Dr. Bill Wattenburg’s Inventions
Dr. Bill is perhaps best known for his out-of-the-box thinking and the many interesting
ideas and inventions that result from the way his mind works. He has designed such normal things
as key computer circuits in some of the earliest mainframes to parts of the Apollo guidance system,
but when I once asked a scientist from Lawrence Berkeley Labs if he knew of Wattenburg, I
wasn’t at all surprised when the answer (with suddenly-raised eyebrows and a smile of pure
fascination) was “Oh, you mean that crazy guy!”. This is an attempt to list all of his
inventions that I’m aware of—though I am sure I have missed many other interesting
ones.
Patents
- Powerline signaling system
- Used in smoke alarm systems once sold by Heathkit.
- Tennis instruction device
- For helping to train the proper form in tennis (Bill’s favorite pastime).
- Card comparing mechanism
- Electrical load control system
- Traffic Barrier
- The first movable traffic barrier designed to prevent head-on collisions,
as a result of many accidents on the Golden Gate Bridge.
- Helicopter mine clearing system
- Co-developed with LLNL, but tragically never put to use by the military
for clearing land mines.
- Steerable bent sub
- The result of a “Texas-sized challenge” from Jim Bryan of Dresser
Industries.
Other Inventions & Discoveries
Bill’s ideas are often unorthodox (Milton Finger of the Lawrence Livermore
National Lab says “There’s often a giggle factor to his ideas, but they work”),
but they are just as often brilliantly simple and workable.
- 1998
- Adapted his Golden Gate Bridge traffic barrier from 1983 for use as a
barrier against terrorist truck bombs.
Reported widely in the AP wire.
- 1993
- A method Bill suggested for getting food to starving refugees was used to
feed hostage Bosnians in the town of Srebrenica. Instead of dropping large
pallets of supplies by parachute (easily stolen by hostile soldiers) he
suggested dropping tons of individual granola bars out of planes. (The Army
used surplus MREs, which one White House official termed “MRE meteors” at the
time.)
- 1997
- With Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, devised a spiral track robot
capable of clearing mine fields. The design was
named a finalist in
Discover Magazine’s 1997 Discover Awards.
- 1995
- The California State Department of Transportation used a temporary
highway bridge of his design that could be erected in record time to repair a
bridge on I-5 washed out by floods.
Covered in the SF Chronicle and in
Public Roads.
- 1974
- Method for remote inventory of oil storage tanks.
During the Arab oil embargo the oil companies were thought to be hoarding gas
and oil by fudging the inventory reports they had to furnish to the
government. Instead of the Energy Department’s costly plan to send a thousand
FBI agents to crawl inside the tanks, Bill used an infrared video camera to
measure the oil level of tanks.
- 1973
- Devised a computerized means of connecting potential car pool riders with
one another and called the idea “Dial-a-Ride”. While simple, almost free, and
elegant, the idea was never used because government agencies were already
salivating over a promised $50 million to create a similar (but far
less-effective) system.
- 1965
- Devised a computerized record keeping system for Bay Area blood banks that
greatly reduced wasted blood and saved many hundreds of lives in the decades
since it was implemented.
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