Scientist Gets a Hand With Inventing a Legacy

Lee tracked down Gates's heirs and gained access to original papers, which he put up on his Web site. Gates "thought that ultimately he would synthesize all of this stuff and he would write his great work," Lee said.

Except he never did. He was in the fine tradition as such iconoclastic -- and doomed -- American inventors as Philo T. Farnsworth. Gates didn't publish, and he spread himself awfully thin. His dozens of inventions include ore separators, an electric iron and an early chemical fire extinguisher.

He trained dogs to walk down a darkened hallway where tiles of certain colors were electrified, in the process becoming perhaps the first researcher to use negative reinforcement.

He had people in various emotional states breathe into a glass tube, collected the condensate, treated it with various agents and examined the precipitate. Newspapers at the time announced that Gates had declared that the color of sin was pink, one of many misinterpretations of his work, Lee said. In fact, Gates had discovered that a person's emotional state could affect his or her body's chemistry, something we take for granted now.

My favorite Gates invention is from 1903: Patent No. 741,903, "Educational Toy or Game Apparatus." It was a box whose lid had different shapes cut into it -- circles, triangles, squares -- and an assortment of similarly shaped blocks to go into it.

Elmer R. Gates invented the square peg for the square hole, the round peg for the round hole.

None of his inventions made him rich, though. He was too busy plowing money back into his lab, which he eventually lost. The pages of his diary from the spring of 1911 show an increasingly desperate man. Money had dried up, and Gates's journal alternates between desperation and inspiration. "My idea for artificial wrapping for sausages and bologna has leaked out," he laments. "I saw these goods for sale in the market recently!"

Then later: "10,000,000 dollars can be made on a non-magnetizable watch."

He decided to try to invent one. If he had, maybe you'd have heard of him.