Inventive Spirit
By John Draper

Celebrating alumni inventors — from the creator of the computer mouse to the developer of a collapsible wagon

OSU’s alumni rolls are filled with inventors famous and obscure.

Definitely one of the former is Linus Pauling, ’22, who won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1954 for his work describing the nature of chemical bonding. Class of 1926 member Milton Harris earned 35 patents during his life, one for a face-saving coating that kept razor blades from rusting and helped him to the position of vice president of research and development at Gillette. Legendary high-jumper Dick Fosbury, ’72, invented the back-first Fosbury Flop, derided by many until he won the 1968 NCAA title and Olympic Gold Medal using the ungainly but soon-to-be-standard technique.

There is also Miles Lowell Edwards, ’24, co-inventor of the world’s first artificial heart valve and, of course, Professor Ernest H. Wiegand, who was not an alumnus but made OSU famous by inventing a new brining process in the 1930s that allowed Oregon’s cherries to be successfully exported as crunchy, bright red maraschino cherries.

While most inventors don’t become widely famous, they share the distinction of having turned thoughts and inspirations into something useful and sometimes lucrative. The following story celebrates the heritage of invention at OSU and represents but a sampling of the richness that is the Beaver inventive spirit.

Ken Austin, ever the inventor, creates a manifold for one of his collector cars.	Don Kirkpatrick’s doctoral thesis was the heart and soul of one of his most important patents: the Tektronix Logic Analyzer.