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The Polymath: Lowell Wood Is America's New Top Inventor (bloomberg.com)
pacopico writes: It's taken more than 80 years, but someone has finally overtaken Thomas Edison as America's top inventor. The dude is named Lowell Wood; he was once behind the infamous 'Star Wars' space laser project, and he was a protege of Edward Teller. On July 7th, he received his 1,085th patent, breaking Edison's record. The article says he has 3,000 more inventions awaiting review at the patent office. Wood seems to be using his powers more for good these days and has become the right hand inventor for Bill Gates and his philanthropic endeavors. He's making efficient nuclear reactors, universal vaccines and anti-concussion football helmets. Quite the life.
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
"Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading—a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. 'I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine,' he says. 'It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them. There will be these three articles that I absolutely have to read before I can turn loose of this thing. If I don't read them, I'm doomed. I'll never come back to them because there will be the next day's journals and the ones after that.'"
Finding someone to fund the patenting process. The rest is quite trivial.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
1085 patents granted and 3000 more submitted. That's 4085 patents. Assuming that he's worked on patents for 50 years, that's an average of over 80 patents per year. That's a lot of patents. The implication of the such a large number of patents is that all the patents are equally valuable. However, I'm not sure it's humanly possible to perform the work for 80 valuable patents per year.
This reminds me of Jan Hendrik Schön, who made waves with 60 publications over 2 years, including 15 in leading journals such as Science and Nature. It was eventually determined that he made up important data for his papers, leading to retraction of many of his papers and even his PhD degree.
I'm not suggesting that there's any fraud in the case of Mr. Wood. Rather, there are many very common and even accepted ways to accumulate a huge number of patents. It's not unthinkable that many/most of the patents are
(1) work mostly performed by others for which he provided guidance, review, or management,
(2) black-box patents that describe what should be done instead of providing sufficient detail to allow someone else skilled in the art to actually utilize the idea, or
(3) incremental ideas based on existing patents or prior art.
It may very well be that Mr. Wood is a genius that has contributed significantly to science and technology and has made a difference in the world. However, the number of patents is not a believable metric of that contribution. To convince me that he is a genius requires only a description of his impactful ideas, as encapsulated in a few (or even one or zero) patents. The large number of patents simply invites skepticism.