Honors for 'People Who Changed the World'

Sept. 15, 2000 -- Imagine a modern world without personal computers, animated film features or radio. Or without fiber optics, home-tests for diabetics or even titanium golf clubs.

It seems almost impossible.

That’s why seven pioneers in those fields were inducted this week into the National Inventors Hall of Fame.

‘People Who Changed the World’

“We look for people who changed the world,” says David Fink, president and CEO of the Akron-based hall and museum.

“Steve Wozniak invented the first personal computer,” he says. “It’s indisputable” that he changed the world.

“Fessenden invented AM radio,” Fink adds. “He’s the first person who ever broadcast over the airwaves,” in 1906.

Walt Disney “really did invent the animated film business … and perfected the process to make those films.”

Disney, the founder of ABCNEWS.com’s parent company, is being honored for patenting the multiplane camera.

Helen Murray Free recalls thinking, “My God, we’ve changed things,” after she and her husband Alfred invented a way for diabetics to test their conditions without going to a doctor or hospital.

J. Franklin Hyde got into the hall for purified glass technology that ultimately led to fiber optics, and William Kroll created a method for processing titanium and zirconium. (For more on all the inventors, see the Hall of Fame Web link.)

A Select Few

There have been millions of men and women behind the more than six million patents the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has awarded since 1790. This year’s seven inductees make just 161 inventors in the Inventors Hall of Fame since it was established by the patent office and the National Council of Intellectual Property Law Associations in 1973.

The first year, Thomas Edison was inducted for inventing the electric light. More recently, a Hall of Fame board has selected for induction inventors behind six key patents each year. The six get picked from candidates nominated by the public and screened twice by 38 science and professional organizations.

The process from nomination to induction can take five years, Fink says, and some say more inventors should get in more quickly.

“We get criticized here [at the museum] for people who walk out of the place saying we didn’t see so-and-so, who’s a very famous inventor,” Fink says. “We’re falling way behind the power curve with six a year. … We could double the number of inductees per year and still have a lot of people who should be considered.”

‘All Those Famous People’

Helen Murray Free is “overwhelmed” to be joining Edison, the Wright brothers and Alexander Graham Bell in the pantheon of great inventors.

She and her husband of 53 years — Alfred Free, who died in May — were each nominated separately for patents on home tests that allow diabetics to diagnose and monitor their conditions.

Before Saturday’s induction, Free said she was “just going to say it’s nice to be in that little black book with all those famous people. I’m just sorry Al couldn’t be here.”

As it turned out, Free choked up many of the nearly 600 people at the black-tie induction dinner, Fink says.

“She acknowledged him as her husband, mentor and boss,” Fink says. “It was quite emotional.”

Free told ABCNEWS after the ceremony — hosted by the actor Danny Glover, and the first to be held inside the Akron museum — that it came from the heart.

“People ask me, ‘How could you stand a husband 24 hours a day?’” Free said. “I guess I chose the right one, because it was great.”

‘To Do Things Differently …’

Free and Wozniak, this year’s only two living inductees, say that as honored as they are to be in the company of the great inventors, they are equally pleased to be associated with the hall’s youth education programs, including Camp Invention, a camp that trains kids to think outside the lines.

“A large part of great inventors is a concern for young people being willing to take risks, to do things differently than before, and the programs of this Hall of Fame are oriented in that direction,” says Wozniak, who has been a computer science teacher in Los Gatos, Calif., for the past decade. “These are the things that I’ve been saying for about 30 years, and I’ve been living and breathing for the last 10 years.

“It takes a lot of skill to do something new and good,” Wozniak adds. “It doesn’t really come to anybody who can just put things together. It didn’t come as much from school and books as much as it came from competing with myself and trying to put together the same computer over and over, with one less part each time.

“It was really all intrinsic to wanting to do something I enjoy, and doing it better than any human.”

Although Wozniak says he never sought to be a businessman, some say inventions such as his changed the face of American life and business.

“People would have said ‘gesundheit’ if you said ‘Nasdaq’ in 1989,” Fink says. “These are truly the people who invented the changes that we live with.”

ABCNEWS’ Peter Jennings contributed to this report.