Pair win major awards for their inventions

George Watson

Friday, April 28, 2000 | 4:55 a.m.

NEW YORK - Several decades ago, Al Gross' creative ideas were used for blowing up bridges and communication between soldiers and aircraft.

These days, those innovations have functions that are far more conventional: everyday communication.

His decades of work led the Lemelson-Massachusetts Institute of Technology prize to choose the Arizona man as its recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at a Thursday night gala at the American Museum of Natural History.

But Gross said what is almost as exciting for him are the daily sights and sounds of cellular phones and pagers, a technological offshoot from his first devices.

"When I see these things, it makes me feel good," Gross said. "It makes me feel like I've had a part in the world."

Gross created the world's first walkie-talkie, built the first pager system during World War II, and today assists a corporation in aerospace technology. The pager was used by military aircraft, which used the signal to detonate bombs hidden on 600 bridges in Europe.

In 1994, Jerome H. Lemelson established the Lemelson-MIT Program with his wife, Dorothy, of Reno, Nev., to honor the nation's finest inventors and encourage youngsters to follow in their steps. Lemelson, who died in 1997, had nearly 500 patents for many everyday devices, including parts used in camcorders, computers and personal radios.

The Lemelson-MIT Program also gave the world's largest single award for inventors to a doctor whose desire to make medical products better initiated a wave of less invasive surgery.

Dr. Thomas J. Fogarty won $500,000 for American invention and innovation.

Fogarty, who has 63 U.S. patents in surgical devices, is best known for creating the world's first balloon catheter for cardiovascular therapy in 1963. The device pioneered the effort to make surgery less invasive and led to a technique for treating blocked arteries.

More than 20 million people have benefited from catheter-related technology - some of whom would have lost limbs under previous methods.

While the technique is now a staple of modern medicine, getting doctors to accept it proved to be difficult initially, he said.

"It was such a radical deviation ... that they questioned it, whether it would work, whether it was safe," Fogarty said, adding that the process of getting people to use an invention is the final obstacle for inventors.

Fogarty continued inventing by starting and assisting more than three dozen companies. He also helped form a venture capital fund, which works with young inventors who are developing medical devices.

"We love inventors. We love innovation, and we would love to see more of it," said Lester Thurow, the chairman of the Lemelson-MIT prize board.

Dorothy Lemelson said both Gross and Fogarty could be described as the typical, yet extremely successful inventor.

"They contributed to society in a quiet way," she said. "And these two fellows obviously are very self-motivated and had to pull themselves up by their bootstraps."