A modern-day Edison

"It's really a one-person sort of vehicle," says Lowell Wood, right after he offers me a lift. His brown 1996 Toyota 4Runner, parked outside his office building in Bellevue, Washington, has 300,000-plus miles on the odometer and looks it. Garbage bags take up most of the back. He squeezes his paunchy, 6-foot-2-inch frame behind the wheel and, using his cane, whacks away papers, more bags, and an '80s-vintage car phone to clear some room on the passenger side. The interior smells like pet kibble. Wood puts the keys in the ignition and then spends half a minute jiggling them vigorously until the truck finally starts. I wonder aloud if all the detritus crammed in his SUV could be from a hobby. "No, I don't have time for any of that," Wood says. He adds that he's not terribly good with the ordinary aspects of life — paying bills, say, or car washing. He's too consumed with inventing solutions to the world's problems. Ideas — really big ideas — keep bombarding his mind. "It's like the rain forest," he says. "Every afternoon, the rains come."

From most people, a comment like that would be preposterously self-important, if not delusional. But Wood is just telling the truth. At 74, he's been an inventor-in-residence at Intellectual Ventures (IV), a technology research-and-patent firm, for about a decade. He's paid to think and orchestrate international teams to develop products such as anti-concussion helmets, drug-delivery systems, super-efficient nuclear reactors — anything, really, that might address some pressing need. In the 1980s he led the development of the space lasers that were meant to shield the U.S. from Soviet missiles as part of the "Star Wars" program. He's an astrophysicist, a self-trained paleontologist, and computer scientist, and, as of a few months ago, the most prolific inventor in U.S. history.

Thomas Alva Edison earned his last patent on May 16, 1933. U.S. Patent No. 1,908,830 is for a device that bonds two metals via electrolysis. It was hardly his most exciting invention. Going back to 1869, Edison had patented breakthroughs in communications, movies, lighting, and power distribution. By the end of his career, he was an international celebrity with 1,084 utility patents to his name, the most for an American.

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That record stood until July 7, 2015, when Wood received U.S. Patent No. 9,075,906 for a device that can imbue medical gear with video-conferencing and data-transmission abilities so a patient can leave a hospital and use the machines at home. It's his 1,085th patent. Just as remarkable, Wood has more than 3,000 inventions awaiting perusal by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. He'll likely remain America's top idea man for many years to come.

Wood's work at IV has included whimsical projects such as a laser-based shaver and a microwave that can customize its power for individual items on a plate. He's also worked on a low-power clothes dryer, anti-collision systems for cars, and a thermos for preserving vaccines. "At least half of his activities — maybe more — are trying to help the least fortunate people on Earth," says Nathan Myhrvold, IV's co-founder and former chief technology officer at Microsoft. "He's really good at it. His ideas have already saved tons of lives and have the potential of saving enormously more."

Wood insists that if he's smart, he didn't start out that way. Growing up in Southern California, he says, "I didn't do well in any classes." He often failed or received the lowest score on the first exam given in a particular course and improved his marks through repetition and intense effort. The strategy worked. He skipped a couple of grades and enrolled at UCLA at 16, where he tested into an honors-level calculus class. The worst score on the first exam — once again — was his. "I'd gotten into the class on the basis of aptitude, not knowledge, which is a ruinous sort of thing," he says. "It's like being told I understand the theory of swimming, and so here I am tossed into a high-speed river."

The score horrified Wood, and he tried to make up for it with a very hard extra-credit problem. "You had to figure out how to cover an area with tiles in a specified fashion," he says. "This is back in 1958, and it was a famous math problem. It was hopeless, and everyone worked on it for a while and then threw it away."

As it happened, UCLA had just taken delivery of the first digital computer west of the Mississippi. Wood taught himself how to use the machine over the Christmas break and then wrote a program to solve the tiling problem. After he turned in his work, his professor accused him of cheating. "And so I reached down in a briefcase and pulled out the program," he says. "The professor's jaw literally dropped, and he said, 'What is a computer? You can have the points if you teach me how to use this thing.'"

Wood went on to get undergraduate degrees in chemistry and math from UCLA, as well as a doctorate in astrophysics. Then, in 1972, he got a job at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, where he served as a protégé of Edward Teller, the theoretical physicist and father of the hydrogen bomb. Wood worked on projects ranging from spacecraft to the use of gamma rays to place hidden watermarks on objects. Then came the Star Wars project, for which Wood pushed a team of scientists to build a weapons system capable of detecting and destroying Russian intercontinental ballistic missiles midflight.

That Wood opens up about this is unexpected. Historians and journalists haven't been kind to Teller, one of the most polarizing figures of the Cold War, and Wood often gets lumped in with him as a fringe science lunatic, especially when it comes to Star Wars. After billions of dollars and years of controversy, the initiative never made it out of the lab.

Wood is quick to suggest that he knew all along that the system, while technically feasible, was too complex and expensive to be practical. It was mainly for show, he says — a feint that broke the enemy's morale and treasury. "I got the result that I wanted," he says. "The Soviet Union collapsed. Check. It's done. The Evil Empire is no more."

