanced telephone answering machine in the world. The year was 1985, and it employed synthetic speech for the outgoing message, and used Touch Tone (r) decoding for the various functions listed below, some of which are still not commercially available....
Slide Projector Dissolve Unit (1985)
Back in the olden days, "multimedia" meant two slide projectors, a dissolve unit (so one image would "dissolve" into the next) and synchronized sound track. But back in 1984 there weren't any dissolve controllers that met my needs, so I did what any self-respecting engineer would do - I designed...
Intelligent Autodialer (1986)
This was an intelligent autodialer. It was designed for those radio station contests where "the 51st caller will win a billion dollars". This would dial a number repeatedly, listen to the signal, and hang up and redial if a busy signal (or an all-lines-busy signal) was detected. It would make noise...
Darkroom Controller (1986)
I had a long history of using computers to alleviate the "dog work" of photography. Anyone who's ever spent long evenings in the darkroom not only has lungs full of Dektol fumes, but also can attest to the fact that there's a lot room for automation. And so the same calculator that got me...
Electronic Tape Measure (1986)
Polaroid corporation was the first company to produce an autofocus camera. It was able to infer the distance of the subject by bouncing sound off of the subject and timing how long it took for the sound to bounce back from the subject. The longer it took, the further away the subject was. ...
Automatic Window Closer (1989)
The first condo I ever owned was arranged like a chimney – every room was on its own floor. (Well, they were staggered, so each room was ½ a flight of stairs away from the other.)My bedroom was on the very top floor, and in the summertime it got really hot up there because, you know, heat rises. ...
Redundant Local Area Network (1989)
Once upon a time, before Wi-Fi, computers would all talk to each other via a network cable called Ethernet. It was a big yellow cable and you had to drill into it in order to install a "vampire tap" in order to attach a computer to ...
The Data Egg (1990)
Back in my NASA days, I identified an Astronaut problem:
when you’re floating in space, the minute you try to press buttons on a
keyboard, unless you were tied down you would start to float away. (You know, every action causes equal and opposite
reaction.) I thought this was a problem
that...
Trustworthy Digital Camera (1993)
Once upon a time there was a saying: “The photograph doesn’t lie”. While mostly true, you could still lie in the old days by attaching false captions or using a forced perspective. Lying by manipulation came much later -- it was used heavily by the Soviets during the time of Stalin, and...
Pentium Re-compiler
Feb. 13, 1995Windows PCs were once run ONLY on CPUs made by Intel: computer chips with names like 8086, 80186, 80286, 80306, 80486, and Pentium. (I guess their legal department figured out they can't trademark a number.) Each new generation offered new capabilities that would only...
Electronic Sheet Music (1993)
Dear all,Last week Nana and I attended an outdoor concert. Some of the musicians were using traditional sheet music; some were using iPads.Instantly my brain zoomed back to the 1990's - long before iPads or Kindles existed - where I had thought of an idea of Electronic Sheet Music. It tried to solve the problem of turning pages of sheet music while performing, a problem made especially...
Life Alert for my Grandmother (1994)
Once upon a time my 80-something-year-old grandmother was
living with us while waiting for her condo (which had been badly damaged during
the 1994 Northridge earthquake) to be rebuilt.
She was frail and fell a lot in our big house. My mom asked me to invent something that
would alert her...
Hold On™ (1994)
My first foray into commercial products...
Once upon a time, before cell phones and before cordless phones,
telephones were plugged into the wall. In
1989, I lived in a 5-story condo where each room was on its own floor. Every
time I wanted to continue a phone conversation in a different...
Electro-Magnet Bindings for Snowboards (2002)
Once upon a time, I learned how to snowboard. Above is a picture of me and my friend Seth (for whom I was a "big brother" for many years).I was never very limber (even in my youth), and I found the bindings too difficult to use. “This is dumb. Why not use an electromagnet instead,...
Digital Guitar (2010)
Once upon a time, Guitar Hero was ridiculously popular. Kids would spend thousands of hours practicing pressing the colored buttons on the guitar neck when the video game told them to. I looked at this and lamented, "All of those hours spent playing this game, but those skills can't...
My Laboratory
I was really into telephones when I was young...
Other Stuff
1980's - While in college I volunteered for the Student Tutorial Elementary Program, which paired college students with low-performing youth from underprivileged neighborhood schools. The one-on-one attention the child received twice a week for a semester made a demonstrable difference according...
Two NASA videos (one from 1989)
This is me when I was young and good looking. A NASA video right around the time of Voyager's visit to Neptune. Back then, scientists got their spacecraft data from 8-track tapes and computer printouts. My group experimented with graphical displays on UNIX workstations which could visualize the data in real-time. I tried to graft that high-end capability to the measly IBM PC, which back then had...
Six Weeks
Since I'm on a nostalgia roll here, let me tell you about the most interesting six weeks of my life. First, some background: In the early 1980's, I was a photographer for a children's sign language performing ensemble called "A Show Of Hands". The group toured Switzerland in 1985 and...
My MIT Application
My oldest grandson and I were going through some of these old inventions, most of which were packed in a box in the basement. One item in that box was a copy of my application to the MIT Media Lab. I was hoping to attend graduate school there in the early 1990's.I explained to him...
I started my own business...
I left my 10-year career at NASA because I wanted to commercialize some of my patents, and in order to do that I had to learn how to run a business.The company I started was called E2 Solutions (E2 stood for "Extended Enterprise" - we were an Information Technology consulting firm which had visions...
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