Meet America's Most Prolific Inventor

The work and ideas of Lowell Wood, America's most prolific inventor.

- Ashlee Vance

“It’s really a one-person sort of vehicle,” says Lowell Wood, right after he offers me a lift back to my hotel. The brown 1996 Toyota 4Runner, parked outside his office building in Bellevue, Wash., has 300,000-plus miles on the odometer and looks it. Garbage bags full of Lord-knows-what take up most of the back. He squeezes his paunchy, 6-foot-2-inch frame behind the wheel and, using his cane, whacks away papers, more bags, and an ’80s-vintage car phone to clear some room on the passenger side. The interior smells like pet kibble. Wood puts the keys in the ignition and then spends half a minute jiggling them vigorously until the SUV finally starts. As we pull away, I wonder aloud if all the detritus crammed in his car could be from a hobby. “No, I don’t have time for any of that,” Wood says. He adds that he’s not terribly good with the ordinary aspects of life—paying bills, say, or car washing. He’s too preoccupied with inventing solutions to the world’s problems. Ideas—really big ideas—keep bombarding his mind. “It’s like the rain forest,” he says. “Every afternoon, the rains come.”