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Charles Walton, the Father of RFID

Posted by simoniker on from the rtfm-on-rfid dept.

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."

4 of 169 comments (clear)

  1. privacy, schmivacy by surreal-maitland · · Score: 4, Interesting

    i don't understand the big fear of lack of privacy due to RFID tags. capitalism just takes care of it. if enough people don't want their location known, there will be a market for clothing, etc that does not have RFID tags embedded in it. the government's never going to say (knock on wood) that all clothes or shoes or whatever must have RFID tags, so it's really not something to worry about.

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    -ninjaneer
  2. Disc Golf by Squareball · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I want these tags on me Disc Golf discs! I lose to many and at $10 a pop it gets expensive. Just wonder if they are small enought to be embedded in the discs. Then we just need a hand held locator to find them with.

  3. RFID Patents...current happenings by ChromDome · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Last week, Intermec filed suit against Matrics over RFID Patent Infringment. Intermec owns a WIDE variety of patents in the RFID space that are very general in nature.

    For those of you who don't live in the RFID world...Matrics is the vendor who's hardware is being put into WalMart. Many insiders believe that Intermec's lawsuit was designed to poision the water around a possible acquistion of Matrics by one of Intermec's competitors. There is also a general train of thought that Intermec tactically blundered by moving too soon, they should have waited 6 more months for the RFID initiative within WalMart to really catch on before they hit the industry with royalties.

    http://www.computerworld.com/mobiletopics/mobile /t echnology/story/0,10801,93744,00.html

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    We are but the sum of our experiances
  4. Re:Patents and Privacy by blueskies · · Score: 3, Interesting
    "Were licensing fees prohibitive for mass-scale introduction of RFID tags, personal privacy would be safer."
    ROTFLMFAO

    Because licensing would prevent what exactly? Identity theift? The fact that credit card companies and banks collect information on me? Would it stop websites from cookie-ing my browser? People spying through my windows? Eliminate the need for my tinfoil hat?

    Have you any clue about the signal strength of passive rfid tags, which i'm assuming you're talking about? They are powered by a tag reader that is required to keep it's output power underneath FCC standards and then they transmit back using the power provided by that reader. How hard exactly do you think it would be to jam the readers from hearing a reply from these unpowered tags?

    Ok, that felt better. +5 for being insightful? Anyway, with all of that out of the way, there are some privacy issues involved but to make it a black and white case that RFID tags are EVIL is the kind of overgeneraliztions used by karma whores on slashdot...oh.....