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Inventor Robert D. Kodis can make a patent claim not even the more-famous Thomas Edison or Jerome Lemelson can: He has been winning patents for longer than any other inventor in the history of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
With the granting of his latest patent earlier this month, Kodis now holds what some are calling the “patent longevity” record: He has been awarded patents for 56 years — longer than Edison’s 53 years of patents granted and longer than Lemelson’s 54.5 years.
While both Edison and Lemelson (for whom the Lemelson-MIT Student Prize for Inventions is named) still win when it comes to the total number of patents granted, Kodis’ feat is impressive nonetheless.
When it comes to patents awarded, the 88-year-old Jamaica Plain inventor is in rarified company.
Kodis’ inventions have found their way into products used by NASA, the U.S. Army, Raytheon Corp., the New York Stock Exchange and even McCoy Stadium, the home of the Pawtucket Red Sox.
“Certainly, he is the oldest client I have ever worked with,” said Scott Kamholz, a patent and trademark attorney with Foley Hoag LLP, who is handling the patent applications for Kodis’ most recent venture, Infection Management Inc.
Kamholz wanted to be sure he was right in thinking his client had the longest span, so he posed the question online, at the website of the Patent Information Users Group Inc. Patent expert Rex Yeap confirmed the longevity record — and that led to Kodis getting a certificate honoring his achievement from the federal patent office earlier this summer.
But Kodis’ career almost never happened. When he tried to join the Massachusetts National Guard, a captain told him he should go to Northeastern University instead.
After studying chemistry, then physics and math, World War II took Kodis to Europe, where he was a navigator on B-24s doing bombing runs into occupied France and Poland. On his second mission, his inventing career again almost ended before it began.
“We got hit badly. We bailed out over Yugoslavia,” Kodis said. “Four of the crew got captured, and six of us got back about a week later.”
He went back to Northeastern after the war and went on to work at a number of companies before landing at Raytheon, to which his second patent, one for magnetic control systems, was assigned. But his first patent was granted when Kodis was working for the Army Materiel Command in Watertown, and has no assignee, just Kodis. It was for one of the first methods that could test a failure point of a metal object without actually testing it to destruction.
At Raytheon, Kodis was granted patents around a magnetic core memory technology that was so stable and reliable it found its way into aerospace applications, including early NASA missions.
In 1958 he founded his own company, Di/An Controls Inc., near Northeastern, before he expanded into a 72,000-square-foot facility in Dorchester, where the company grew to about 480 employees at its height. Kodis continued to innovate with more patents around his magnetic core memory at Di/An and continued to draw aerospace customers. “We found ourselves over the years in 42 different programs in NASA and the Air Force,” Kodis said.
When Di/An’s federal contracts began to dry up, he moved into printing technology.
Kodis patented the first high-speed wire matrix printer head, and Di/An started supplying specialty printers to businesses. When the New York Stock Exchange went through a major technology upgrade in the early 1970s, Kodis designed and installed the first high-speed printer systems to deliver orders immediately to floor traders. Always thinking of new ways to solve problems, Kodis also created a system to automate concession sales at event venues, he said.
“The first one was at Busch Stadium in St. Louis,” he said. In fact, Kodis credits the baseball strike of 1981 as helping that part of the company take off.
“There were people who still wanted to see baseball, so they went to their minor league games,” he said. That got their major league owners pumping money into the system, and Di/An jumped on the opportunity. “Probably about 30 to 40 minor league clubs put in systems,” Kodis said.
Today, Kodis has moved on to yet another new market: hospital medical waste. With Infection Management, Kodis has another handful of patents, this time around methods of disposing of medical waste using machinery and technology right inside the hospital, which reduces the cost of handling and the likelihood of hospital-borne infections being spread.
To be able to file for and be granted patents over such a long period of time makes Kodis a “rare bird,” Kamholz said.
“It is exceptionally rare because so few people are intellectually active for such a span of time,” he said.
Kodis, for his part, has no plans to stop anytime soon, but he would like to see Infection Management get off the ground pretty quickly.
“I’m only going to live to 120 years, and that’s fast approaching,” he said.
Career achievement awards
Bob Kodis’s 56 years of patent awards set a record for longevity, according to the U.S. Patent Office.
Feb. 1952
Method and Apparatus for Magnetic Testing
Assignee: None
Dec. 1953
Magnetic Control Systems
Assignee: Raytheon Corp.
Nov. 1954
Magnetic Computing
Assignee: Raytheon Corp.
Mar. 1955
Magnetic Control
Systems - “Close Gate”
Assignee: Raytheon Corp.
Mar. 1955
Intelligence Control Systems
Assignee: Raytheon Corp.
Jan. 1957
Electrical Apparatus - “Shift Level I”
Assignee: Minneapolis/Honeywell Regulator Co.
Oct. 1960
Drive Circuit for
Magnetic Core Memory
Assignee: Di/An
Controls Inc.
Dec. 1961
Output Circuit for Magnetic Core Memory in a High Speed Printer
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
Nov. 1965
Magnetic Storage Integrated Circuit for Performing
Logical Functions
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
May 1972
Wire Matrix Print Head for Particularly High Speed Printers
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
May 1974
Multiple Sheet Ticket Printer
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
Aug. 1974
Ticket Printer
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
Oct. 1975
Multiple Document
Printing System
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
Mar. 1976
Bar code printing system
Assignee: Di/An Controls Inc.
May 2008
Waste processing method
for pathogen reduction
Assignee: Infection Management Inc.
May 2008
Waste processing for pathogen reduction
Infection Management Inc.
May 2008
Cutting System
Assignee: Infection Management Inc.
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