text: Gilbert P. Hyatt, the Las Vegas-based inventor, who turns 76 in March, filed a lawsuit in January demanding action on what may be the oldest pending U.S. patent applications. 
   
   Gilbert P. Hyatt, the Las Vegas-based inventor, who turns 76 in March, filed a lawsuit in January demanding action on what may be the oldest pending U.S. patent applications. Close 
   
   Forty-three years is too long even for Gilbert P. Hyatt, the dogged inventor who once shocked the computer industry and got rich. 
   
   Hyatt said he’s been waiting that long for a U.S. ruling on whether his electronic signal to control machinery should be granted a patent. The patent-approval process takes 28.3 months on average. His idea for liquid crystal displays? That’s been sitting in the Patent and Trademark Office for 35 years. 
   
   The Las Vegas-based inventor, who turns 76 in March, filed a lawsuit in January demanding action on what may be the oldest pending U.S. patent applications. Hyatt attributes some of the delay to retribution for sometimes making the agency look bad during years of disputes. 
   
   “It’s totally unconscionable,” said Brad Wright, a patent lawyer with Banner & Witcoff in Washington who specializes in computer-related applications and isn’t involved in Hyatt’s case. “The patent office doesn’t want to be embarrassed that they might issue a broad patent that would have a sweeping impact on the technology sector. Rather than be embarrassed, they’re just bottling it up.” 
   
   No one is able to put a price tag on what licensing those two patents would cost technology companies. Even Hyatt said he’s not sure whether he would replicate the shock of getting a patent in 1990 on a “single chip integrated circuit computer architecture,” a ruling that effectively gave him a financial claim to most microprocessors, the digital backbone of every personal computer in the world. 
   
   Industry Firestorm 
   
   What is certain is that Hyatt isn’t some gadfly in a garden shed. He’s probably made more than $150 million from a deal with Royal Philips NV (PHIA), the Dutch electronics maker, to license 23 of his patents, including the 1990 one. Intel Corp. (INTC) co-founder Robert Noyce invested in Hyatt’s first company in the 1960s, according to Hyatt. 
   
   “These were fundamental technologies and even though the industry has grown tremendously, they are based on those fundamental technologies,” Hyatt, who still works in his private lab each day, said in a telephone interview. “I suspect that my ideas are still novel, even to this day.” 
   
   The patent office, which issued 302,948 patents last year and receives more than 500,000 new requests annually, won’t say what’s in Hyatt’s two pending applications. 
   
   Because the filings are so old, they fall under a law that keeps them confidential, said Patrick Ross, a PTO spokesman. That means the office can’t discuss them or even say how many pending patent applications predate a 1995 change in the law, Ross said. 
   
   All Hyatt would say is that he is fighting to get acknowledgment for his work on what he calls “square wave machine control.” 
   
   Texas Instruments 
   
   It took Hyatt 20 years to get his 1990 microprocessor patent. He filed the application around the same period as the two still pending. 
   
   Reaction at the time was swift. Texas Instruments, the world’s largest analog-chip maker, argued to the patent office that Hyatt was claiming credit for one of the company’s inventions. After five years, the agency canceled part of the patent while allowing other aspects of it to remain. 
   
   Still, the patent became part of Hyatt’s licensing deal with Philips, which has generated more than $350 million. Philips deducted its costs and then split the proceeds 50-50, meaning Hyatt probably got more than $150 million. 
   
   $388 Million 
   
   Hyatt, who speaks softly in conversations, doesn’t hesitate to fight. When California, where he once lived, claimed he owed $51 million in back taxes and penalties, he shot back with a lawsuit accusing state officials of harassing him and invasion of privacy. He won a record $388 million award that’s currently being reviewed by Nevada’s Supreme Court. 
   
   He has taken the patent office to court more than 10 times to force the agency to reconsider rejections of some of his applications. He even won a case at the Supreme Court in 2012 over what type of evidence can be presented in district court. 
   
