>>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

>>On this edition of Florida Road Trip, we're traveling across the state to discover the interesting stories of Florida inventors and innovators.

From the Space Coast to the Panhandle, join us as we learn more about the great thinkers who made the quality of life better for all of us in some very refreshing ways.

Road Trip is back on the road.

[MUSIC] Thank you for joining us on this edition of Florida Road Trip, I'm Allison Godlove.

We all have busy lives.

And if you're anything like me, you do things to make those daily tasks just a little bit easier.

Like with this, something I imagine none of us could live without.

Growing up, would you ever have thought we'd have a mini computer in our pocket?

But if you take a pause, innovation is all around us.

And believe it or not, many have ties to Florida.

One of the most well-known inventors of all time is Thomas Edison.

Did you know he owned a winter home in Florida alongside another inventor, Henry Ford?

The two of them, along with another friend, Harvey Firestone, founded the Edison Botanic Research Corporation in an effort to find natural sources of rubber.

In 2014, the lab was named a national historic chemical landmark and is the only place in Florida to get this recognition.

You can see the laboratory and homes in Fort Myers at the Edison and Ford Winter Estates.

All three are recognized here at the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame in Tampa.

This Hall of Fame is only one of seven in the United States.

I'm here with Jamie Spurrier.

She is the program manager for the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.

Jamie, thank you for being here to talk with us.

>>It is a pleasure to be here.

Thank you so much for joining us at the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame.

It's a very exciting.

>>It's a beautiful space.

It's a beautiful area.

Let's start with the background on the Hall of Fame.

>>Great.

So the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame was founded in 2013 as a way to bring recognition to inventors from Florida.

They collectively hold over 5000 patents.

So it's a pretty incredible group of inductees that have contributed anything from major biomedical patents to, you know, Spanx with Sara Blakely.

>>How many halls of fame are there in the country?

We're really the only one of its kind.

There is one in New Jersey kind of founded around Edison.

There is the Black Inventors Hall of Fame.

And some other states have halls of fame that aren't specifically dedicated toward inventors, but they do induct inventors.

And then, of course, there's the National Inventors Hall of Fame, which is located partially in Akron, Ohio.

And then their museum is at the USPTO building in Alexandria, Virginia.

I think part of the founding of or the growth of the Florida Inventors Hall of Fame is really about changing the culture in Florida.

So that we can recognize inventors the way we would recognize famous people or sportspeople, that they contribute so much to society and the progress of society.

So it's exciting to celebrate them and be in the community and talk about the things that they've invented.

>>And it's important to have that conversation because Florida ranks among the top ten of the states for the most patents granted.

>>Thats right.

Yeah, that's right.

Consistently.

And it's kind of one of those things people don't really understand.

People look at, you know, California and Texas, Massachusetts and New York as these powerhouses of innovation.

And they don't really look at Florida, which is kind of cool because we're like an underdog state.

We're kind of doing this maverick innovation here.

And so we get to do it under the radar.

But still, we're producing these high amounts of patents.

>>Why is it so important to have this innovation and for Florida to be a place of innovation?

>>I think innovation drives progress and it drives economic development.

You know, you have foundational patents that people can commercialize and grow off and license, but a lot of patents lead to more patents and more innovations.

And then in the incorporation of those patents, so it can have this wonderful snowball effect where one patent grows into more patents, grows into economies.

You know, you look at what's going on in the Space Coast with NASA they have patents that grow and grow and grow from each other.

And they like encapsulate incorporate a whole economy there.

>>You probably have so many people say, oh, or kids, too you know if they can do it and they live in Florida?

>>Exactly.

Exactly.

That's exactly right.

>>Jamie, thank you so much.

>>Thank you.

Thank you so much.

I could not imagine living in Florida without the comfort of air conditioning.

And the man considered the father of it lived in Apalachicola, but he wasn't trying to cool our homes or our offices.

He was a doctor trying to treat yellow fever.

John Gorrie was a physician who studied in New York and moved to Apalachicola in 1833.

While living there, he held more titles than just doctor.

>>He was the mayor, the town treasurer, the postmaster general.

He was a member of the Masons and he was also the president of the Panama City Branch Bank.

At the time, I'm sure that doctors got paid in chickens and eggs and cash enumeration too, but he's just trying to serve his community and trying to do what he can for for the people in the area.

>>Dr.

Gorrie was interested in yellow fever.

It's even one of the reasons he became a doctor.

In 1841, Apalachicola faced a yellow fever epidemic.

At the time, no one realized it was a mosquito related illness.

But Gorrie notices a pattern.

>>Dr.

Gorrie comes up with the idea that it seems like the changing of the seasons terminates the fevers, and he comes up with the idea and the thesis that cold is a cure for yellow fever.

