Bright ideas by the dozen

James Fergason has been a shining light in the inventor community, though few people outside of it know of him.

Yet his creations are ubiquitous.

The 72-year-old Menlo Park scientist is responsible for the technology behind liquid crystal displays -- the brilliantly clear images that appear on flat panel televisions, watches and computer monitors, and have helped spawn a multi-billion industry.

His achievements in the field were recognized on May 3 when he was handed the $500,000 Lemelson-MIT prize from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the largest cash award for invention in the US.

But Mr. Fergason, a modest man with the air of an old-time Midwesterner, is not one to rest on his laurels.

He is still inventing at Fergason Patent Properties in Menlo Park, and working on selling off a portfolio that at one time contained more than 130 US patents and over 500 foreign ones.

And it is this shrewd business sense that sets him apart from other inventors, his friends and colleagues say.

"Jim Fergason did some very good science in the early days of liquid crystal displays. But what distinguishes him is that he uses that science to build real devices of real importance," says Merton Flemings, director of the Lemelson-MIT program. "He's regarded as uniquely creative, far-sighted in his choices and having an entrepreneurial core."

It was more about pure science in the beginning, though.

The young Fergason grew up on a farm in Missouri, the youngest of four children born during the Depression. His father was a postmaster and his mother taught school intermittently while raising her kids in the bleak times of the 1930s and 40s.

Mr. Fergason, who still carries that rural sensibility in his manner and dress, wearing old-fashioned suspenders hitched to worn khakis, remembers being intrigued by science early on.

He often pilfered textbooks on the subject from his two older brothers, who went on to study electrical engineering and chemistry. He eventually followed in their footsteps, earning a physics degree in 1956 at the University of Missouri, and after a 6-month stint in the military, he landed at Westinghouse Electric Corp.

It was at the labs of this Pennsylvania employer that he began a lifelong fascination with liquid crystals, a relatively unexplored area of science at the time.

"I was kind of a lone wolf there because no one in the U.S. was dedicated to looking at liquid crystals," he recalls. "I put together the first industrial group to study them."

Though he had only encountered liquid crystals in books until then, Mr. Fergason and his group pioneered practical uses for the temperature and color-sensitive crystals, initially in the area of temperature measurement, paving the way for products like forehead thermometers.In the process, the young scientist, who won his first patent in 1963 with this temperature-measuring discovery, realized that inventing came easily.

"When it came to putting things together, I wasn't too bad," he says.

The trick is not to be married to your idea, he says, and be willing to jettison a theory if early experiments fail.

That "go/no-go" process of experimenting came to a halt, however, when Westinghouse decided to cut the group's budget.

Having gained a name already for his novel work, Mr. Fergason quickly landed a job as associate director of Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University.

And he discovered what would fuel the next three decades of his research: the "nematic field effect."

He realized that naturally twisted liquid crystals could be untwisted with an electric field. The process changed the amount of light that passed through the crystals and ultimately produced unusually sharp images. The realization was the genesis of liquid crystal displays.

Intent on commercializing the discovery, he left Kent State in 1970 and founded International Crystal Co. in Kent, Ohio. One of the first products it sold were digital watch displays and the company grew to over 100 employees before it ran out of cash in 1973.

After selling it, Mr. Fergason started another venture called American Liquid Crystals in Kent and spent the next eight years developing more technologies around liquid crystals, including privacy windows that can turn opaque with a switch. When Raychem Corp. of Menlo Park licensed the patents around this invention, Mr. Fergason took his wife and four children out to Silicon Valley to work as a consultant for the company.

Along the way, his capacity for generating new ideas won him numerous awards and honors, including an induction in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 1998.

"He is deservedly famous nationally and internationally for his creativity," says Arthur Berman, who has worked with him as a co-inventor, supplier and employee. "Time and time again he is the first one to conceive of breakthroughs."

He has also shown himself to be a savvy business man, adds Mr. Berman.

"He is famous for aggressively patenting his technology," he says. "He informs himself on the state of art of an industry, thinks about it deeply and comes up with a vast [array] of ideas -- some of which are bad and some of which are world-beaters ... Jim is very good at finding new opportunities and persuading all levels of clients that he has something to offer."

These sentiments are echoed by Lawrence Udell, who nominated him for the Lemelson-MIT prize. "Most inventors just want to sell patents," he says. "He realized he would have competition and he kept inventing around his own inventions."

And he is still doing that well past the age when most people retire.

When he's not talking IP with potential buyers, he's tinkering with liquid crystals. His latest project? Contrast technologies for televisions, computer monitors and other electronics.

In fact, ask him about other hobbies and he draws a blank.

"I do technical things for fun," he says.

LAURA CUTLAND covers health care and biotechnology for the Business Journal. Reach her at (408) 299-1830.