What Is Woody Norris Like?

The delight Woody Norris takes in his inventions is that of a kid who grew up to be a toymaker, but didn't really grow old.

The interview in his Poway, California office is punctuated with grins and, "Do you want to see something cool?  Let me show you this!"

Whether it's a one-man helicopter that takes 30 minutes to learn to fly or stereo speakers the size of an Oreo cookie, you're nodding along with him, "Yeah, I've got to have this."

His enthusiasm is infectious, and his innovative creations back it up -- was Thomas Edison like this, you wonder.

How could he not be? The power to conjure up your wildest dreams -- high tech items you'd most like to browse through at Best Buys, inventions you know the world will beat a path to your door for and will pay a ton of money for. And through it all, he seems a little bit in awe of the possibilities himself. He quotes Arthur C. Clarke, author of 2001 Space Odyssey -- "'Pure science is magic.' It is magic. The stuff we do today -- magic," enthuses Woody. 

The striking thing about Woody is that he doesn't seem like a genius. And he'll be the first to tell you that. The way he explains things is simple and understandable for the scientifically challenged, unlike those idiots whose job it is to write simple computer manuals that nobody understands.

He's no techno nerd. If more science teachers were like him, our world would be full of new marvels daily. Born in Barrelville, Maryland (which is right next to Mt. Savage, which is near Cumberland, of Cumberland Gap fame), his father was a coal miner with a third grade education and his mother only went through eighth grade.

Woody's electronics knowledge is mainly self-taught, consisting of repairing broken radios he begged from the local repair shop on the way home from school. "I had a chicken coop full of 20 or 30 or 50 radios... I fixed most of them." He had a mere six months of basic electronics training in the Air Force, where he worked with radar and electronics used to trigger A and H bombs.

"You know how some people can play the piano, they just pick out notes? I've always had that ability with electronics and I know rudimentary things about circuits just intuitively, or like it's psychology, know how they worked. And if I don't, I can figure it out pretty quick with just a clue here and there. So most of my electronic training is pretty elementary." Is there such thing as an inventor savant?

Woody joined the Air Force right out of high school because the hi-fi store to which he'd applied for a job didn't respond fast enough. While the results of the aptitude test he took in the Air Force said he could do anything, he was funneled into electronics, and stationed for a time at Monzano, a top secret base located inside a mountain in New Mexico.

"I hated it. I hated the Air Force. I wasn't making any money." To supplement the meager military paycheck (his Air Force duties only ran from 6:30 till noon), Woody worked as a cameraman at the ABC affiliate in nearby Albuquerque.

"I had a full time job from four until midnight. I was always dead tired. Midnight till 6:30 I got to sleep. Working at the TV station, I met a lot of pretty girls. We had a Dick Clark type dance thing. And I would date all the girls because I was the cameraman right out on the floor."

After four years of working his way up to Airman Second Class ("about as low as you can get"), he got a job at the University of Washington fixing electronic equipment. "I was making four hundred bucks a month, which was terrible at the time. Because I worked for the university, I could take classes for free. So I just took one during the day and then as many evening classes as I wanted for free. So I was having a heyday. I had a little old English Riley car that you cranked to start."

The courses varied -- electronic engineering, philosophy of religions, Spanish, business, psychology, accounting... a mishmash of knowledge which would serve him well in later years.

He regrets not attaining a degree, but, well, you know, he invented a couple of things and became slightly busy... not to mention rich.

While working on a phonograph tone arm that would eliminate the common linear tracking problems of the turntable, word got out and a fledgling company in Salt Lake City approached him about developing an invention for them. And oh, since one of the four partners was a doctor, they said it would be good if the invention was medical.

Using his experience in the Air Force, Woody came up with a sonar version of radar to listen to sounds inside the body.