   “I got a whole bunch of cases referred back to the patent office telling them to do it right,” said Hyatt. “I don’t think they want to let it get to the board of appeals and therefore they keep running me around from examination to appeal, reopening prosecutions, examining, forcing me to appeal again and round and round.” 
   
   In the January lawsuit, Hyatt alleges he was told by a PTO unit director that the agency’s unofficial policy in dealing with him is to give him the runaround to avoid making a decision he could appeal. He said that may be why the patent office hasn’t granted him a patent since 1997. 
   
   Ross, the PTO spokesman, wouldn’t comment on the lawsuit, which was filed Jan. 3 in a U.S. district court in Las Vegas. 
   
   Intel Connection 
   
   Hyatt, the son of a Russian emigrant and civil engineer, spent the early part of his career working for aerospace companies. He said he got his ideas for a business while at Teledyne Technologies Inc. (TDY) in the 1960s. 
   
   He set up Micro Computer Inc. in 1968 to implement his ideas, with Noyce, who would co-found Intel that same year, as one of his investors. 
   
   “Dr. Noyce invested in my company personally because, from his standpoint, he thought it had merit,” Hyatt said. “I was happy to get him because I thought Intel would build the chips.” 
   
   Noyce, who died in 1990, often invested in Silicon Valley startups, said Thomas Misa, director of the Charles Babbage Institute Center for the History of Information Technology in Minneapolis, who likened it to someone backing a neighbor’s ideas. Investing with Hyatt would have been consistent with his interests, he said. 
   
   “Bob Noyce was investor in everything,” Misa said. “When he died, his family found a shoe box of promissory notes. He was very keen on building the electronics industry.” 
   
   ‘Frugal Inventor’ 
   
   Leslie Berlin, Noyce’s biographer, and technology historian Ross Bassett, a professor at North Carolina State University in the city of Raleigh, said they couldn’t find records showing Noyce invested with Hyatt, while agreeing with Misa’s comments. 
   
   Hyatt, who describes himself as “at heart a frugal inventor,” said it’s clear he will never be placed in Silicon Valley’s pantheon of founding fathers, even with his 1990 patent. He just wants a decision -- either give him a patent, he said, or a final rejection that he can appeal to a U.S. court. 
   
   While some of Hyatt’s patents predate or are contemporary with those granted to executives at Intel and Texas Instruments Inc. (TXN), those companies made products that changed the world, Bassett said. 
   
   “I respect Gilbert Hyatt’s work -- the process of engineering is difficult,” Bassett said in a telephone interview. “But innovations are more than ideas. The broader context matters. If Gilbert Hyatt had never existed, I believe the microprocessor would have developed in the same way that it did.” 
   
   To contact the reporters on this story: Susan Decker in Washington at sdecker1@bloomberg.net; Ian King in San Francisco at ianking@bloomberg.net 
   
   To contact the editors responsible for this story: Bernard Kohn at bkohn2@bloomberg.net; Pui-Wing Tam at ptam13@bloomberg.net ||||| Washington has always loved a good war. Ronald Reagan revived the nation's War on Drugs, George W. Bush declared a War on Terror, and, more recently, some of the conservatives in Congress have even accused liberals of waging a War on Christmas. But there is one war that has failed to grab the headlines it deserves. 
   
   I'm speaking of the ongoing War on Inventors. 
   
   Our founding fathers understood that American innovation would lead to American jobs, so they created the U.S. Patent System to nurture and protect small inventors. Their strategy paid off, and our nation's economy grew into an international juggernaut because of independent innovators like Alexander Graham Bell, Thomas Edison, Eli Whitney, and the Wright Brothers. 
   
   Their modern-day counterparts are in danger. For the last few years, a small handful of global high-tech corporations and their allies on Capitol Hill have been doing everything they can to put small inventors out of business. Ironically, many of these companies--Google, Apple, Microsoft, and others--were themselves started in inventors' garages, but now they live in constant fear that their business models will be disrupted by unpredictable technologies developed by little guys. 
   
