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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