20 Inventors Inducted Into Hall of Fame

Feb. 14 -- At a ritzy Washington cocktail party this week, attendees deviated from the norm — no one asked for money or suggested how others should vote in the House of Representatives.

That's because they were inventors, in town for the annual induction into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

Don Keck was there. He invented fiber optics, which have transformed the communications industry. Luc Montagnier, who helped to discover HIV, was at the party too, talking to Robert Ledley, who invented the CAT scan, making medical imaging possible.

Meanwhile, Patsy Sherman, the inventor of Scotch Guard, rubbed elbows with Harry Coover, the inventor of Super Glue.

Coover said he's most proud of the glue's use in Vietnam. Medics used it to stop the bleeding until they could get the wounded to better care.

The National Inventors Hall of Fame inducted 20 such people this week. The hall has more than 200 members, who are selected by a committee of leaders in scientific and technical fields.

Ivan Getting was inducted for conceiving GPS, the Global Positioning Satellite system used to plot and track almost everything these days.

Ray Dolby, as in Dolby Sound, was in the class of inductees, as well. He transformed the recording industry by finding a way to get rid of the "hiss" in recordings. His name appears at the end of every movie.

John Gibson, another hall of fame inventor, created the first heart-lung machine. There would be no-open heart surgery without it.

And Frederick Banting and Charles Best, other inductees, came up with insulin in 1922 to treat diabetes.

Charles Kelman developed a faster, safer surgery to remove cataracts. Before Kelman, getting rid of cataracts required 10 days spent a hospital. Now, the procedure takes only hours.

Posthumous Honors

Most of this year's inductees were deceased, as it sometimes takes a while to be inducted. Among the historic inventors were Elias Howe, the man who invented the first sewing machine in 1845, and John Roebling, who invented the suspension bridge the same year.