The Lonely Passion of Karl E. Smith

The solitary tinkerer, an archetypical figure of American technology, has widely been replaced by corporate research and development teams armed with computers. Still, some lonely inventors do survive. TIME'S Timothy Tyler visited one of them:

KARL E. SMITH, 54, is a shy, forlorn man who is almost marooned in his solitude. To find him, a visitor heads north from Fresno, Calif., and up into the Sierras, following a single-lane trail that winds endlessly along 9,000-ft. precipices. Finally, the traveler arrives at Florence Lake, and there is Karl, smiling nervously, waiting in rumpled cowboy clothes, wearing a three-day beard and smelling of horses. He helps you into his aluminum outboard motorboat and you putter to the other end of the lake. There you mount a horse, and three hours later, after climbing mountains and slogging through countless streams and upland bogs, you reach Karl's ranch.

He built it all with his hands--killing work that took 18 years--all because he wanted to live and invent as far from civilization as he could. To survive, he operated the place as a dude ranch in the summer.

Monster Chickens. Karl was a trombonist with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra when he bought his 200 acres in 1952. At first he wintered in Dallas, spent summers building the ranch. But as he built, he found he could not keep from inventing things: an underwater device that guides his boat safely to shore, or a collapsible bow, for hunting on horseback.

Once he invented something other people actually used. It was part of a complex brain-surgery device for scientists at Berkeley, which enabled an electronic needle to enter a chicken's brain and reach its hypothalamus with out killing the chicken. "It worked so well I had chickens laying double eggs, eating their heads off, or not eating at all. They could have created monster chickens with my instrument," Karl says proudly.

It was in 1960 that Karl had his biggest brainstorm: a revolutionary new rear-view mirror for automobiles. "Suddenly I got the idea, what a great thing to see over the top of the car instead of having to see through all those heads and seats and blind spots inside the car. I thought, 'Gee whiz, Karl, here's opportunity knocking at the back door, success. Invent over-the-top rear vision and make money fast!' "

Panoramic Periscope. So Karl quit the symphony, moved his family from Dallas to Auberry, a town in the foothills below his ranch, and began to develop his mirror full time. The principle was simple: a panoramic periscope. A system of three mirrors, each as wide as the car, mounted in the roof above and inside the windshield. The top mirror juts four inches above the roof, catches an unobstructed view to the rear and sides, and then transmits it via the other two mirrors down to the driver.

The tricky part was getting the three mirrors exactly the right size and shape, and at just the right angles and distances from one another. The puzzle took Karl three years to solve, working ten-and 15-hour days, trying thousands of pieces of glass. "We had to get rid of the dining-room table," says his wife Adeline, "to give Karl room to work. After that, we ate mostly TV dinners." Adeline taught school in Auberry so they would not starve.

Nearly broke, Karl at last hit on the magic combination of mirrors that had eluded other inventors who had thought of the same basic idea. He bought a '61 white Corvette, built a new top for it, incorporating the mirror, and drove it down to Los Angeles expecting to astound the world. It was indeed a wonderful mirror, making driving many times safer and easier. But all Karl got was one small article in the Los Angeles Times. Then he tried writing letters to all the Senators and Congressmen he had heard of and to 17 federal agencies. Nothing happened.

Machine Guns in Back. Shaken but undaunted, Karl wrote asking to testify when the Senate auto-safety hearings came along in '65. He was amazed when the committee refused. The following year, however, Karl managed to get on the witness list for the House hearings and drove his Corvette all the way to Washington. On the way he was stopped several times by police, because his Corvette has no rear window, the better to demonstrate the virtues of his device. Once a highway patrolman drew his gun on Karl and searched the car, explaining that cars without rear windows generally had machine guns in the back. At the hearings, Karl testified about his mirror, but no one seemed to listen.

So Karl drove doggedly on to Detroit, getting arrested again on the way, and challenged the automakers to match safety mirrors with his. Four auto companies examined it, eventually turned it down. Karl was despairing when the Department of Transportation was founded. He flew back to Washington and explained his mirror to DOT. But the department seemed uninterested also.

The years were rolling by, and Karl had about given up, when DOT commissioned a research firm in Santa Monica to test the leading safety-mirror concepts. Karl's invention was among them. The report, which came out last year, said: "There is no vehicle on the road which permits maneuvers such as freeway lane changes and merges to be made as quickly, safely and with such a high degree of assurance as does the Smith car." As a result, there is a chance that a Santa Barbara firm, under contract to DOT, will build a prototype of Karl's car. DOT could then possibly, just possibly, recommend the Smith mirror to Detroit.

Now Karl, the lone inventor, brims with hope. But at times he wonders if it has been worth it. He has had a miserable ten years. Five of his horses have been killed by lightning, the old Corvette hardly runs any more. Karl has been stopped by police 400 times, and duped by two different firms that promised to build a prototype of his car but tried to steal his patent instead. Karl is out $30,000. He looks older than his 54 years and has grown careless about his appearance. He trembles. But a man who will spend three years in his dining room playing with pieces of glass does not give up easily. "I really think this is it, don't you?" he says. "I mean, it's been ten years now, and my car is the only reasonable solution to the vision problem. They've got to build my car, don't you think?"

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