>>There's no air conditioning, there's no artificial ice.

The only cold comes with the seasonal change in weather.

He's determined to solve that problem.

>>What he set out to do was essentially create colds so he could cure his yellow fever patients because he thought that cold was a cure.

What he ended up with was an actual functioning machine that froze water into ice.

>>Before this machine, the only way to get ice was from an area with frozen fresh water.

>>So you would sail a ship to the Great Lakes.

You would cut it in great slabs.

You would loaded on to the hold of a ship.

You would pack it in sawdust.

And when you ended your journey here, you ended up with less ice than when you started.

During the summer, it didn't exist because it melts.

So being able to artificially manufacture ice is life changing, not only for this area, for the world.

>>The U.S. patent was granted on May 6, 1851.

It was number 8,080.

Gorrie dies a few years later in 1855.

>>Sadly, Dr. Gorrie dies at 53 years old, and he never does get to see the tremendous invention that this would essentially be and the benefit to mankind that it would eventually come to be.

>>His invention paved the way for more than just making ice.

>>Think about what he invented.

All of modern refrigerant principles are really based off of Gorrie's design.

If you look at your air conditioner, at your house, your car, air conditioner, your freezer, it uses the same principle.

>>At the U.S. Capitol, you'll find a statue of Dr. Gorrie.

The National Statuary Hall collections made up of 100 statues.

Each of the 50 states providing two.

The first statue was installed in 1870, with Gorries being added in 1914.

The Center for Research and Education in Optics and Lasers, better known as CREOL, is a world renowned research center at UCF.

The man who's led it since its inception is also an innovator and holds seven U.S. patents.

For nearly 20 years, M.J. Soileau led sponsored research at the University of Central Florida.

But his passion for science began at a young age.

>>From the fourth grade, I was interested in science and astronomy primarily.

And you can't be interested in astronomy without being interested in optics.

And you can't be interested in astronomy without learning some physics.

And you can't learn some physics without learning about life.

>>MJ was drafted during Vietnam, but the Air Force sent him to continue his education and earn a Masters in Physics with a specialty in optics.

His career eventually led him to lead a new program at UCF.

>>The chance to do something to create the third focus Optics program in the U.S., There were two that were very, very successful, one in Rochester, one of the University of Arizona.

The state goes what the center would do, kind of lined up with what we thought we wanted to do.

>>The Florida High Technology and Industry Council was made up of business, industry and university leaders, and it defined seven tech areas it felt were important to the state's economic future.

One of those was light wave technology, and that led to the founding of CREOL.

>>We had from the beginning the idea we're going to work with existing companies and we're going to do research that is, you know, doing state of the art research.

You're not going to be useful for those companies because they don't have to compete with companies in Florida.

They have to compete with companies around the world, you know?

So it's got to be state of the art kind of stuff.

>>MJ holds several U.S. patents, but his most significant innovation is used by the U.S. military, somehow.

>>It's called an optical power limiter.

What the heck is that?

So let's light through a low intensities, but after a certain intensity, it shuts off and it's got to do it fast.

Fast meaning on the order of a billionth of a second or less.

It produced a lot of opportunities for us and for our students.

And the Air Force has used it for something.

>>While we can't see his impact with the U.S. military.

We can all see the impact on UCF and how his legacy will continue.

We all look at NASA as the leader of space exploration.

But did you know one of their most license patents isn't space technology?

>>So I'll give you a quick history lesson here.

When was the U.S. EPA established?

It was 1970, I'll cheat and tell you it was 1970.

And when did we first put a man on the moon?

Walking on the moon was July 1969.

So before we had regulations in the United States to help guide us with environmental cleanup and environmental disposal techniques, we'd already put a man on the moon.

>>NASA's used a lot of cleaning fluid on their rockets.

And how they disposed of the cleaning waste back then is not how they do it today.

NASA and other companies have since changed their disposal practices, but they were left with contamination on their properties.

>>We didn't have technology in the 1990s that was really addressed at cleaning up the really high concentration of stuff in the ground.

We're talking like 50 meters down or, you know, 25 meters or whatever below the surface of the ground and not in surface waters like you see behind me, but the groundwater.

And so we didn't have those techniques, but we had those problems.

>>Quinn set out to design technology to help clean the groundwater.

She, along with her team, developed emulsified zero valiant iron, also called EZVI.

NASA used it on its properties, but it's also been used by many other companies around the world.

>>EZVI is one of the most licensed technologies, actually was very much needed across the United States because of the existence of these high concentration contamination in a number of the states.

And and it offered the users an opportunity to put it into the groundwater and not have to do any type of maintenance or any type of remediation after it that you could just put it into the ground and then pretty much just sample infrequently to show that the concentration was degrading.

