Deceased--Stanford R. Ovshinsky

Stanford R. Ovshinsky and Iris M. Ovshinsk

Stanford R. Ovshinsky
November 24th, 1922 to October 17th, 2012

"Stanford R. Ovshinsky Dies at 89, a Self-Taught Maverick in Electronics"

by

Barnaby J. Feder

October 18th, 2012

The New York Times

Stanford R. Ovshinsky, an iconoclastic, largely self-taught and commercially successful scientist who invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and contributed to the development of a host of devices, including solar energy panels, flat-panel displays and rewritable compact discs, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 89.

The cause was prostate cancer, his son Harvey said.

Placing Mr. Ovshinsky in “the league of genius inventors,” The Economist magazine once titled an article about him “The Edison of Our Age?”

If not quite that, he was certainly among the 20th century’s most inventive breed of scientists who, like Edison, parlayed their ideas into practical commercial applications.

He gained particular attention for upsetting common wisdom about the nature of semiconductors. Semiconductors, which block or carry electrical current depending on the voltage to which they are exposed, typically consist of crystals in which molecules line up in ordered ranks. But in the late 1950s Mr. Ovshinsky became convinced that less regimented materials could also act as semiconductors.

He argued that products using these so-called amorphous, or disordered, materials could be much cheaper to make than those built from the workhorse compounds of the electronics industry, like silicon crystals.

His ideas drew only scorn and skepticism at first. He was an unknown inventor with unconventional ideas, a man without a college education who made his living designing automation equipment for the automobile industry in Detroit, far from the hotbeds of electronics research like Silicon Valley and Boston.

But Mr. Ovshinsky prevailed. Industry eventually credited him for the principle that small quantities or thin films of amorphous materials exposed to a charge can instantly reorganize their structures into semicrystalline forms capable of carrying significant current.

With a bit of a promotional twist, he christened the field “ovonics.”

In 1960, he and his second wife, the former Iris L. Miroy, founded Energy Conversion Laboratories in Rochester Hills, Mich., to develop practical products from the discovery. It was renamed Energy Conversion Devices four years later.

Energy Conversion Devices and its subsidiaries, spinoff companies and licensees began translating Mr. Ovshinsky’s insights into mechanical, electronic and energy devices, among them solar-powered calculators. His nickel-metal battery is used to power hybrid cars and portable electronics, among other things.

He holds patents relating to rewritable optical discs, flat-panel displays and electronic-memory technology. His thin-film solar cells are produced in sheets “by the mile,” as he once put it.

The Ovshinskys were champions of alternative energy and sounded early alarms about the industrial world’s insatiable demand for oil, saying it could lead to resource wars and climate change. More than 50 years ago, Mr. Ovshinsky began promoting hydrogen fuel cells as an alternative to the internal-combustion engine.

In his so-called hydrogen loop, water is converted to stored hydrogen through solar-powered electrolysis, and from hydrogen back to water, generating electricity through a fuel cell. Automotive companies have begun producing hydrogen-based demonstration models.

Mr. Ovshinsky’s promotional flair helped Energy Conversion Devices attract investors, including giants like Standard Oil, Texaco, Chevron, Canon, 3M, Intel and General Motors. They collectively invested hundreds of millions of dollars in his ventures, some of which failed.

Mr. Ovshinsky’s business maneuvers came to be considered every bit as creative and extraordinary as his inventions. Energy Conversion Devices lost money decade after decade, surviving by periodically selling control of patents, rights to royalties from them or new stock.

In 1989, when the company was completing the 29th of what would become a string of 35 years of losses, Forbes described it as “a high-tech Roach Motel” where “the money goes in but it never comes out.”

Mr. Ovshinsky recruited Robert Stempel, a former chairman and chief executive of G.M., to help run the company in 1993. Mr. Stempel became chairman in 1995 and retired in 2007. (He died in 2011.)

The practical applications of his ideas never fully diverted Mr. Ovshinsky from his passion for basic materials research. He continued to help write scientific papers and cultivated relationships with luminaries like Nevill F. Mott, who won the 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics for explaining the underlying behavior of amorphous materials.