   Since the late 1990s, these high-tech multinationals have been stripping garage inventors of their rights under the guise of "patent reform," doling out tens of millions of dollars to K Street lobbyists and pushing Congress to chip away at the system carefully laid out by Thomas Jefferson and his brethren. Their latest attempt to undercut innovation, the harmless-sounding "Patent Transparency and Improvements Act of 2013," will be debated by the Senate later this year. If passed, this bill would make it all but impossible for small, cash-strapped patent holders to file perfectly legitimate claims against large companies that rip off their intellectual property, tilting the legal system in favor of corporate infringers. These new "Loser Pay" laws would encourage technological copycatting and greatly reduce the incentives that keep independent inventors tinkering in their garages. 
   
   The anti-innovation crowd is even proposing that the director of the patent office create a national database of the small inventors who are forced to defend their inventions in court most often--not to help them, mind you, but to monitor them and help big businesses beat them in the courtroom. 
   
   If this isn't an example of big government picking winners and losers in the marketplace, then I don't know what is. 
   
   Congress should instead focus on making the patent office more accessible to small inventors, who often run into bureaucratic problems that are difficult to solve without a large corporation's resources. The independent inventor Gilbert Hyatt is a prime example. Hyatt is one of the fathers of the microcomputer, and he recently had to take the patent office to court because the agency has apparently refused to decide appeals on patent applications that have been pending, unbelievably, for more than 40 years. Hyatt is now asking a federal court to order the patent office to stop delaying and issue decisions on the appeals. 
   
   Hyatt is not the only small inventor to have suffered problems like these. 
   
   Rather than enact legislation that encourages the patent office to discriminate against small inventors like Hyatt, Congress should consider creating some much-needed protections for them. 
   
   As it stands now, the patent office allows inventors over the age of 65 to petition the agency for an accelerated examination of their patent applications. The older an inventor is, the less likely he or she is able to wait years for an answer from the agency, and this measure encourages innovators to keep working on technologies that could one day provide thousands of other Americans with jobs. Why not do the same for small-scale applicants, such as companies with fewer than 10 employees, or organizations with few or no issued patents? Congress might also consider waiving the fees applicants like these pay in order to file application continuances, which are new claims that build upon existing patent applications. Small businesses are the backbone of the American economy, and steps like these would help grow particularly inventive companies into engines of prosperity. 
   
   Whatever course it chooses to take, Congress should stop those that want to undercut American innovation, particularly in the midst of a fragile economic recovery. Small inventors made this country what it is today, and I shudder to think what its future would be like without them.
target: – It's been 43 years since Gilbert Hyatt applied for a patent on a machinery-control system, and 35 years since he sought a patent related to liquid crystal displays. It takes an average of about two years to get patent approval—but Hyatt hasn't received it on either invention, Bloomberg reports, meaning his could be the oldest pending applications in existence. The 76-year-old inventor filed a lawsuit in January to push for official action. The problem, according to an outside patent lawyer: The patent office fears embarrassment. Officials worry they "might issue a broad patent that would have a sweeping impact on the technology sector. Rather than be embarrassed, they’re just bottling it up." It's unclear how much such patents could cost technology companies. A previous patent Hyatt received—which took a mere 20 years to be granted—shocked the tech industry by initially offering him a claim on most microprocessors. The patent was later partially revoked, but Hyatt still made a likely $150 million after a deal with Dutch firm Royal Philips NV to license that and other patents, Bloomberg notes. Now he says he's getting the "runaround" from the patent office. At the Huffington Post, an economist puts him among "the fathers of the microcomputer" and calls him a prime example of the challenges faced by independent inventors. But a tech historian notes that "innovations are more than ideas ... If Gilbert Hyatt had never existed, I believe the microprocessor would have developed in the same way that it did."