By Bennett Hall

Mid-Valley Sunday

CORVALLIS -- Bruce Cowger calls it "that aha! feeling" -- the magical moment when inspiration strikes and a stubborn problem surrenders to an elegantly simple solution. It's the feeling that comes at the precise moment of invention, and it's a sensation Cowger has felt many times.

Cowger is a Stanford-trained mechanical engineer with 20 years at Hewlett-Packard under his belt and an astonishing 45 patents in his hip pocket -- more than anyone else at the computer and printer company's Corvallis campus.

His output has been so prodigious that it's made him something of a cult hero at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. Three years ago, when a group of patent examiners came to Corvallis to tour Hewlett-Packard's R&D operations here, all they wanted to do was meet Cowger.

"We brought Bruce down and the examiners cheered and a couple of them got their picture taken with him," recalled Curtis Rose, a managing counsel in HP's legal department. "In Washington, D.C., everybody knows Bruce Cowger."

Remarkably, though, Cowger is far from alone. Legions of inventive minds are at work in Corvallis, not only at HP but elsewhere, as well.

Corvallis, it turns out, is a city of inventors.

In a recent analysis of government documents, the online publication BizDemographics calculated that Corvallis produced more utility patents per capita during the 1990s than all but three other U.S. cities. Specifically, BizDemographics determined that residents of the Corvallis metropolitan statistical area, which includes all of Benton County, were the first-listed inventors on 613 patents in that 10-year period, or 823 per 100,000 people.

"If you just look at the numbers," said G. Scott Thomas, who compiled the figures for BizDemographics, "the San Jose area is the winner every year."

That's hardly news, of course; the Bay Area city is the heart of Silicon Valley, hub of the nation's high-tech industry. What's surprising is that, pound for pound, Corvallis actually out-invents San Jose and emerges as a legitimate contender for the title of America's most creative community.

And that means more than just bragging rights, Thomas says. It's an indicator of fundamental economic strength.

"It's a really important factor because it indicates you've got people in the area coming up with new ideas and new products," he said. "It's fuel for the economy because some of those products will be produced there."

Inside the skunk works

The vast majority of the 613 patents generated in Corvallis over the last decade -- 471, to be precise -- have come out of the Hewlett-Packard idea factory at 1000 N.E. Circle Blvd. This Oregon outpost of the California company opened in 1976 as part of the calculator division. Over the years, it has evolved into the main research and development site for HP's hugely profitable inkjet printer business -- a business founded on the inventions of Corvallis engineers.

Several of Cowger's patents have contributed to inkjet's success.

One of the engineering problems that plagued the first inkjet cartridges was leakage, and one of the early solutions was to put plastic foam inside the ink reservoir. It was an effective fix, but inefficient.

"While foam holds the ink in pretty well," Cowger said, "it also means in 40 milliliters of volume you can only get about 20 milliliters of ink out."

Working with other HP engineers, Cowger came up with a better approach.

"We found a way to bubble air into the reservoir in a way that allows ink only to come out when the ink is being fired, and that allowed us to dispense with the foam entirely," he said. "We were able to deliver twice as much ink as earlier print cartridges."

More recently, Cowger has brought his creativity to bear on one of Hewlett-Packard's newest products -- a sleek, silver digital snapshot printer the size of a football. The portable inkjet device lets shutterbugs bypass their home PCs to print digital photos on the go.

Melissa Boyd holds 16 patents at Hewlett-Packard, incl

uding one for a component in the first color inkjet pen and another for a means of mounting integrated circuits in calculators. One of her personal favorites, though, is for a much less business-like product.

After inkjet computer printers became popular with consumers, some of HP's competitors came out with transfer sheets for printing images onto T-shirts, much like the iron-on transfers of an earlier generation. The problem was that the images weren't colorfast -- they ran in the wash.

"We were concerned our (printer) customers wouldn't have a good experience," Boyd said. After Boyd patented a better chemical formula, the company introduced its own line of transfer sheets.

"It's a little off the wall for a mechanical engineer," Boyd admitted. "(But) as it turns out, the T-shirt transfer is one of the most successful HP media products."

Serious business

Hewlett-Packard's patent portfolio runs into the tens of thousands, and it's critical to the company's continued success.

"Our patents protect our intellectual property rights and allow us to continue to be innovative," said Rose, who heads a team of 10 lawyers and patent agents who manage patent generation activities for HP sites in Corvallis, San Diego and Vancouver, Wash. "If there wasn't a patent system, the other companies would copy (HP's products) right away."

A patent gives the holder exclusive rights to an invention for 20 years. After that, the patented material, process or technology goes into the public domain, where anyone is free to make use of it, often in ways the inventor never imagined.

"That's part of the trade-off with the government," Rose said. "That allows technology to march on."

Hewlett-Packard keeps some of its proprietary technologies to itself. Others it licenses to outside companies, either for a fee or for the right to use their patents in return. But another reason to maintain a well-stocked patent portfolio, Rose said, is purely defensive.

"It's very helpful for us if somebody threatens to sue us for patent infringement," he said. "If they come to us and say, 'We think you infringe our patent,' we can look and say, 'Maybe we do, but we've got 20 (patents) we think you're infringing.' "

The campus connection

Another source of inventiveness in Corvallis is Oregon State University, which has generated patents on everything from food additives to computer chips. OSU's numbers, however, trail far behind Hewlett-Packard's -- it received only 70 utility and process patents from 1990 through 1999.

"It's not as much as you'd think," admits Bill Hostetler, director of technology transfer for the university.

The problem is money. It costs the university $20,000 to $30,000 in legal bills and filing fees for each U.S. patent application.

"We just don't have the budget to patent every little thing that might come out," Hostetler said. "We have to identify a licensee for most patents before we start the process."

Licensing fees represent a significant source of income for the university. Last year, deals allowing private companies to use OSU's patents brought in $1.2 million, Hostetler said.

In addition to generating revenue, part of the university's mission is to make the fruits of its research available to commercial users. That's exactly what chemistry professor Art Sleight has been doing with zirconium tungstate, a metallic oxide on which he holds three patents.

"That's being made by Wah Chang in Albany," Sleight said.

What's special about zirconium tungstate is that, unlike almost every other substance in nature, it doesn't expand when heated. In fact, it contracts.

The commercial potential, Sleight believes, is enormous. Possible markets include semiconductors, ceramic cookware, optical instruments, gasoline engines, even dental filling material -- anywhere it's important to restrict or regulate thermal expansion.

But turning even the most brilliant idea into a profit-making product is not as simple as that. Despite giving away free samples of the material to interested companies, Wah Chang has yet to book an order for commercial

quantities of zirconium tungstate.

"It's one of those great materials in search of an application," said Jim Denham, a spokesman for the company.

Not that Wah Chang has given up on zirconium tungstate. The company knows better than most that inventions have a way of creating their own business opportunities.

In the post-World War II years, looking for commercial sources of zirconium and titanium for military use, the federal government decided to license a process developed by a researcher at the U.S. Bureau of Mines laboratory in Albany. Wah Chang and Oremet stepped in to fill the void, and others have followed.

"That's why you have the specialty metals industry concentrated here in the valley," Denham said. "That's probably the most classic case I can think of where pure research translated almost immediately into industry and jobs."