“His incredible curiosity and unbelievable ability to learn sets him apart,” Hellmut T. Fritzsche, a longtime friend and consultant, said in an interview in 2005.

Mr. Fritzsche was a noted semiconductor researcher at the University of Chicago when Mr. Ovshinsky called him in 1963 to ask him to visit Energy Conversion Devices.

Mr. Fritzsche, who became a paid consultant for the company and then its vice president, said he had been impressed that Mr. Ovshinsky’s first words when he arrived were: “Let’s not talk. Let me show you what I’ve discovered.”

Stanford Robert Ovshinsky was born on Nov. 24, 1922, in Akron, Ohio, the son of Benjamin and Bertha Munitz Ovshinsky. His father was an immigrant from Lithuania who became a scrap metal dealer. His contacts got young Stan an apprenticeship as a lathe operator with a motor manufacturer while still in high school.

When Mr. Ovshinsky’s asthma excluded him from military service, he married Norma Rifkin, his childhood sweetheart, and moved to Phoenix to work in a Goodyear aircraft factory. He returned to Akron and set up his own machine and lathe manufacturing shop in 1946. His first patent was for a novel lathe design.

That design caught the attention of the New Britain Machine Company in Connecticut, and it bought his company in 1950. Mr. Ovshinsky ran the business for two years until leaving for Detroit in 1952 to become director of research at Hupp, a motor manufacturer.

He and his brother, Herbert, formed General Automation in 1955, which was renamed Ovitron in 1958. Energy Conversion Devices became a publicly traded company in 1967.

Iris Ovshinsky died in 2006. Mr. Ovshinsky later married Dr. Rosa Young. He retired from Energy Conversion in 2007 and formed Ovshinsky Innovation and Ovshinsky Solar to further his work in energy and information technologies.

This year Energy Conversion sold its battery unit, the Ovonic Battery Company, to BASF and filed for bankruptcy protection. A liquidation plan was approved in bankruptcy court in August.

Mr. Ovshinsky’s survivors include his wife as well three sons from his first marriage, Benjamin, Harvey and Dale; two stepchildren from his first marriage, Dr. Robin Dibner and Steven Dibner; two stepchildren from his third marriage, Angela Goddard and Vicki Young; his brother, Herbert; and six grandchildren and step-grandchildren.

Stanford and Iris Ovshinsky’s five-decade partnership in science, business and marriage brought them almost as much attention as their contributions to alternative energy.

In an interview for PBS in 2004, Mr. Ovshinsky was asked how he and his wife had managed to work so well together.

“By being in love,” he replied.

Stanford R. Ovshinsky [Wikipedia]

Deceased--Byron Donzis

Byron Donzis
March 5th, 1932 to Janiary 4th, 2012

"Byron Donzis dies at 79; wide-ranging inventor"

Byron Donzis made and lost fortunes while inventing such products as a flak jacket used by football players, inflatable running shoes and an X-ray machine to detect leaks in oil pipes.

by

Elaine Woo

January 13th, 2012

Los Angeles Times

In 1978, Byron Donzis walked into a Houston hospital looking for Dan Pastorini, the Houston Oilers' prized quarterback who was laid up with three broken ribs from a recent game. Donzis was wearing a trench coat and carrying a large bag. He was accompanied by an associate wielding a baseball bat.

They sweet-talked their way past the nurses and into Pastorini's private room. The quarterback thought the two strange men must have lost money on the game and had come for revenge.

Instead, Donzis instructed his friend to smack him across his rib cage as hard as he could with the bat. His buddy hit him four or five times but Donzis didn't flinch. When he pulled back his coat to reveal a garment that looked like a life jacket, Pastorini was agog.

"I said, 'I'd like to have one of those,'" Pastorini recalled telling Donzis. A few days later, the National Football League star donned Donzis' "flak jacket" in a big game and led his team to the playoffs.

The flak jacket became standard gear in the NFL and the greatest success in Donzis' prolific and sundry career as an inventor-entrepreneur.

Donzis, 79, who died Jan. 4 in Landrum, S.C., after a stroke, turned his ideas into useful products in fields as diverse as sports equipment, cosmetics, floristry and medicine. "He just wanted to know how things worked and what he could do to make things better," said his wife, Martha Gibson Donzis.