In 2006, after four decades in the government, Wood retired to become a full-time inventor. He'd met Myhrvold many years earlier, and the pair rekindled their friendship at a dinosaur conference. Myhrvold soon introduced Wood to Bill Gates. The men hit it off and now meet regularly to brainstorm. "Lowell is the definition of a polymath," Gates says. "It's not just how much he knows, it's the way his brain works. He gives himself the freedom to look at problems in a different way. To me, that is the mark of a great inventor."

On a recent morning at IV, Wood putters past a disturbingly lifelike Tyrannosaurus rex head hanging in the reception area toward a conference room. He's dressed, as usual, in slacks and a tie-dyed, short-sleeve oxford. The tie-dye, combined with his reddish-gray beard, suggests a hippie Santa.

Listening to him is like binge-watching several seasons of Nova. He talks for four hours in a soft, deep voice, digressing into one intellectual rabbit hole after another: physics, space lasers, pestilence, rockets, whale oil, lithography, fracking, eidetic memory, war. He's adept at the tangent — did you know that measles is a zoonosis humans picked up from grazing animals 1,500 years ago? — that somehow always relates back to the topic at hand.

Wood attributes his ability to hop from subject to subject, making associations that sometimes lead to inventions, to reading — a lot. He subscribes to three dozen academic journals. "I have a terrible deficiency of willpower once I open an electronic table of contents for Physical Review Letters or the New England Journal of Medicine," he says. "It's just terribly difficult to pull myself away from them."

The more difficult the problem and the more layers of complexity it has, the more emphatic Wood's disquisitions get. Take his work on concussions: "I didn't know the first thing about a concussion. I thought it was just brain slamming against the interior of the skull, particularly violently." Wood looks down. It clearly bothers him that he had it wrong. "Basically that has nothing to do with what a real concussion is. A concussion occurs by the brain being very rapidly twisted inside the skull, and in particular the so-called angular acceleration. It's not just the twist or the speed of twist, but it is the time rate of change and the speed of the twist that tears neural fibers apart. It's a ghastly sort of thing. It literally just rips the nervous system apart."

"But the striking thing is that it piles up. If you do that same thing again a week or two later — or an hour or two later, heaven help you — the damage not only becomes more severe, but it takes much longer to heal. And if you do it three times in a bad afternoon on the soccer field or football field, the damage is likely to be permanent."

An organization — he declines to say which — came to talk him into developing anti-concussion technology. He wasn't interested at first. NFL players "are professional gladiators," he says. "They know what they're doing. I mean, it's been documented for a decade or two that this is what happens to you. It's a self-inflicted wound. Why are we wasting time on this?"

"Well, it turns out that's not where most of the damage occurs. Most of the damage occurs on high school playing fields. Young males between ages 10 and 20 are the ones that are inadvertently, unknowingly, innocently taking damage."

Wood's anti-concussion solution, much like football, isn't for the squeamish. Sensors in the helmet trigger a mechanism that fuses a player's helmet and shoulder pads. Wood is vague on exactly how that would work, but spikes or rods of some kind would shoot down from the helmet to keep the head from turning.

"In a fraction of a second, the helmet will put things down that will grab your collarbones and not only will your neck not break, but your brain won't be damaged. That's what we've invented."

Wood's refusal to say who approached him to work on helmet technology is typical cloak-and-dagger theater for IV. The company is an idea factory that often gets contracted to work on difficult, potentially lucrative problems. It keeps this work to itself until the invention has been patented and is ready to commercialize.

Wood's anti-malaria technology is much closer to his background in weapons research: the Photonic Fence, which is to mosquitoes what Star Wars was meant to be to Soviet ICBMs. The system uses fence-post-mounted cameras and light sensors to measure insect size, speed, and wing-flapping frequency. When a mosquito is detected, a laser zaps it into a tiny puff of smoke.

On the subject of things like faster planes and engines, Wood becomes downright distraught and angry. "What have we been doing?" he asks. "How can we be so lazy?" He sees the world as a never-ending puzzle. It's an attitude that leaves others feeling optimistic after chatting with him. Famine? Evil? Impending environmental doom? They're but problems waiting to be solved.

Wood, for example, is of the mind that global warming can be stopped relatively quickly and inexpensively through geoengineering. "There's all kinds of solutions on the table that nobody denies are technical solutions. They're just not politically preferred solutions," he says. One such solution would be to sink the atmosphere's carbon dioxide into the deep ocean; another would be to push the warm water on the top layer of the ocean down to the bottom.

He seems most bullish on the idea of using high-altitude balloons to release particles of sulfur or some other substance that would, in effect, provide shade for the planet. He's convinced this wouldn't only be feasible but would also come with few, if any, consequences. "All these sort of things involve capital investments on the order of $10 billion, but people are talking about going out and spending $1 trillion a year to cope with global warming, and they're not even doing a very good job of it," Wood says. "The solutions are straightforward."

He argues there's little chance of climate change — or anything, really, natural or human-made — wiping out the species soon. He points out that the sheer number of humans makes us hard to kill, and says we're still not as good at mass destruction as we imagine. "It's going to be a long, long time before the human race has the ability to threaten 90 percent of human lives."

On a much brighter note, Wood thinks there are plenty of ideas — really big, great ones — left to be imagined. "It's frankly illiterate to not be optimistic," Wood says. "We're going to see a blossoming across essentially every front, unprecedented in human technological history. This is not something that's hoped for. This is baked in the cake."

Excerpted from an article that originally appeared at Bloomberg. Reprinted with permission.