Robert H. Rines
Pierce Law Founder: A True Renaissance Man
At commencement ceremonies held in May 2004, Pierce Law founder Robert H.
Rines advised the graduates to, "Dream, and make your dreams happen.
Work for what you believe in. Don't let your children grow up without a
parent because you are so busy being a lawyer. Be happy."
This is sage advice from Rines, age 82, an individual who has taken his
ideas and his visions, and literally run with them. A prolific
inventor, musical composer, accomplished international patent attorney
and professor of law, Rines is a true Renaissance man.
Rines daily schedule would be considered frantic for someone half his
age. He teaches classes at MIT, speaks at conferences throughout the
United States, meets with inventors and entrepreneurs worldwide, writes
musical compositions and practices law out of his office on Concord's
North State Street.
Over the past 50 years, Rines has assisted hundreds of inventors. His
patents on his own inventions now number more than 100, many for
electronic apparatus to improve the resolution of radar and sonar
scanning. The scanning systems used to locate the wrecks of the Titanic and the Bismarck were dependent on Rines' prototypes, as were medical
ultrasound imaging systems.
In March of 2004, Rines received the Boston Patent Law
Association's first "Lifetime Achievement Award" for the many
contributions he has made during his over fifty–year career in the
field of intellectual property law.
Born in Boston, MA in 1922, Rines has spent a lifetime inventing. He
attempted to file his first patent at the age of six. While visiting
his sister at summer camp in Maine, he saw his first pocketknife. He
asked his father why he had to carry a pocketknife, a fork, spoon and
scissors when they could all be included in the pocketknife. His
father, a patent attorney, was very impressed with his son's idea, and
showed him how to research patents in Washington, DC. Together, they
discovered that similar ideas had already been patented by others.
Rines studied and played the violin at the age of four and began his
musical performance career at age eleven, playing a violin duet with
Albert Einstein at summer camp in Maine. During high school, Rines
created musical arrangements for his band, The Six Aces of Rhythm, and
was later invited to attend composition classes at Harvard University.
While attending MIT, where he earned a BS in physics early in 1942, he
composed a musical suite, entitled Life at MIT. It was much later
performed as a ballet in 1999 at New York's Lincoln Center. Rines has
composed scores for more than ten Broadway and off–Broadway shows,
including Blasts and Bravos, a play on the life of H.L. Mencken,
O'Casey's Drums Under the Windows, O'Neill's Long Voyage Home and
Strindberg's Creditors. Rines' music for the television and later
Broadway play, Hiz Honor the Mayor, earned him the sharing of an Emmy
with playwright Paul Shyre in 1987. Earlier this year, an Irish ballad
written by Rines, entitled "Joanne's Theme," in honor of his wife of
eight years, was featured in a new film Irish Eyes. Rines has
recently been approached by producers in Hollywood to write inter–act
music for a new play.
He joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps during World War II as a radar
officer, serving in both Europe and the Pacific, and invented the
microwave modulation and scanning technique essential in building the
Army's then top–secret Microwave Early Warning System. After the War,
Rines worked as an examiner for the U. S. Patent Office while earning
his law degree from Georgetown University in 1947, and later joined his
father's law practice in Boston. He completed his Ph.D thesis at Chiao
Tung University in Taiwan in 1972 while consulting in the development
of the patent systems in Taiwan and, a decade later, in Mainland China.
In 1963, he founded the Academy of Applied Science, a Massachusetts and
New Hampshire–based, private, nonprofit organization dedicated to the
promotion of science and technology education and the encouragement of
invention. He later founded Franklin Pierce Law Center in 1973 to help
save the patent system in the United States and more generally to
modernize legal education in a technological era. In 1994, Rines
was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame and became the
first inductee into the U.S. Army Signal Corps Wall of Fame. Over the
years, he has used his advanced scanning technology to search for
Nessie in Scotland's Loch Ness, first in the early 1970s and again,
re–starting with his son, Justice, in 1997.
In addition to his teaching duties at MIT, Rines continues to invent.
He discovered his latest invention while visiting his eye doctor
recently for a consultation for cataract surgery.