His name appears on more than 35 patents, according to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. His inventions include a prefabricated tennis court, inflatable running shoes, stadium seats with solar panels and an X-ray machine for detecting leaky oil pipelines.

Like many inventors, he had more ideas than successes and lost a number of fortunes.

"It's almost a curse," Sue Shaper, a Houston intellectual property attorney who represented Donzis for many years, said Thursday about the personality of inventors. "They see so many things and they can't pursue them all. Byron was a paradigmatic inventor in that sense."

Before the flak jacket, Donzis developed running shoes with air chambers inflated by a built-in pump and acquired a patent on the system in 1972. Two decades later he successfully sued sports shoe maker Reebok for infringing on his patent when it marketed its "Pump" sneaker.

Donzis also discovered the wrinkle-reducing capability of a chemical compound called beta-glucan, which he marketed to leading cosmetics companies, including Estee Lauder and Mary Kay. Licensed under the name Nayad, it won favorable reviews: Vogue magazine described it as "a superstar natural ingredient of the '90s."

He once dismissed his inventions for lacking "any social relevance whatever," and said his real motivation was finding a cure for cancer. Although that goal eluded him, he was an early and important benefactor of the Sunshine Kids Foundation, a Houston-based nonprofit that supports children with cancer.

Donzis was married twice but had no children.

Born in San Antonio on March 5, 1932, Donzis graduated from high school in 1949 and dropped out of Southern Methodist University after one semester. After serving in the Army, he found work on a pipeline.

"In those days, no one was paid until the project was finished," Donzis told the San Antonio Express-News in 1999, and he needed a paycheck. Desperation, often the mother of invention, led Donzis to his first Thomas Edison moment. To speed up construction, he invented an X-ray system that quickly found leaks and flaws in the pipeline. He secured the patent in 1963.

The tennis boom in the 1970s led to his next major inspiration: a tennis court made of wood and foam that could be built far more quickly than a traditional court. It seemed like a brilliant idea until the cold temperatures of winter made the foam shrink. Lawsuits from customers bankrupted him, but he rebounded as a carpenter and made good money building backyard decks.

In the late 1970s, he spent some time at an Army laboratory in Massachusetts. The Army was looking for ways to protect pilots from blunt-force impact. Donzis' solution was a super-lightweight vest that inflated and deflated instantly, like a car air bag.

After leaving the Army lab, he moved to Houston and was struggling to gain attention for his protective jacket when he heard about Pastorini's injury. Pastorini recalled that the prototype was fabricated from a Navy SEAL life jacket, with an outer layer of Kevlar. "It was a little bit rustic," he said.

Donzis had no regrets about his unorthodox demonstration in the quarterback's hospital room. "People will consider you off the wall. If that bothers you don't be an innovator," he told the Dallas Morning News in 1994. "That's part of the badge you wear."

The jacket caught on with other players and soon the NFL gave Donzis a grant to produce more of them, which he later made with foam. He went on to make other protective items, including thigh and neck pads, shoulder harnesses, helmets and knee guards. He made a flak jacket for James Garner after the actor fell off a mechanical bull during a movie shoot and broke several ribs.

Donzis once said that the only gear he wouldn't make was a cup protector, quipping that he would never submit that part of his anatomy to the bat test.

Deceased--Samuel M. Genensky

Samuel M. Genensky
July 26th, 1927 to June 26th, 2009

"Samuel M. Genensky dies at 81; mathematician invented tools for the near-blind"

by

Elaine Woo

July 12th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

Samuel M. Genensky, a former Rand Corp. mathematician and inventor whose near-blindness led him to help others cope with limited eyesight and become more self-sufficient, died June 26 at his Santa Monica home. He was 81.

The cause was complications of heart disease, said LaDonna Ringering, president and chief executive of the Center for the Partially Sighted, a West Los Angeles facility that Genensky founded in 1978.

Genensky was best known for developing a kind of closed-circuit television that became the prototype for the video magnifiers sold around the world today that enable people with severe visual impairments to read books, magazines and other conventionally printed materials.

