Elmer Gates

Who?

That's what I said the first time I happened on his name.

Then I read John Kelly's July 30, 2007 Washington Post column about Gates (above) and found out.

If you prefer, head straight to elmergates.com, a website created last year by 65-year-old Lee Humphries of Minneapolis, Minnesota to bring belated attention to this forgotten idiosyncratic genius, who from 1896 to 1908 in Chevy Chase, Maryland ran what was said to be the largest private laboratory in the U.S.

Here's Kelly's piece.

Scientist Gets a Hand With Inventing a Legacy

Elmer R. Gates was the most brilliant scientist you've never heard of. He taught dogs to see color. He studied the way emotions affect human breath. He had 43 patents to his name. He spent each waking moment intensely studying his own consciousness, going so deep inside himself that he was certain he had changed the very structure of his brain.

And he did it all in Chevy Chase in what at the time — 1896 to 1908 — was said to be the largest private laboratory in the United States. Yet today, even the folks at the Chevy Chase Historical Society haven't heard of this idiosyncratic genius.

Idiosyncratic genius or crackpot?

That's the problem. Some of Gates's theories were so outlandish at the time — exercising the brain as if it were a muscle? — that he was embraced, if he was embraced at all, by the fringiest of knowledge-seekers.

Lee Humphries of Minneapolis wants to change that. Last year Lee, 65, launched http://www.elmergates.com, a Web site devoted to all things Elmer.

Gates seems to have been more concerned with how something was invented than what was invented. He was convinced that people could put themselves in the right frame of mind to be creative, possibly by adjusting their physical surroundings. And so he paid special attention to the conditions when he was most creative.

Said Lee: "He kept voluminous records on his own physiology, taking urine samples several times a day and blood samples. He would take his temperature. He was doing this to find out what his physiological state was when he was most productive."

Sometimes Gates would do his thinking in a special chamber in which he could regulate the temperature, humidity and electrostatic charge of the air. All to discover how external forces affected his thinking.

Except he didn't call it his "thinking," preferring the expression "mentative process" or "psychurgy."

Although he lectured at the Smithsonian and his lab played host to esteemed visitors, it was a mention in the book "Think and Grow Rich," by power-of-positive-thinking huckster Napoleon Hill that kept Gates's name alive.

That's where Lee, then a curious high-school student, first encountered him.

"I'm interested in creativity," Lee said. "I felt in my own meager way I had replicated some of [Gates's] results, essentially using the same introspective procedures for problem solving that he used."

Lee tracked down Gates's heirs and gained access to original papers, which he put up on his Web site. Gates "thought that ultimately he would synthesize all of this stuff and he would write his great work," Lee said.

Except he never did. He was in the fine tradition as such iconoclastic — and doomed — American inventors as Philo T. Farnsworth. Gates didn't publish, and he spread himself awfully thin. His dozens of inventions include ore separators, an electric iron and an early chemical fire extinguisher.

He trained dogs to walk down a darkened hallway where tiles of certain colors were electrified, in the process becoming perhaps the first researcher to use negative reinforcement.

He had people in various emotional states breathe into a glass tube, collected the condensate, treated it with various agents and examined the precipitate. Newspapers at the time announced that Gates had declared that the color of sin was pink, one of many misinterpretations of his work, Lee said. In fact, Gates had discovered that a person's emotional state could affect his or her body's chemistry, something we take for granted now.

My favorite Gates invention is from 1903: Patent No. 741,903, "Educational Toy or Game Apparatus." It was a box whose lid had different shapes cut into it — circles, triangles, squares — and an assortment of similarly shaped blocks to go into it.

Elmer R. Gates invented the square peg for the square hole, the round peg for the round hole.

None of his inventions made him rich, though. He was too busy plowing money back into his lab, which he eventually lost. The pages of his diary from the spring of 1911 show an increasingly desperate man. Money had dried up, and Gates's journal alternates between desperation and inspiration. "My idea for artificial wrapping for sausages and bologna has leaked out," he laments. "I saw these goods for sale in the market recently!"

Then later: "10,000,000 dollars can be made on a non-magnetizable watch."

He decided to try to invent one. If he had, maybe you'd have heard of him.