Chances are, if you’ve ever purchased a movie ticket, taken a commercial flight, or bought a hot dog at a ball game, Robert Kodis has had a hand in the transaction.
Kodis, LA’47, has been innovating improvements longer than any other American in the history of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office, earning more than twenty-two patents over a record-setting fifty-seven years. Even Thomas Edison was inventing for only fifty-three.
Just this summer, the eighty-eight-year-old resident of Brookline, Massachusetts, received three more patents, for a processor that allows medical waste to be safely deposited into commercial trash.
His first patent, for a method of testing the failure point of metal, came in 1952, while he was working at the U.S. Army Material Command in Watertown.
At Northeastern, Kodis studied chemistry, physics, and math before joining the U.S. Army Air Corps and serving as a navigator on B-24 bombing runs over occupied Poland and France during World War II. After returning to Northeastern to complete his degree, he went to work at the Harvard University Computer Lab.
In 1958, he founded Di/An Controls, originally located on Boston’s Leon Street, now part of the Northeastern campus. The company, which specialized in magnetic core memory, contributed technology to NASA and U.S. Air Force aerospace programs. It also employed many Northeastern co-op students.
Years later, Di/An Controls became an industry leader in printing technology, developing the first high-speed ticket printers, which transformed the New York Stock Exchange in the early 1970s by expediting order deliveries to traders.
The same technology was adapted for use in movie-theater and sporting-event ticketing, as well as boarding-pass and baggage-tag systems at dozens of airlines.
In the early 1980s, Di/An Controls devised an automated system that revolutionized concession sales at more than 150 stadiums, sports arenas, and other venues.
Kodis’s latest venture, a company called Infection Management, is developing a processor he believes could revamp the medical-waste industry by eliminating external costs and liabilities, and reducing the risk of infection at medical and research facilities. He is currently seeking investors for the effort.