"Sam is universally known as a pioneer of assisted technology for people with partial vision," said Tony R. Candela, a deputy director in the California Department of Rehabilitation who oversees services for the blind and deaf. Genensky's magnification machine "ended up revolutionizing the ability of people with partial vision to read printed material," Candela said.

The positive reaction to the invention persuaded Genensky to become an advocate for the partially sighted, who number about 14 million in the United States.

"When the partially blind went out in the world, they found that they either got no services at all or services that were appropriate for people who were totally blind," Genensky told an interviewer this year. "Neither of these alternatives made much sense to me."

Genensky, who was born in New Bedford, Mass., on July 26, 1927, was determined not to be treated as a blind person, even though he met the legal definition. His eyes were burned shortly after birth when a delivery-room nurse accidentally administered the wrong eyedrops to guard against infection. No sight remained in his left eye and he had only 20/1000 vision in his right eye.

Hardworking and exceptionally bright, he completed the first eight years of school in seven years. After elementary school, he was sent to the Perkins Institute for the Blind in Watertown, Mass., where he refused to use Braille even though he knew it. He preferred to use what little sight he had, even if it meant holding a book up to his nose.

Frustrated by teachers' demands that he "act like a well-behaved blind child," he left Perkins for a regular public high school in New Bedford. To keep up with his normal-sighted peers, he took his father's World War I-era binoculars to geometry class one day and was delighted to discover that he could see what the teacher was drawing on the board.

With the help of a doctor, he added another lens to one side of the binoculars, essentially creating a bifocal system that allowed him to read the blackboard in the distance as well as the book on his desk. He began to earn A's.

This contraption, though cumbersome, worked well enough to get Genensky through high school, as well as four years at Brown University, where he graduated magna cum laude with a bachelor's degree in physics in 1949. He earned a master's in pure mathematics from Harvard in 1951 and a doctorate in applied mathematics from Brown in 1958.

In the late 1950s, not long after joining Rand, a colleague, Paul Baran, noticed how Genensky had to work slumped over his drawing board with his nose to the paper. Baran suggested that there had to be a way to improve the mathematician's ability to see.

With Baran and other scientist and engineer friends, Genensky hooked up a closed-circuit TV with a camera. It not only magnified the type on a page but had controls for brightness and contrast. Genensky didn't have to slump over his desk anymore.

When the device was publicized as "Sam Genensky's Marvelous Seeing Machine" in a 1971 issue of Reader's Digest, the Rand mathematician was flooded with thousands of requests a week from partially sighted people who wanted to try it. Many of them said the magnifying machine enabled them to read printed matter for the first time. "I couldn't turn my back on them," he said in 1994, recalling his decision to devote himself to working for the partially blind.

Another innovation from Genensky's two decades at Rand sprang from his experiences looking for the bathroom. The signs marking Rand's restrooms were too small for him to read unless he put his face right up to the door. All too often he was peering at the wrong door when it opened and a startled woman came out.

When a Rand guard asked why he was smelling restroom doors, Genensky knew he had to find a solution to the dilemma.

"He's the guy responsible for the triangle and circle," Baran said, referring to the widely adopted system of a triangle-shaped sign to identify the men's room and a circle-shaped one for the women's room. Genensky's brainstorm eventually became the standard for marking public restrooms in California, years before similar federal requirements were introduced in the 1990s.

In 1993, when fragments of scar tissue began to cloud his "good" right eye, Genensky underwent a cornea transplant, as well as cataract removal and pupil reshaping. When the bandages were removed, a new world opened, especially in his perception of color. For instance, he saw that his wife was a redhead, not a brunet as he had thought.

The visual improvements lasted for more than a decade, until other age-related health issues rendered him completely blind.

Genensky is survived by his second wife, Nancy Cronig; daughters Marsha and Judy; stepchildren Andrea Cronig Mindell, Mitchell Cronig and Adam Cronig; and four grandchildren.

Deceased--Jack Cover

Jack Cover
April 6th, 1920 to February 7th, 2009

"He got the name for the weapon from one of his favorite childhood books, "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle," one in a popular early 20th century series by Victor Appleton. In the book, the young Swift invents a rifle that shoots bolts of electricity. The story apparently continued to animate Cover's imagination decades later, when he conceived the word "Taser" as an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle.""

