I became an inventor by accident. I was out of the Air Force in 1956. No, no, that's not true: I went in in 1956, came out in 1959, was working at the University of Washington, and I came up with an idea, from reading a magazine article, for a new kind of a phonograph tone arm.
I'm the laziest inventor you ever met. My inventing is in my head - I don't have to be in the lab working and sweating.
There's a smugness that goes with being a huge company. The big fish say, 'If it's so great, why didn't we invent it?' But how'd you like to be makin' buggy whips when cars came along?
I invent by analogy. I thought, 'It's commonplace that you can mix colors, smear them together to get new emerging colors. Likewise, you can mix radio waves to get new frequencies.' So, I wondered, 'Why can't you mix sound to get new sounds?'