From "Wealth of Ideas" e-newsletter, July 2005

On June 24, 82-year-old Paul Winchell died at his home in Moorpark, California. Older readers will remember Winchell as the TV ventriloquist whose dummies included Jerry Mahoney and Knucklehead Smiff; younger readers will remember him as the voice of Gargamel the Wizard in the “Smurfs” cartoon; and just about everybody will remember him as the voice of Tigger in the Winnie the Pooh cartoons.

But until now, very few knew that Winchell was also the first person to receive a patent for an artificial heart. He built the prototype with the advice and input of Henry J. Heimlich, the doctor who invented the most famous method of saving choking victims, and received his patent in 1963.

Winchell donated the patent to the University of Utah, where a researcher named Robert K. Jarvik took the design further and developed the artificial heart that was successfully implanted in a human in 1982. Winchell’s artificial heart was powered by batteries and Jarvik’s by compressed air, but according to Heimlich, “I saw the heart, I saw the patent and I saw the letters. The basic principle used in Winchell's heart and Jarvik's heart is exactly the same.”

In all, Winchell received 30 patents for inventions as disparate (and as dated) as a disposable razor, a retractable fountain pen, an invisible garter belt, and a flameless cigarette lighter. Winchell also owned a shirt factory, ran a fish farm, and tried – with the help of celebrities such as Ed Asner and Richard Dreyfuss, but ultimately unsuccessfully – to get funding for what he called “The Tilapia Project,” which would have provided tilapia fish to starving African people.

In his later years, Winchell wrote an autobiography about his widely varied career, and at the time of his death was working on a streaming video project that would showcase full 30-minute children’s shows from the 50's and 60's – not only his own shows, but those of others.

Despite his success in so many other areas of life, Winchell regretted his own lack of success with his patent (even though it served as the basis for a successful artificial heart). And that’s a moral in and of itself: Many inventors patent their inventions but fail to commercialize them, and when the patents are exploited by others the inventor often fails to enforce them. Patents, after all, are valuable market monopolies and need to be commercialized, licensed or enforced instead of just hung on the wall...even if their inventor is a Tigger.