A useful but abused tool of law enforcement.

"Jack Cover dies at 88; scientist invented the Taser stun gun"

Cover, who spent most of his career working in the aerospace and defense industries, originally developed the idea for the Taser in the 1960s. But it didn't really take off until the 1990s.

by

Elaine Woo

February 13th, 2009

Los Angeles Times

Jack Cover, an aerospace scientist who invented the Taser stun gun -- a device used by thousands of law enforcement agencies to subdue unruly offenders with electrical shocks -- has died. He was 88.

Cover had Alzheimer's disease and died of pneumonia Saturday at the Golden West Retirement Home in Mission Viejo, said his wife, Ginny.

Trained as a nuclear physicist, Cover spent most of his career working in aerospace and defense industries. He was a chief scientist for North American Aviation (later Rockwell International) and helped the firm become a primary NASA contractor on the Apollo moon landing program in the early 1960s.

He also was a born inventor who in the 1940s already was building gadgets, including cooked-food testers, voice- activated switches and an electric toothbrush. One of his last brainstorms was an alternative-energy generator.

But the Taser was his most successful invention, credited with preventing deadly police encounters and spurring improvements in the tactics used to take violent offenders into custody.

"Jack is an unsung hero. He did something great for the world, saved a lot of lives and prevented a lot of injuries," said Greg Meyer, a retired police captain who was heading the Los Angeles Police Department's nonlethal weapons research when he met Cover 30 years ago.

The Taser also has its share of critics, who have linked the device to scores of deaths in recent years, including two Orange County jail inmates last year. The American Civil Liberties Union is pressing to have Tasers classified as lethal weapons, but experts disagree on whether the stun guns directly caused the deaths.

Despite the continuing debate, the Taser has come into widespread use, adopted by more than 13,000 military and law enforcement agencies around the world, including the LAPD, which worked closely with Cover to test the device in the 1980s.

According to Meyer, Cover began to develop the Taser in the 1960s in response to a rash of airplane hijackings. Sky marshals carrying sidearms began riding on commercial airliners to discourage hijackers, but Cover saw the risk inherent in the situation. If a bullet missed the hijacker and pierced the fuselage instead, the plane could go down.

"He said, 'Let me figure out something better than shooting people that might crash the plane,' " Meyer said.

Cover told the Orange County Register in 1991 that he got the idea for the Taser after hearing about a man who was briefly immobilized by a fallen power line. He began tinkering in his garage and in the late 1960s came up with a device that looked something like a flashlight but fired darts that delivered an electrical charge. The darts could hit a target up to 15 feet away.

He got the name for the weapon from one of his favorite childhood books, "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle," one in a popular early 20th century series by Victor Appleton. In the book, the young Swift invents a rifle that shoots bolts of electricity. The story apparently continued to animate Cover's imagination decades later, when he conceived the word "Taser" as an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift Electric Rifle." (Cover evidently added the middle initial "A," which does not appear in the books.)

Cover was born in New York City on April 6, 1920, and grew up in Chicago. He earned a bachelor's degree and a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago, where his professors included Enrico Fermi and Edward Teller, the renowned atomic scientists.

During World War II, he was an Army Air Forces test pilot. After the war, he spent several years at the Inyokern Naval Ordnance Test Station at China Lake, Calif. He was a scientist at North American Aviation from 1952 until 1964 and later worked for IBM and Hughes.

In 1970, he formed Taser Systems Inc., believing that his invention of a weapon that could stun but not kill an assailant would have wide appeal. But because the Taser used gunpowder to launch the darts, the federal government considered it a firearm, a classification that ruled out a civilian market and also discouraged police and military sales.

The LAPD had rejected the Taser twice during the 1970s, Meyer recalled, but reconsidered in 1979 after the controversy involving Eula Love, a South Los Angeles woman who was shot to death by LAPD officers in a confrontation over an unpaid gas bill. As a result of field tests with the LAPD in 1980, Cover won department approval with an 11-watt Taser that proved more effective than his initial 7-watt model, Meyer said. But sales remained limited and the business collapsed.

