Charles Walton, the Father of RFID

Roland Piquepaille writes "In a very interesting article, the San Jose Mercury News tells us about Charles Walton, the man behind the radio frequency identification technology (RFID). Since his first patent about it in 1973, Walton, now 83 years old, collected about $3 million from royalties coming from his patents. Unfortunately for him, his latest patent about RFID expired in the mid-1990s. So he will not make any money from the billions of RFID tags that will appear in the years to come. But he continues to invent and his latest patent about a proximity card with incorporated PIN code protection was granted in June 2004. Maybe he'll be luckier with this one. This overview contains some excerpts of the original article. It also contains tips to search for Walton's patents and an image of the front page of his first patent."

Comments

wouldn't make a difference

[John Harrison]

The cost of making the antenna is the largest factor in the price of the simplest RFID tags. The industry is pretty close to the elusive 5 cent tag, which has been the holy grail for some time. It is improved technology (as opposed to expiring patents) that has lead to the reduction in cost over time.

Were the patent still in force he could charge less than a penny per tag and he would still get rich (there will be billions and billions of tags) and the cost wouldn't be prohibitive.

If he insisted on a high fee, such as a dollar per tag that would certainly slow the adoption of the technology, but why would he do that?

In the end the market would have dictated the price and it would be low in order to allow adoption of the technology and maximize his profit. In that case, what you are saying would not be any more applicable than it is today.

Delay in RFID NOT due to patent

[PatHMV]

Umpteen morons have posted so far claiming, without benefit of evidence, that RFID has only recently begun to be widely implemented because the patent expired. Baloney!

Even the briefist of Google searches will show you that RFID implementation has been bogged down by 2 factors: sufficiently cheap manufacturing techniques and industry-wide standards for implementation / data encoding / frequency usage. It took bar codes decades to become ubiquitous, in part because of the same need for standard data dsecriptions that allow every product by every manufacturer to be given a unique bar code.

See Frontline, and CSEMag.com, just to pick 2.

The fact that this was patented had nothing to do with its lack of widespread use. Get a grip, people!