Where bright ideas are born – Inventors at home in Portola Valley

Ted Driscoll designed a panoramic camera. Lynn Wilcox patented a way to capture handwritten notes as digital ink. Hy Murveit co-invented a technique that recognizes telephone numbers embedded in voice messages.

By Truong Phuoc Khánh
Mercury News

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/news/local/states/california/peninsula/7842621.htm

They don’t know it, but at the time of their inventions all three resided in the same tiny town that happens to be the patent capital of California.

A laid-back, sidewalk-less community of less than 5,000 people, Portola Valley boasts more than 1,800 patents, earning it the distinction of the highest patent-to-people ratio in the state, according to a Mercury News analysis of three decades of California inventions recorded by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

This is where creators behind the valve-less toilet, pay-per-view cable television and the three-dimensional cursor lived when their brain synapses fired up, fusing with imagination to conjure something entirely original and legally patentable.

Creative place

It’s the kind of creativity that made Silicon Valley famous as a birthplace of ideas. And with the economy showing signs of perking up, it’s the kind of ingenuity that inventors and investors expect will pull the high-tech industry out of its slump.

Explaining why — of all places — Portola Valley is the leading incubator of inventors, stumps even Thomas Fogarty, who has lived in town since 1968. Most people know him for his winery, but before wine, Fogarty was renowned in medical circles for his inventions, including the balloon catheter that revolutionized vascular surgery. In 2001, he was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

“It’s almost as simple as birds of a feather flock together,” Fogarty said of Portola Valley’s lure.

The town is modest about its ingenuity. There are no inventors’ clubs, no Inventors’ Day or wall honoring great inventions. There is, however, a sense that down the street or next door, a neighbor is tinkering with the future.

“It’s inspiring, because you always have to be on your toes,” said Sheldon Breiner, a Portola Valley resident who was invited to the White House after Robert Kennedy’s assassination to demonstrate his patented gun detector.

Place for patents

Portola Valley has company in Silicon Valley when it comes to being prolific with patents. Nine of the top 11 places in California with the highest ratio of patents-to-people are right here; six on the Peninsula. San Jose tops the state in number of patents with 29,018 — more than Los Angeles and San Diego combined.

Stanford University, Bell Laboratory, Hewlett-Packard and other homegrown giants have been here to nurture the minds behind everything from endovascular devices to Google.

“All the technology and all the fallout of the knowledge happens here,” said Bill Seidel, CEO of America Invents, a San Francisco company that helps inventors license, develop and market ideas.

As a testament to the recent boom in bio-tech, six of the state’s top holders of utility patents worked at a single company: Incyte, a Palo Alto genomics firm whose scientists mapped new gene sequences to develop medicines. Utility patents are given for inventions and account for 90 percent of all patents.

Certain places tend to breed certain innovations. Silicon Valley, for instance, patents things like “electrosurgical apparatus” (Patent No. 6,589,364) and “chip socket assembly” (No. 6,589,059).

Malibu, on the other hand, has “Sprayable beautifying composition” (No. 6,589,541) and “Floral bouquet and keepsake assembly” (No. 6,145,245).

Even San Quentin has turned out an invention. Kenneth Earl Gay, 46, on death row since 1985 for the murder of a police officer, owns Patent No. 6,065,157, a computerized hang-glider he invented behind bars.

Words from the wise

Seasoned inventors say patents aren’t a surefire way to get rich. “You can have a lot of inventions that turn out to be nonsense,” said Felix Theeuwes, a Los Altos Hills physicist and holder of at least 230 patents on drug delivery systems.

But most of the engineers and scientists who seek out Portola Valley for its rural ambience, miles of horse trails, and the fresh air that washes over the Santa Cruz Mountains enjoyed success before they could settle here, said Ed Davis, one of three patent holders on the town council.

“Almost by definition,” said Davis, 70, whose inventions on integrated circuits in the 1950s and ’60s pre-dated his migration from the East Coast to the area in 1988.

Beneath Portola Valley’s hard-won, yoga-calm exterior is a long tradition of harboring inventors, a history that predates the dot-com era. After all, town historian Nancy Lund noted, Portola Valley pioneer Andrew Hallidie invented the cable car in the 1860s.

Here, Blair Simmons patented the automated newborn hearing screening for Stanford in the 1970s; Douglas Hardy designed TV game cartridges for Atari in the ’80s; and four decades after its founding, the Fogarty research and development laboratory continues to churn out new ways to cut, clamp and heal tissues and blood clots, vessels and veins.

The ideas also show up underground in this town bisected by the San Andreas Fault, where Breiner, who chairs the Geologic Safety Committee, devised a way to safeguard the town’s water supply if an earthquake ruptured the pipes. The water company liked his idea so much it plans to bring it to other quake-prone places.

Silicon Valley’s downturn has had some impact on the drive to churn out inventions. Patent applications in California fell by 19 percent during the fiscal year ending June 2003, from 43,568 to 35,083. It takes about three years for a patent to be reviewed and approved. But even after the Internet bubble burst, inventors here have kept on inventing.

Dot-com bust

“The dot-com bust was a business bust not a technology failure,” said Seidel of America Invents. “In fact, much of the valuable technology from failed companies was picked up.”

Portola Valley Councilman Ted Driscoll has 30 patents pending. And Breiner’s latest invention is a system that causes a car’s brake lights to blink if the driver is on a cell phone.

For a place with so many ideas, the inventors of Portola Valley had no clue they lived in the patent capital of California. Breiner shrugged it off.

“It’s not patents,” he said, “it’s the way we think.”
Mercury News Database Analyst Seth Hemmelgarn contributed to this report. Contact Truong Phuoc Khánh at [email protected] or (650) 688-7505.