In 1993, two Arizona brothers, Tom and Rick Smith, contacted the then-73-year-old Cover about retooling the Taser as a nonlethal self-protection device that could legally be sold to civilians.

"Jack was very dedicated to the mission," Tom Smith, co-founder and chairman of Taser International in Scottsdale, Ariz., said this week. "He had a true belief in where this technology was going to go."

In 1994, the Smiths' company launched the Air Taser, based on Cover's proposal to change the propulsion system from gunpowder to compressed air. Among projectile stun guns, the Smiths' devices are the most widely sold in the world, used by police and military agencies in 45 countries. In addition, more than 180,000 Tasers have been sold to private citizens, according to a company spokesman.

Cover was cremated, and there are no immediate plans for a memorial service. In addition to his wife, of San Clemente, he is survived by four children, two stepchildren, 10 grandchildren and five great-grandchildren.

Deceased--Adrian Kantrowitz

Adrian Kantrowitz

October 4th, 1918 to November 14th, 2008

"Dr Adrian Kantrowitz, Inventor, Transplant Surgeon, Dies"

by

Michael O'Riordan

November 19th, 2008

Heartwire

November 19, 2008 (New York, NY) — Dr Adrian Kantrowitz, the surgeon who performed the first human heart transplant in the US, the second worldwide, died late last week at age 90 from complications from heart failure.

In more than 60 years of surgical practice, Kantrowitz is credited with designing and using more than 20 medical devices that aided circulation and vital functions, including the intra-aortic balloon pump (IABP), the left ventricular assist device (LVAD), and an early version of the implantable defibrillator.

However, Kantrowitz will forever be remembered as the first surgeon in the US to perform a heart transplant. On December 6, 1967, he implanted a heart into a baby with a fatal heart defect, doing so just three days after South African surgeon Dr Christiaan Barnard performed the world's first cardiac transplant.

In an obituary appearing in the New York Times, the newspaper notes that Kantrowitz had practiced hundreds of heart transplants in animals over the previous four years and had been on track to be the first to surgically implant a human heart. The previous year he had been prevented at the last minute because the donor infant had not been declared brain dead.

In addition to replacing hearts, the Times points out that he "concentrated on finding ways to supplement the work of the natural heart with an impressive array of circulatory devices of his own invention." Of these, the most noteworthy invention was the LVAD, which he implanted for the first time in 1972. The IABP, invented in 1967, has been used in roughly three million patients since the 1980s when it went into general use.

Born in New York City on October 4, 1918, Kantrowitz graduated from New York University with a degree in mathematics. He attended the Long Island College of Medicine, which is now part of SUNY Downstate Medical Center, and interned at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. His medical education was fast-tracked, however, as part of an accelerated program to supply doctors for World War II. He joined the Army Medical Corps as a battalion surgeon, where he served for two years.

In 1948, Kantrowitz practiced surgery at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx and later moved to the Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he held a surgical post. In 1970, Kantrowitz moved his entire team to Detroit, teaching at Wayne State University School of Medicine and practicing at Sinai Hospital.

Kantrowitz is survived by his wife, Jean, and his three children, Niki, Lisa, and Allen, all of whom are doctors.

"Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, Cardiac Pioneer, Dies at 90"

by

Jascha Hoffman

November 19th, 2008

The New York Times

Dr. Adrian Kantrowitz, who performed the first human heart transplant in the United States in 1967 and pioneered the development of mechanical devices to prolong the life of patients with heart failure, died Friday in Ann Arbor, Mich. He was 90.

The cause was complications of heart failure, said Jean Kantrowitz, his wife of nearly 60 years and a longtime colleague in developing the devices.

On Dec. 6, 1967, when he removed the heart of a brain-dead baby and implanted it into the chest of a baby with a fatal heart defect, Dr. Kantrowitz became the first doctor to perform a human heart transplant in the United States. The patient lived for only six and a half hours, but the operation was a milestone on the way to the routine transplants of today.

