was working at the university of washington and i came up with an idea from reading a magazine article for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm now that was before cassette tapes cds dvds any of the cool stuff we've got now
and it was an arm that instead of
and pivoting as it went across the record
went straight a radial linear tracking tone arm
and it was the hardest invention i ever made
but it got me started and
i got really lucky after that and without giving you too much of a tirade i want to talk to you about an invention i brought with me today
no that's not true either golly i'm just totally losing it my forty fourth patent
about the
to play it for you in a couple minutes but i want to make an analogy before i do to
i usually show this hypersonic sound and people will say that's really cool but what's it good for
and i say what is the light bulb good for
sound light i'm going to draw the analogy
when edison invented the light bulb
came out of it in every direction
put lenses in front of it focus it a little bit better ultimately we figured out how to make things
lasers that were totally focused now think about where the world would be today
if we had the light bulb
if when you turned one on it just went wherever it wanted to
you turn on the loudspeaker and after almost eighty years of having those gadgets
the sound just kind of goes where it wants even when you're standing in front of a megaphone it's pretty much every direction a little bit of differential but not much
if the light bulb was the way the speaker is and you couldn't focus or sharpen the edges or define it
or movies in general
or computers or tv sets
or cds or dvds and just go down the list of what the importance is of being able to focus light
now after almost eighty years of having sound
i thought it was about time that we figure out a way to put sound where you want to
i have a couple of units that guy there was made for a demo i did yesterday early in the day for a big car maker in detroit who wants to put them in a car small version over your head so that you can actually get binaural sound in a car
what if i could aim sound the way i aim light
i got this waterfall i recorded in my back yard now you're not going to hear a thing
because i have some limited time i'll cut it off for a second and tell you about how it works and what it's good for
sony 's got an idea sony 's our biggest customers right now they tried this back in the sixties and were too smart and so they gave up but
they want to
and though i did not graduate from college doesn't mean i'm stupid because you cannot be stupid and do very much in the world today too many other smart people out there so
i just happened to get my education in a little different way i'm not at all against education i think it's wonderful i think
sometimes people when they get educated lose
they get so smart they're unwilling to look at things that they know better than
and we're living in a great time right now because almost everything 's being explored anew
i have this little slogan that i use a lot which is virtually nothing
and i mean this honestly has been invented yet
we're just starting we're just starting to really discover the laws of nature and science and physics and this is i hope a little piece of it
sony 's got this vision back to get myself on track that when you stand in the checkout line in the supermarket
new tv channel they know that when you watch tv at home because there are so many choices you can change channels miss their commercials
now they've tried this a couple years ago and it failed because the checker gets tired of hearing the same message every twenty minutes
and reaches out turns off the sound and you know if the sound isn't there the sale typically isn't made for instance like when you're on an airplane they show the movie you get to watch it for free
and so abc and sony have devised this new thing where when you step in the line in the supermarket initially it'll be safeways it is safeways they're trying this in three parts of the country right now
you'll be watching tv and hopefully they'll be sensitive that they don't want to offend you with just one more outlet but what's great about it
from the tests that have been done is if you don't want to hear it you take about one step to the side and you don't hear it
so we create silence as much as we create sound
talk to you nobody else hears it sit in bed two in the morning watch tv your spouse or someone is next to you asleep doesn't hear it doesn't wake up
we're also working on noise canceling things like snoring noise from automobiles
i have been really lucky with this technology all of a sudden as it is ready the world is ready to accept it
they have literally beat a path to our door we've been selling it since about last september october
and it's been immensely gratifying if you're interested in what it costs i'm not selling them today but this unit with the electronics and everything if you buy one is around a thousand bucks
we expect by this time next year it'll be hundreds a few hundred bucks to buy it it's not any more pricey than regular electronics
now when i played it for you you didn't hear the thunderous bass
this unit that i played goes from about two hundred hertz to above the range of hearing it's actually emitting ultrasound low level ultrasound that's about one hundred thousand vibrations per second
and the sound that you're hearingunlike a regular speaker on which all the sound is made on the face is made out in front of it in the air
the air is not linear as we've always been taught
you turn up the volume just a little bit i'm talking about a little over eighty decibels
and all of a sudden the air begins to corrupt signals you propagate
the speed of sound is not a constant it's fairly slow it changes with temperature
and with barometric pressure now imagine if you will without getting too technical i'm making a little sine wave here in the air
well if i turn up the amplitude too much
having an effect on the pressure
which means during the making of that sine wave the speed at which it is propagating is shifting
all of audio as we know it
is an attempt to be more and more perfectly linear
means higher quality sound
hypersonic sound is exactly the opposite
effect happens in the air
it's a corrupting effect of the sound the ultrasound in this case
but it's so predictable that you can produce very
precise audio out of that effect now the question is where's the sound made instead of being made on the face of the cone it's made at literally billions
of little independent points along this narrow column in the air
i said we can shorten the column
put it so that one ear hears one speaker the other ear hears the other that's true binaural sound when you listen to stereo on your home system
your both ears hear both speakers
turn on the left speakersometime and notice you're hearing it also in your right ear
so the stage is more restricted the sound stage that's supposed to spread out in front of you because the sound is made in the air along this column it does not follow the inverse square law which says it drops off
about two thirds every time you double the distance six db every time you go from one meter for instance to two meters
that means you go to a rock concert or a symphony and the guy in the front row gets the same level as the guy in the back row now all of a sudden
a separate system in the back
i was seeing if you were listening
a stereo system in the front for mom and dad
and maybe there's a little dvd player in the back for the kids and the parents don't want to be bothered with that or their rap music or whatever
so again this idea of being able to put sound anywhere you want to is really starting to catch on
it also works for transmitting and communicating data
it also works five times better underwater
got the military have just deployed some of these into iraq where you can put fake troop movements quarter of a mile away on a hillside
or you can whisper in the ear of a supposed terrorist some biblical verse
i'm
and they have these infrared devices that can look at their countenance
and see a fraction of a degree kelvin in temperature shift
from one hundred yards away when they play this thing
we make a version with this which puts out one hundred and fifty five decibels
pain is one hundred and twenty
so it allows you to go nearly a mile away and communicate with people and there can be a public beach just off to the side and they don't even know it's turned on
we sell those to the military presently for about seventy thousand dollars and they're buying them as fast as we can make them
we put it on a turret
so that when they shoot at you you're over
i have a bunch of other inventions i invented a plasma antenna to shift gears
looked up at the ceiling of my office one day i was working on a ground penetrating radar project and my physicist
ceo came in and said we have a real problem we're using very short wavelengths
got a problem with the antenna ringing
i just sold that for a million and a half dollars cash
i took it back to the pentagon after it got declassified when the patent issued
and told the people back there about it and they laughed and then i took them back a demo and they bought
any of you ever wore a jabber headphone the little cell headphones that's my invention i sold that for seven million dollars big mistake it just sold for eighty million dollars two years ago
i actually drew that up on a little crummy mac computer in my
attic at my house and one of the many designs which they have now is still the same design i drew way back when
so i've been really lucky as an inventor i'm the happiest guy you're ever going to meet
my dad died before
he realized anybody in the family would maybe hopefully make something out of themselves you've been a great audience i know i've jumped all over the place i usually figure out what my talk is when i get up in front of a group let me give you in the last minute
i've got a coke can opening that's right in your head that's really cool thank you once again
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