5 Little Known Indians With Amazing Tech Inventions

SiliconIndia  |   Monday, 03 June 2013, 08:31 IST  

Bangalore: India was been a land of many inventions in the past. The number ‘0’, chess, first in medicine (Ayurvedha), first surgery (Sushruta), first to discover and make diamond ornaments, first to extract zinc and a lot many ‘firsts’. However for some reason, lately, Indians are growing more to be a service class population than an innovative one, and so there are not many big inventions to the name of India. And even if there are some real inventions achieved, they do not make it to main stream media, hence stick to their oblivion. Here is a small attempt to highlight some of the little known Indian inventors with amazing inventions.

#5 Ajay Bhatt

Invention: USB

Ajay V. Bhatt is an Indian-American computer architect who helped define and develop several widely used technologies, including USB (Universal Serial Bus), AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port), PCI Express, Platform Power management architecture and various chipset improvements.

Ajay Bhatt rose to global celebrity as the co-inventor of USB through an Intel 2009 TV advertisement, where he was portrayed by actor Sunil Narkar.

A few days back, The European Union honored him for leading a team at the US tech-giant Intel that developed the Universal Serial Bus (USB) technology, one of the most important advances in computing since the silicon chip.

The European Patent Office announced the winners of the European Inventor Award 2013, which honors outstanding inventors for their contribution to social, economic and technological progress. An industry standard today, USB not only allows users to more easily connect devices to a computer, it also streamlines work for hardware and software developers. It is found in billions of electronic devices all over the world, from webcams to cell phones and memory sticks

After completing his graduation in Vadodara, India, Bhatt completed his master's degree in New York. Bhatt joined Intel in 1990. He currently holds 31 US patents.

#4 Shiva Ayyadurai

Invention: Email

VA Shiva Ayyadurai was born 2 December 1963 in Mumbai, India. At age seven, he left with his family to live in the United States.  At the age of 14, he attended a special summer program at the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences of New York University (NYU) to study computer programming, and it was the period, as he claims, led to invention of email.

It is quite heartening to mention that, Ayyadurai missed on the fame for some reason, even though he was just a 14 year old teenager when he invented email in 1978. He developed a full-scale emulation of the interoffice mail system, which he called "EMAIL" and copyrighted in 1982. That name's resemblance to the generic term "email" and the claims he later made for the program have led to controversy over Ayyadurai's place in the history of computer technology.

In languages such as FORTRAN IV, it was conventional and a well-known fact that names of programs, variables and subroutines were typically written in upper case --- thus the convention of "EMAIL" to refer to the main subroutine name of the program V.A. Shiva Ayyadurai developed. By the source code submitted to the US Copyright Office and by the documents provided to the Smithsonian, email's intention and origin was to replicate electronically the interoffice, inter-organizational mail system. These are indisputable facts, as I have referred to in my earlier statement. Note by the Copyright Act of 1976, once a work is in publication it is protected. In 1978, "email" was first coined and used by Shiva to name his program.

#3 Vinod Dham

Invention: Intel Pentium Chip           

We are all well aware about the fact that Intel processors brought quite a revolution to computing world. The chips that made computers fast and efficient.  And the inventor of the chip is an Indian, Vinod Dham.  He is popularly known as the Father of the Pentium chip, for his contribution to the development of highly successful Pentium Processors from Intel. He is a mentor, advisor and investor; and sits on the boards of many companies including promising startups funded through his India based fund – Indo US Venture Partners, where he is the founding Managing Director.

After graduation in Electrical Engineering (with an emphasis in Electronics) from the prestigious Delhi College of Engineering (now known as Delhi Technological University) in 1971, he joined a Delhi-based semiconductor company called Continental Devices. In 1975, he left this job and joined University of Cincinnati, in Cincinnati, Ohio – USA, to pursue a master's degree in Electrical Engineering, where he specialized in Solid State Science. After completing his masters degree in 1977, he joined NCR Corporation at Dayton, Ohio, where he did cutting edge work in developing advanced Non-Volatile Memories. He then joined Intel, where he led the development of the world famous Pentium processor.

#2 Anadish Kumar Pal

Invention: Electromagnetically Controlled Fuel Efficient IC Engine

Anadish Kumar Pal is an Indian inventor, poet, and environmentalist. Anadish Pal has obtained nine United States patents, a significant patent issued in 2009 for an electromagnetically controlled, fuel-efficient internal combustion engine is titled, "Relaying piston multiuse valve-less electromagnetically controlled energy conversion devices". He was granted two more patents last year for a unique gas-operated reloading gun which is titled in the patent grant as "Magnetic gyro-projectile device with electronic combustion, turbogeneration and gyro stabilization" and for a railgun.

He was issued another significant patent in 2007 for a 3D computer mouse. He has also filed for several other US and Indian patent applications. His recent patent is for a high torque electric motor.

Pal is not a qualified designer or engineer. After dropping out of the All India Institute of Medical Sciences in 1982, he took to prototyping in electronics, which was his hobby. He designed a DXing radio receiver when he was 14, which never worked; however, he designed his own circuit and made all the PCBs himself.

He did freelance projects for companies such as Maruti Udyog, Honda, the National Institute for the Visually Handicapped, Dehradun, and Duracell (now a part of Global Gillette). Afterwards, he turned his attention to inventions. His concept for a personal mobility vehicle (PMV) for the common man, a diwheel vehicle, is ready to go to the prototype development stage and Pal has been trying to get companies interested in it, so far with little success

#1 G. D. Naidu

Invention: Two-Seater Petrol Engine

Gopalaswamy Doraiswamy Naidu was an Indian inventor and engineer who is also referred to as the Edison of India.

He is credited with the manufacture of the first electric motor in India. His contributions were primarily industrial but also span the fields of electrical, mechanical, agricultural (Hybrid cultivation) and automobile engineering.  He had only primary education but excelled as a versatile genius.

As a young boy, Gopalswamy was inspired by the motor cycle which was driven by a British surveyor.  He worked as a waiter for three years and saved up to 400 rupees, and asked the surveyor to sell his bike, which he sold it to him to save himself from a persistent kid.

Ecstatic young Doraiswamy drove it and also learned everything by dismantling and assembling the motor cycle and later became a mechanic.

Naidu invented 'Rasant' razor, a small motor operated by dry cells, which was later developed at a factory in the German town called Heilbronn. Among his other inventions were super-thin shaving blades, a distance adjuster for film cameras, a fruit juice extractor, a tamper-proof vote-recording machine and a kerosene-run fan. In 1941, he announced that he had the ability to manufacture five-valve Radio sets in India at a mere Rs 70/- a set. In 1952, the two-seater petrol engine car (costing a mere Rs 2,000/-) rolled out. But production was stopped subsequently, because of the Government's refusal to grant the necessary license.