Along with Dr. Michael E. DeBakey of Texas and a few others, Dr. Kantrowitz helped open the new era in care for seemingly terminally ill heart patients, using both surgery and artificial devices. His work at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn and Sinai Hospital in Detroit had a lasting impact, starting with his first headlines in 1959, when he gave a healthy dog a booster heart muscle.

Over six decades of surgical practice, he designed and used more than 20 medical devices that aided circulation and other vital functions.

Although his 1967 transplant was the first in the United States, it was not the first in the world, following by three days Dr. Christiaan Barnard’s in Cape Town. But Dr. Kantrowitz had been methodical in laying the groundwork for the procedure. He practiced hundreds of heart transplants in puppies over the previous four years, and had planned a human operation the previous year, but was prevented at the last minute because the donor infant had not been declared brain-dead.

"Although Dr. Kantrowitz had the dedication and perseverance to accomplish this remarkable surgical tour de force, it was the notion that, for the first time, science could view the heart as yet another organ that could be fixed that was a revolutionary concept," Dr. Stephen J. Lahey, director of cardiothoracic surgery at Maimonides Medical Center, said in a statement on the 40th anniversary of Dr. Kantrowitz's transplant.

While many doctors have worked to replace failing hearts altogether with artificial ones, Dr. Kantrowitz concentrated on finding ways to supplement the work of the natural heart with an impressive array of circulatory devices of his own invention. The most influential was the "left ventricular assist device," or LVAD, which, for the first time in 1972, allowed a patient with severe chronic heart failure to leave the hospital with a permanent implant.

Another of his inventions was the intra-aortic balloon pump, described in The New York Times in 1967 as “a long, narrow gas line” inserted through the patient’s thigh that inflated "a six-inch-long sausage-shaped balloon" in the aorta. The device deflated when the heart pumped blood and inflated when it relaxed, thereby reducing strain on the heart, according to Dr. Kantrowitz's theory of "counterpulsation." The device has been used to treat about three million patients since it went into general use in the 1980s.

He also invented an early implantable pacemaker, designed with General Electric in 1962, and captured the first film of the mitral valve opening and closing inside a beating heart in 1951.

His inventiveness extended beyond cardiology. In 1961, inspired by the way the muscles in the heart were stimulated, he was the first doctor to enable paraplegic patients to move their limbs by electronically triggering their muscles.

Adrian Kantrowitz was born on Oct. 4, 1918, in New York City, to a mother who designed costumes for the Ziegfeld Follies and a father who ran a clinic in the Bronx that charged its patients 10 cents a week.

"My mother told me from the age of 3 that I wanted to be a doctor," he told The New York Post in 1966.

As a boy he worked with his older brother Arthur to construct an electrocardiograph from old radio parts. The brothers later collaborated on the left ventricular assist device.

After graduating from New York University with a degree in mathematics in 1940, Dr. Kantrowitz enrolled in the Long Island College of Medicine (now a part of SUNY Downstate Medical Center) and completed an internship at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital. He earned his medical degree early, in 1943, as part of an accelerated program to supply doctors for the war effort. After serving two years as a battalion surgeon in the Army Medical Corps, Dr. Kantrowitz began a career in cardiac research and became a major figure in the first generation of cardiac surgeons.

From 1948 to 1955, he practiced surgery at Montefiore Hospital in the Bronx. From 1955 to 1970, he held surgical posts at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where he led a team that devised many influential devices with support from the National Institutes of Health, including an electronic heart-lung machine and a radio transmitter that allowed paralyzed patients to empty their bladders.

In 1970 Dr. Kantrowitz left Maimonides when "it became apparent that a small community hospital in Brooklyn was not the proper environment for the development of innovative cardiac surgical techniques," according to a recent profile in the journal Clinical Cardiology. Remarkably, he was able to move his entire team of 25 surgeons, engineers and nurses — and with them a nearly $3 million research grant — to Detroit, where he taught at Wayne State University School of Medicine and held surgical posts at Sinai Hospital for the rest of his career.

Besides his wife, Jean, who helped him start a medical device company, LVAD Technology, in 1983, his survivors include three children, Dr. Niki Kantrowitz, a cardiologist in Brooklyn; Dr. Lisa Kantrowitz, a radiologist in Newport Beach, Calif.; and Dr. Allen Kantrowitz, a neurosurgeon in Williamstown, Mass.; and nine grandchildren.