"When a car or truck or train goes by and you hear the whistle go, aaaayuuuuu, it goes up and then down in pitch because sound waves travel at a finite, fairly slow speed. The pitch changes if the waves are moving as they are being produced. So I got this idea to emit ultrasonic sound into the skin, just with a little thing on the end of a flashlight I bought at Radio Shack. I put a speaker on the other end and through some little tricky math and manipulation, if anything under the skin was moving when that ultrasonic wave went in, it would bounce back -- the movement would cause it to shift its pitch. And by some tricky circuitry you could hear the movement under the skin."

The difference between Woody's "doppler" tool and a stethoscope is important. With a stethoscope, any particular sound to which you're listening -- whether a heartbeat, breathing, the heartbeat of a fetus -- is obscured by all the other sounds in the body. The doctor has to learn to discern it. But Woody's product was like a laser beam, with the ability to zero in on a particular blood vessel and stay on it even if a bunch of others crossed over it.

"I stole the idea from FM radio. There are only one hundred FM channels in the country, but there are 50,000 stations, maybe. So the same frequencies are used over and over again all over the country, they just keep them away from each other. But if you're on the fringe of losing an FM station, and you're moving into another one on the same frequency, it'll keep the weak one over the strong one because it's locked into that one. That's the nature of frequency modulator radio signals."

And, Woody admits, "You know what? I didn't invent that. It happens and I observed it. And so I claimed it. You know what inventing is -- I heard this from somebody else -- 'It's an accident observed.'"

Woody's doppler tool eventually evolved into the sonogram. "They put pictures to it and all that; mine was just sound. But that was a pretty big deal," says Woody in a massive understatement. "I made it on a weekend and I sold it and I quit working for the school. And I haven't really -- except for a real brief time -- worked for anybody since I was in my early 20's. I made my own living by my wits."

Woody was given 50,000 shares in the company and, at the time, knowing nothing about the stock market, he didn't pay attention when the company went public. A year later, they called to inform him of a secondary stock offering and the piggybacking of some of the shares of the founders. Woody casually asked what the stock was worth and was pleasantly surprised to find out that the shares had gone up to $8.

"So I had three hundred and some thousand dollars worth of stock for a weekend's work a year before. I quit work at the university and bought a milling machine and a lathe and a grinder and a sander and a drill press and every tool you could conceive of. I rented a little place and set up an inventing company and started to invent. Is that cool?"

Woody was still struggling with his tone arm when the Heath Technic Corporation offered to buy it and pay him to perfect it. Because he said he didn't want to work with other people, the company rented him his own private state of the art facility within a mile of his house.

"I was totally spoiled! I was making $600 a month when I left the university and I was making nothing when I was on my own for that brief time. They offered me $48,000 a year. That was $4,000 a month. I had so much money I didn't know what to do with it."

When Heath fell on hard times, he bought the tone arm back, then sold it to another person for a big chunk of money. Woody's empire was off and running. "So then I just started inventing stuff. And it's like anything else, once you start doing it, you get good at it. You get the routine down. Inventing is mostly a routine, I think."

So what sparks invention? "Thinking about it. If you are interested in math, and you read books on math and you do formulas, pretty soon you'll get insights that other people don't get because you attend to it. If you like music, writing music, or whatever, you'll develop a skill. Now, I will tell you that people who play the piano strictly by rote, taking lessons for 20 years, will never be as good as a guy who also has a knack. It's like an athlete. You can go to a certain limit as an athlete, but if you don't have the muscle structure and that and this and the other, the way the whole body is fixed when you're born, you'll never be a Michael Jordan. So there's a combination."

A vital part of Woody's winning combination has been his ability to sell himself and his products. Woody credits his high school drama experience. It began purely by accident when a boy he used to walk home with asked him to wait after school while he read for a part in the play.

"He said, 'You know, you should read, too.' So I got the lead in the play. And I got the lead in every play I ever did. When I graduated from high school, I got a national thespian award for acting. I was always going to do that (acting), but after high school, I went into the Air Force. When I got into the cameraman thing, I thought, 'When I get done with this, I'll go back and do acting.' But I didn't because I thought of an invention. I became an inventor."