>>She shares the credit with her teammates.

>>That group was just the dynamics, the input, the team of researchers and developers, and taking it from lab scale to full implementation in the field.

That group was just definitely a highlight.

>>And she has a new project.

>>I actually now am working on a payload to go to the moon to look for water, our payloads called MSolo or a mass spectrometer observing lunar operations.

And it's kind of unique and cool because we've taken a commercially developed mass spectrometer that you or someone in your organization could go by.

We've ruggedized it for spaceflight.

We should have our first mass spectrometer heading to the moon before the end of the year, and we'll be looking specifically for water because water is the enabling resource.

So to think about going from working as a shuttle engineer in the late eighties to working road design and stormwater system design to developing technology, to now working on a lunar payload to go look for ice.

I don't know anywhere in the world that you can do that but here.

>>She offers a bit of advice for young inventors.

>>No matter how you start out, you're not going to have the right answer the first time.

The other thing I'd think about is just really important to recognize.

It's not always one person.

I didn't develop all of these technologies myself.

I worked on a team that we all put ideas together and that team think tank is what makes it possible.

And every idea we tried does not work.

>>It may not be surprising to you to hear the popular sports drink Gatorade was created at the University of Florida.

Well the innovator behind that drink left a legacy to inspire future inventors.

Dr. Robert Cade is considered the father of Gatorade, but he wasn't a member of the Florida football staff.

>>When my dad was recruited to the University of Florida, it was to a brand new medical school.

Florida did not have a medical school in the 1950s and the early fifties.

If you wanted to study medicine, you had to go to a different state.

So University of Florida is the first public medical school in this state.

My dad was recruited to open the Division of Renal Medicine to teach the new graduates in the heart or the kidney.

One of their first kidney experiments was actually turned out to be Gatorade.

And a lot of people don't know the connection between the kidney and the Gatorade.

>>Cade and his students befriended a security guard at Shands Teaching Hospital.

This security guard was also an assistant coach on the Florida football team.

>>15 of his players had ended up in the infirmary the night before from water deprivation and heat stroke.

So my dad thought that's not good and started asking questions.

And it turned out that the security guard slash assistant football coach said, my players never pee during a game.

Why don't they pay during a game?

And my dad, being the kidney doctor, thought, that's a really interesting question.

Let's get to the bottom of this.

I know I have a solution that will help the Gators.

>>The head coach gave them permission to experiment with the freshman team if the players agreed, but they could not test it on the varsity players.

Ten freshmen were willing to participate.

>>They had to subject themselves to temperature controls throughout the game.

Blood, collected sweat in gloves, urine samples and over the course of the week, they collected all of this data, brought it back to the lab, this very lab, and tested what was going on with the human body.

With the collected data, they were able to figure out what needed to be added to the body to rehydrate the players.

>>You need sodium, but it doesn't enter the body on its own.

It has to connect with a glucose molecule.

Then its ushered into the body and once it's there, it draws water behind it.

My dad always said, where sodium goes, water flows.

All excited, they go back to the Gators.

Here it is tonight to the freshmen team.

And they refused to drink it because it was putrid.

>>And it was Cade's wife who solved that problem.

>>And she said well Bob, add lemon.

Lemon covers up a lot of flavors.

So my mom, the housewife who's not even thinking of herself as an inventor and certainly not a scientist, saved the Gatorade experiment from failure.

>>With a new flavoring, the freshmen team drank the formula.

>>And not only did they drink it in the “Toilet Bowl, ” an annual scrimmage between the freshmen and Varsity B, the freshman team won the first time ever in Gator history.

So the coach at that point said, Gosh, I got to have this for the LSU game next week.

The doctors went back again to this lab, not enough glucose, so they had to break into other laboratories to steal glucose to make enough Gatorade for the Gators.

But they left IOUs.

The Gators won against LSU in a big upset on the fourth quarter because they were hydrated.

>>Most people associate Gatorade with sports, but in reality the science had a global impact.

>>So it used to be that the fourth leading cause of death worldwide before Gatorade was death by dehydration.

You're talking about people with intestinal diseases, cholera, Ebola, any type of disease that you lose all your electrolytes.

You will die from dehydration because the salt is what holds the water in the body.

It used to be that if you were very sick, you would have to go to a hospital to get an I.V..

But in the third World, in many rural communities, that's not possible.

So this oral rehydration solution, the first of its kind, is behind every electrolyte pack that you see and the third world to the man, to the doctor.

Each of them thought that was the most significant part.

Even more than the Gators winning a game.

>>Remember this thing we're always carrying around?

Some of its most used features like WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS, can be traced back to an actress and a technology she was awarded a patent for in 1942.