Dr. Kantrowitz received a lifetime achievement award from the American Society for Artificial Internal Organs in 2001. He did not rest on his laurels. This year the Food and Drug Administration approved a clinical trial of his latest cardiac assistance device, which promises to allow seriously ill patients to move around and even exercise.

[Thanks to stringer Tim for the notification.]

Deceased--Alvin M. Marks

Alvin M. Marks
October 28th, 1910 to May [?], 2008

Quite an inventor...from the practical [optics] to the fantastic ["space train"].

"Alvin M. Marks, Inventor With 122 Patents, Dies at 97"

by

Bruce Weber

May 31st, 2008

The New York Times

Alvin M. Marks, a prolific inventor who held patents on polarized film for sunglasses, a 3-D moviemaking process, a generator the size of a grapefruit that could produce enough electricity for a house, a windmill with no moving parts and a trillion-dollar "space train," died Sunday in Gardner, Mass. He was 97 and lived in Athol, Mass.

The cause was liver and pancreatic cancer, said Molly Bennett Aitken, his former wife.

A man capable of both small-bore pragmatism and large-scale imagination, Mr. Marks held 122 patents. An expert in optics, he developed several variants of polarized film that were used in sunglasses and to reduce glare on television screens; a headlight system to aid night driving; and window panels that change gradually from transparent to opaque and back again.

In 1951, he was granted a patent for a "three-dimensional intercommunicating system" that could be used to make TV shows and movies. He was president for many years of the Marks Polarized Corporation, based in the Whitestone section of Queens, where, along with his brother, Mortimer, who died in 2006, he invented many improvements on his original device, even though three-dimensional moviemaking never became the widespread technique he hoped it would.

For much of the latter half of his career, Mr. Marks focused on developing alternative and low-cost energy sources. An early experimenter with solar energy, he served as an adviser to President John F. Kennedy, and in 1967 was a consultant to the United States Senate on new technologies.

His inventions in the energy field include several aerosol electric power generators for home use as well as larger-scale generators, including the "windmill" with no moving parts, which proposed the placement in remote locations of enormous screens that would emit charged water particles into the wind to create power.

In recent years, he had been developing an array of minute antennas capable of collecting sunlight and transforming it into electricity, as well as a corresponding battery for storing it.

Alvin Melville Marks was born in Brooklyn on Oct. 28, 1910. His father, Alexander, was a lawyer. He studied at a variety of colleges and universities, including Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute, Harvard, M.I.T. and New York University, receiving a bachelor of science degree in electrical engineering from Cooper Union. Because he could read German, his former wife said, he spent much of his Navy service during World War II translating intercepted Nazi documents.

After his first two marriages ended in divorce, he married Molly Bennett in 1967; they divorced a decade later, and she subsequently married Gerard Aitken III, who became Mr. Marks’s business partner, helping to raise money to support his research. Mr. Aitken died in 1987, and Mr. Marks adopted the two young children his partner and friend had had with his former wife.

All told, he had five children, two stepchildren and two adopted children, all of whom survive him. They are Sara Marks Tabby of Merion Station, Pa.; Bridget Marks of New York City; Jacqueline Marks of Dallas; Sean Christopher Marks of Litchfield, Conn.; Frederick Peter Marks of Athol; Douglas Marks of Pensacola, Fla.; Meridyth Senes of Burlington, N.J.; Gerard J. Aitken IV of Swan Lake, N.Y.; and Hannah Aitken of New York City. Mr. Marks is also survived by 12 grandchildren.

"My father was fluid with unconventional relationships for years," said Ms. Marks Tabby. "That’s how he ended up having a hand in raising nine children."

In 1989, Mr. Marks won a patent, with Peter G. Diamandis, for perhaps his most audacious invention, a plan to circumvent conventional space travel with a 6.6-million-pound, 180-foot train that would be propelled into outer space in an electromagnetic tunnel. It would cost trillions of dollars and take a decade to build, he said, but once complete, it would cut the cost of space exploration drastically.

"It’s a feasible idea and should be given consideration," he told The New York Times at the time.