Chuck Evanhoe: Thank you for giving us such insight into the beginnings, and your journey towards RFID. In all of what you achieved in developing the RFID, how did that help you in your other inventions or activities as you went on? It’s certainly an interesting transition from being a rocket engine engineer to the inventor of RFID.
Mario W. Cardullo: Well, I came up with a patent on a pasta machine. This was another business of mine. I raised $3.5 million for a company I named Yankee Noodle Dandy, and we had two units. I raised that money and invented that machine to cook pasta to order in 55 seconds. We built these machines and we were in business for three years.
I was teaching cooking as a hobby. In the end, the business ended up costing me over a million dollars. Based on that, I’m probably not a good business guy, but I do see a lot in technology and where it could go.
Anja Van Bocxlaer: Did you already know from the very beginning that the invention of RFID would have such a big commercial impact, or that it would change processes so significantly? Was there a moment where you thought that this invention would change the world?
Mario W. Cardullo: Inventors come up with ideas and solutions for things. Until Dan J. Webster said that my idea had fantastic potential, it was, to me, just an idea and a concept. He was the one who saw the market value of it.
To answer your questions concretely, the thought has never crossed my mind. As an inventor, you just make things and you hope that they work and that you get some return from them. You never really think that your inventions are going to change the world.
Chuck Evanhoe: Were there moments during your journey that you felt were definitely worthwhile?
Mario W. Cardullo: During my time at COMSAT, in 1968, I did a study on an aeronautical satellite. I got the U.S. Navy to give me a printout of all ships at sea in the Atlantic. There were 10,000 ships in the North Atlantic at any one time in 1968/69. There was no way to communicate with them in the middle of the ocean because the frequencies would go straight up.
Ships were sinking and there were people dying. So I wrote a paper and gave it to a meeting at the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on how you could use the satellite and the data to solve this problem. At the end of the meeting, I got a standing ovation. I thought to myself, “What am I getting a standing ovation for? This is just obvious”.
I met a man called Chuck Dorian. Captain Dorian was in charge of communications for the U.S. Coast Guard, and he was a member of the International Maritime Consultative Organization. He told me to write another paper for him to present at his meeting, as something COMSAT may be interested in. He came back from the meeting and told me that the Soviets approved of the idea to put up a transponder for people at sea. This has saved over 100,000 people.
Now that alone is the payment. That’s when I knew I had done something worthwhile. To be completely honest, I never had that feeling with the RFID, not until I was told by the General Head of Logistics for the U.S. Army that my invention and ideas had saved the lives of a lot of soldiers. Those are moments that make you feel like you’ve done something worthwhile. And that’s me.
Anja Van Bocxlaer: We can certainly all appreciate that. Thank you for sharing your story with us.
Chuck Evanhoe: We look back now at an incredible history of how you were able to leverage previous technologies into your RFID solution. When you first do something, it takes a while for the true results to surface. Take the barcode on a Wrigley’s pack of gum 50 years ago. It took another 10 years before it was in widespread use and started to be scanned just to have automation.
From what we heard from you in this interview, RFID followed much of the same path. You invented it and it was really the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) and the Walmart mandate that really kick-started the interest in these technologies back in the late 90s, early 2000s.
Now that it’s been re-implemented and Walmart is asking for end-item marking, the market is going to expand even more. It simply takes a long time for some technologies to be adopted.
Mario W. Cardullo: Yes, and let me add one thing. We talked about the pasta machine. You know what that's based on? All these technologies are based on something else that builds on it. The benefaction of ores. That's where I got the idea. When you make copper or you use a flotation process. That’s how I separated the material from the pasta when you cooked it. You floated it off, and then you circle it.
All ideas come from something else. It's only very few that are “de novo”, as we say.