"But I'll tell you something, if  you're an inventor and you start out poor the way I did, you need to know how to speak publicly, to convince people to invest in you. So the drama that I did in high school was the best thing I ever did. Never had any fear in front of any audience."

The inventor first stepped into the role of spokesman after inventing a child locater device to foil kidnappings. The VIPs of the company asked Woody to tag along to a TV interview in Los Angeles, just in case there were some technical questions they couldn't answer.

"They had this little room off to the side where the host took all of us. We sat behind the camera and the president sat with the host in front of the camera. The light on the camera comes on and the host says, 'First of all, tell us who you are, sir,' and the president says, 'Uhhhh. What's my name?' He couldn't remember his name. He says, 'I can't do this.' So I got drafted."

Woody completed the interview and became the point man for the company for all subsequent interviews. After that first interview, the TV station's switchboard operator told them they'd "gotten more calls than the day Reagan was shot." 

That's not to say Woody's a one-man show. He has developed a system of inventing, often working with a team of engineers and inventors.

"I got some intense electronics training for like six months in the Air Force, but I don't think it was college level. Everybody around here knows more than I do, but I speak all of it enough to not look stupid. And I know enough to find answers when I've got things I need to implement or to do. I'm way over my head right now in some of the inventions I'm working on, but I always do that." 

His is the creative mastermind, the one who has the vision, the one who can gather pieces of knowledge and put them together to answer "what if?"

"I came up with the idea for all these inventions and I would usually do a very crude prototype. But often after the prototype and the concept emerged, the engineers I would hire executed it with a whole different route, but ended up with the same destination... But these guys can't dream up products. I've got a really good gift of determining before you spend any money if a product is stupid or not. And most people lose that objectivity when they get involved in anything. Writing songs or writing a book. They think everything they do is wonderful."

"I read about Thomas Edison. He used to hardly ever sleep. Three or four hours at a time at the most. He would take keys and he'd sit in a chair and hold the keys. If he dozed off and the keys would drop on the floor, he'd wake up and he'd go to work. I don't do that. But I'm always thinking. Two o'clock in the morning, I'll wake up with ideas and I'll jot them down by the side of the bed. I jump around a lot by nature because I don't have a very long attention span. I always butt in, and I'm trying to shake that habit, but I can't help it. And sometimes I've got it before the guy's gotten it out. Sometimes I don't get it and I'm thinking I've got it, but I didn't."

He has thirty or forty U.S. patents and over 300 patents around the world, and another fifty or sixty pending. Currently, he's working on four things at once, three of which are top secret. "If any one of them succeeds, we'll all be rich," says Woody.

"Most inventors, the statistics published by the U.S. government say that one out of 2,000 patent applications issues as a patent. The rest are rejected. Out of the ones that do issue, one out of 2,000 of those issued patents ever makes enough money in its lifetime to pay what it cost to get it. So what's that? Four million. I've been really lucky. I think that's the lucky talent, to know when you've got a stupid idea. And most ideas are stupid. Most of mine are stupid."

So what's the stupidest he's come up with? "I usually don't spend more than a few minutes on something really stupid. I spent years on those books on tape. We recorded, for instance, an entire unabridged novel on one tape. Sixteen, twenty hours on one tape. We spent hundreds of thousands of bucks on it. To get the material, we hired college students from the university. They would work for five bucks an hour. But none of the distributors, the bookstores, wanted them because they wanted to sell a lot of tapes. So they didn't want a book on one long tape. And that was terrible. I can't think of any more stupid ideas. I guess you put those out of your mind."

It actually sounds like a great idea for consumers, just wrong for the marketplace. But that's another thing about Woody -- anything worth doing is worth doing for profit. Judging from the high security and high tech outfitting of his research and development facility, business must be good.

Not bad for a small town guy with no college degree and no clear direction in his youth. "They say life is what happens to you on the way to doing what you want to do. And I've just had a series of good things happen. But most of the good things that have happened to me in my whole life have been because I'm a good salesman. And that's probably the basic skill. If you're a good salesman and you can communicate well, you can almost be anything. Almost be anything. That's what I think."