Hedy Lamarr, once known as the most beautiful woman in the world, is also... >>She's the mother basically of the frequency hopping spread spectrum technology that GPS is based on and Bluetooth is based on wireless communications are based on that end to end encryption technology.

>>Before that, she was a famous actress from the Golden Age in Hollywood.

And before that she was a young girl growing up in Austria.

>>She ended up marrying pretty young to a man who ended up becoming a ammunitions dealer to the Third Reich.

>>Will you marry me?

>>So she would have hosted dinner parties where Mussolini and Hitler was there.

And she's she was actually from a Jewish family.

And that just did not really sit right for her.

And it was making her maybe nervous, a little afraid.

She ends up secretly escaping from that marriage.

She dresses up as her maid and she runs away to Paris.

>>That's where she meets the head of MGM Studios who signed her to a contract.

>>From all accounts, she didn't really value that, like her beauty and her looks and her ability to act as much as she valued her ability to problem solve and innovate new ideas and answers to problems that, you know, anyone was facing.

>>Don't worry about me.

I can handle trouble.

>>One problem during World War Two was escaping the torpedoes fired by German U-boats.

>>Over those thousands of perilous floating miles, constantly under attack from the enemy.

>>So she's talking with George Antheil at this party, and they're talking about what could we do to stop these torpedoes?

So he had actually been working on this sequencing 16 player pianos by, you know, using the different rolls of the, you know, the player piano rolls.

And they get this this idea in their mind that you could theoretically create a frequency using the theory of how a player piano roll works.

At that time, frequencies could be jammed so that the torpedoes, the allied torpedoes headed toward the U-boats, you know, wouldn't arrive at their target.

But the U-boat torpedoes could hit would hit the allied targets without being intercepted.

So their technology would encrypt basically the frequency from the transmitter to the receiver so that a torpedo could theoretically hit the target without the communication being intercepted.

>>The U.S. Patent Office issued both of them a patent for the technology, and they donated it to the Navy.

The technology was shelved.

>>It wasn't until the Cuban Missile Crisis that they understood how to apply that technology and they were able to, you know, use it in that blockade to have a successful outcome from that.

So unfortunately, she actually didn't really get credit for that invention until later on in life.

So you think about it's like these multiple billion dollar industry and she and her family saw no money for it.

One of the other things that it leads to is satellite communications.

NASA used, has used it, fax machines were based on it.

It really has been foundational to our modern day communications.

>>For many inventors, the research doesn't stop after being awarded one patent.

A UF professor holds multiple U.S. and foreign patents and donates the royalties and licensing profits back into her research.

>>I actually wanted to go into a field where a virus causes cancer, and that was feline leukemia virus causes leukemia in cats.

>>The leukemia virus is a retrovirus, which is the same type of virus as HIV.

When AIDS was found in the eighties, Dr. Yamamoto's research focus switched to study it.

It wasn't long before she discovered the HIV virus in cats.

>>Some cats were getting sick, like AIDS with AIDS like symptoms.

And I started to isolate the virus from a sick cat.

It's only after the second trial I was able to actually isolate feline immunodeficiency virus.

And I'm the actual investigator who isolate the virus.

>>Discovery was not enough for Yamamoto.

She contributed to developing the diagnostic tool.

And then... >>We developed a vaccine.

Killed vaccine like the Chinese vaccine for Sars-Covid.

But the unique feature was it had two different viruses from the start.

Its called bivalent.

Right now with sars-covid, which you do get bivalent vaccine on the current and Wuhan strain.

So we did the bivalent from the start.

>>Dr.

Yamamoto holds more than 20 U.S. patents and the money she earns she puts back into her research.

>>You have to be able to work with the area you want to work on, and the patent income allowed me to work on the area of retroviruses that causes diseases in cats and that is feline leukemia virus.

And FIV.

>>Her motivation?

She wants to find a cure.

>>With FIV vaccine, we are also trying to develop therapeutic vaccine in order to cure FIV infection and this will lead to cure for HIV.

>>To achieve her goal, she knows the dedication it will take and she's thankful for the support her family provides.

>>My mother, who is 97 years old this June, is still cooking for me and allows me to work 18 hours a day in research.

I also work on weekends, still short from being a genius.

You have to work even more harder.

You have to have incredible common sense.

And secondly, you have to have endurance and doing research.

Persistence and finally, some creativity.

And that creativity combined with all these three issues, will allow you to be a better scientist for future scientists too.

>>Thanks for coming along with us on this edition of Florida Road Trip.

I'm Allison Godlove.

I'm going to continue to check out the inventors here at the Hall of Fame.

And I look forward to seeing you next week as we continue to explore the history that's all around us.

>>Funding for Florida Road Trip was provided through a grant from Florida Humanities with funds from the National Endowment for the Humanities.