"While measuring my eyes with very high–frequency
but very low power, sound reflections, the doctor's assistants were
unable to get consistent results. I asked them to try something
else. Instead of just touching the sound transducer to the eyeball,
looking for an echo, I asked them to scan all over the eyeball, three
dimensions of the lens, and average the results. It took a great deal
more time than the usual fifteen seconds, and it was quite a
substantial exposure to low power ultra sound radiation. It took a
total of five to seven minutes."
"Well, when I came home, I looked over the harbor at the lights of
Logan Airport. I couldn't believe it. 'Where are the halos?' I asked my
wife Joanne. 'Why is everything so crystal clear?' I called up
the surgeon and said, 'I think that the long term radiation I received
in your office has shaken up the occlusions in my eyes.'" The
next day Rines went to the doctor's office, and the assistants again
measured his eyes. Looking at the results, the doctor agreed with
Rines, and told him he was definitely "on to something."
"This process is actually based on a concept that I worked on as an
undergraduate student at MIT over fifty years ago," says Rines. "I was
sending ten megahertz ultra sound into small glass blocks, and I was
visualizing through polarized light how the sound waves were making
compressions and dilations." Rines has since filed a patent application
and has contacted alumna Katherine McGuire '89, a patent attorney at
Bausch & Lomb, where they are continuing to do additional research
on this project.
"Tomorrow's technology is nanotechnology," says Rines. "We are
now able to make things so small that they are almost invisible. So
small, and sophisticated and multi–purposed, they can control and even
replace organ functions in the human body. So small, they take brand
new technologies to know how to manufacture them. Since our laws have
been created for things that are large, things that we see and
manufacture by conventional ways, I am not so sure they are suited for
what's needed for the developing nanotechnology."
"Take it from one who has worked on some pretty fundamental patents in
this field of software–driven nanotechnology, these are such
sophisticated concepts that even the inventors don't always know how to
tell the attorney how it works, what it is that might be novel, what
might be protectable, and certainly not what else has been done
before," says Rines.
"We have one of the finest legal systems in the world," says Rines, who
often consults on the nation's patent laws. "Unlike any other, our
Constitution recognizes the rights of individuals, inventors and
novelists, to their creative endeavors," says Rines. "We have gone on
to try and tailor our laws to match that recognition, that an inventor
has as a 'right.'"
"In the U.S., inventors are not encouraged to hurry into the patent
office with their first idea," explains Rines. "Test it in the
marketplace. Perfect it first. Then file with the patent office,"
explains Rines. "We demand under oath, that you prove your acts of
conception, what you did to try to build it, and the diligence you had
up until you filed an application. This is not done anywhere else in
the world. It's a more cumbersome system, but Democracy is cumbersome,"
says Rines. "It's tough. It's hard."
"While we have championed creativity and updated our legal system,
our patent system may still, however, be outmoded," believes Rines.
"But the legal system is slow to change. At some point, someone will
stand back and say, 'Can we invent another way of balancing incentive,
balancing risk taking of innovation, and teaching the art so that
others can use and improve on it too?'"
Rines' desire to invent, to improve life for others, and to give back
to society remains unchanged, despite his many accomplishments. After
accepting his honorary degree at Pierce Law's commencement, Rines
traveled to Las Vegas to deliver a paper to the Scientific Exploration
Society of America on his most recent discovery, a new life form.
"We have now found proof positive that there was an ocean bed
below Loch Ness in Scotland," says Rines, "and we have recovered
and carbon dated marine shells, and can prove positively the dates that
the ocean bed was there. In addition, says Rines, "I will report on a
new life form, apparently microbial–based. It's nothing that experts
have apparently ever seen before, in the oceans or the lakes."
For a man whose life work has affected so many people, Robert H. Rines
is extremely humble. He has single–handedly changed the face of patent
law in the U.S, and by founding Pierce Law will leave a legacy of legal
education in New Hampshire, New England, the U.S. and around the world.
Today, please join me in thanking him for bringing Franklin Pierce Law
Center to life thirty–one years ago.
