The Patent That Never Was: An Innovator Origin Story

By Mike Rainone

I’ve worked in innovation for more than thirty years now, and I have more than forty patents to my name. I can confidently call myself an innovator. Looking back, though, the moment I became an innovator was actually long before my first job in innovation and before my first patent. My innovator “origin story,” so to speak, started with lasers.

Today, lasers are commonplace. They are interwoven into our daily lives. Barcode scanners, fiber-optics, laser surgery, optical disc drives—they all use lasers. You can buy a basic laser pointer for under ten bucks. For about twice that, you can get one powerful enough that it can temporarily blind airplane pilots. (This is why you should never point a laser at the sky, unless you want to commit a federal crime and face fines up to $11,000.) 

Not that long ago, though, lasers were a theoretical dream. The theoretical groundwork for lasers and masers was laid by Albert Einstein in 1917, when he predicted the phenomenon of stimulated emission of electromagnetic radiation. 

For more than forty years, the laser remained simply a theoretical possibility. Then, in 1960, Theodore Maiman at Hughes Research Laboratories built and operated the first functioning laser. Several other research teams were close behind, each using a different method, and there was an explosion (metaphorical) of lasers: solid-state, gas, and semiconductor lasers in just about every color imaginable. 

I was eleven years old when the first laser was invented. At that age, I wasn’t reading scientific journals—surprising, I know. A few years later, though, at fourteen, I had to write a paper on something scientific to earn an A+ for my math class. I chose lasers, and I was hooked. Got that A+ too, for what it’s worth.

A couple of years later, with a few more math and physics classes under my belt, I was thinking again about Maiman’s laser. His laser worked using a flashtube (a glass tube filled with gas that allows you to produce a brief intense flash of light) and a ruby crystal.

That’s a stupid way to use a flashtube, I thought. The flashtube pulsed light, and some of it went into the ruby crystal, which reflected the light back and forth, until it escaped in the form of a coherent beam. However, the majority of the light from the flashtube went everywhere other than into the ruby. Why don’t you surround the thing with another housing? I wondered. Then you silver it on the inside so that none of the light can escape, but rather bounces around inside, and you’ll have a higher probability of more light ending up in the crystal, thus lasing. This seemed like a great idea to me, so my next thought was, I should patent this! As a first step, I called up a physics professor at the University of Texas at Arlington (then called Arlington State College). I told him my idea, and he essentially said, “That will never work. Goodbye.”

Well, guess what. A year or two later, a research team filed a patent for a laser exactly like I’d proposed. That meant they had probably gotten started on the concept and worked out the kinks long before I had the initial idea. I wasn’t disappointed or upset—the exact opposite, actually. I was thrilled. I had an idea I thought was innovative, and the United States Patent Office agreed.

That experience, though it never manifested in a patent or product, was a pivotal moment in my life. It was the first innovative spark. Obviously, the fact I turned out to be right was vindicating. (Take that, Professor Ulrich!) But it wasn’t being right that made me an innovator. It was asking the right questions:

• How does this thing work?
• Why do people do it that way? Why don’t they do it another way?
• How could we do it better?

No two innovators are exactly alike. That is part of what makes innovation so powerful. However, innovators typically do share common characteristics. As my experience with the laser idea taught me, innovation starts with mindset. At seventy-five I’ve really changed a lot from that seventeen-year-old kid, but one thing has remained the same. I’m still passionately curious and manically persistent. That is what it means to be an innovator.