We’ve got a prefrontal cortex that works as an experience simulator.
—DANIEL GILBERT1
PERHAPS NONE OF OUR mental capacities is as underutilized as our power of visualization. Einstein spoke of the “gift of fantasy” that virtually every child develops, saying that “imagination is more important than knowledge.” Immanuel Kant said that “thinking in pictures precedes thinking in words.”
We can make movies in our minds and construct three-dimensional models of things that do not exist. Yet we don’t use this built-in experience simulator as much as we should and could. We dream at night, but we usually can remember only random bits of footage. While we’re awake, we are constantly overexposed to so many images—on television, in movie theaters, on computer screens, in video games—that we seem to consume the imagery of others as a surrogate for making our own. To invent, you often need to close your eyes, block out everything external, and project original visuals onto your prefrontal cortex.
Stephen Jacobsen would be nowhere without tapping into this ability. Jacobsen makes robots. Sarcos Research, his tightly run company in Salt Lake City, is what Jacobsen calls “a skunk works for hire.”2 It’s an invention shop built on Jacobsen’s reputation among inventors for creating things straight out of science fiction novels: an android that can learn to juggle after watching humans do it; a mechanical replacement arm for amputees that is controlled by the brain; a lightweight, robotic “exoskeleton” for soldiers to wear into combat; an eighty-thousand-pound dinosaur that walks, writhes, and serves as the feature attraction at a famous amusement park. The initial drawing boards for all these things, and hundreds of other inventions, are inside Jacobsen’s head.
Visual representations preoccupy Jacobsen so much that one of the first things one notices as he talks about his past creations is that he has virtually no recollection of nonvisual data, such as dates. It’s not that he forgets what month or year something happened; he can’t even place events in the correct decade. Whether he has worked on a project in 1983 or 1967 or 1975 or 1996 is something Jacobsen often can’t recall. “What I see is the geometry,” he says. He visualizes the progression of the hundreds of projects he has worked on in terms of how their intricate shapes were formed and assembled over time, and yet he can seldom recall time itself. Just as a digital photo or movie often requires more computer storage space than a book’s worth of text, Jacobsen’s visual images seem to have crowded out the other things in his mind.
Jacobsen’s laboratory is a visual feast. His fifty-employee company is perhaps the closest thing to a pure invention playhouse. Nestled in the Wasatch Mountain valley, at the end of Utah’s Pioneer Trail, Sarcos is housed in a low-lying brick building in a research park just east of the University of Utah, where Jacobsen has long been an engineering professor. A visitor to Sarcos is issued a name badge adorned with pictures of a bird and a dinosaur and then is greeted in a conference room by handcrafted heads of various creatures peering out from wooden shelves. There’s a space alien, a green gladiator, a rubber gargoyle, a menacing-looking man in need of a shave, a metallic circuit board with eyes and teeth, and various humanoids fashioned from blue plastic, white foam, and metal fixtures.
Jacobsen himself has bright white hair and blue eyes, and he speaks softly. He has an easygoing disposition, but when the conversation turns to his favorite topics—robotics, microelectronics, and artificial biological organs—he begins painting word pictures in rapid-fire succession that illustrate how his creations work. He is the kind of man who wouldn’t seem out of place zipped up in a silver jumpsuit as the scientific captain on a space station orbiting the galaxy.
Clearly, Jacobsen has an ability that is in great demand. The holder of more than one hundred patents, the creator of a constellation of high-tech spin-off companies, Sarcos has a long list of corporate clients notable for its range—it includes healthcare concerns such as Merck, Pfizer, Baxter, and Johnson & Johnson; legendary technology outfits such as Bell Laboratories and the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC); aerospace leaders such as Boeing, McDonnell Douglass, and Lockheed Martin; automakers such as Ford and Honda; entertainment powerhouses such as Mirage Hotels, Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum, Universal Studios, and Walt Disney Imagineering; and divisions of government such as the U.S. Department of Defense.
Jacobsen’s visual way of inventing and processing information leaps out at every turn as he leads an informal tour of the Sarcos lab. Like many of his peers, Jacobsen collects inventions from the past. In his case, especially, these props serve as inspirations for thinking visually. In one hallway, he points to a colorful graphic rendered by Benoit Mandelbrot, the Polish mathematician who developed the fractal theory of geometry in the 1970s before coming to the United States and joining the research staff at IBM. “People looked at mathematics for centuries,” Jacobsen says. “Then all of a sudden some guy takes a stupid little equation and generates the fractal,” which explains the constantly recurring patterns in nature. Jacobsen is awestruck at the paradox inherent in Mandelbrot’s equation. Like Einstein’s E=mc2, it’s humble and yet profound. “How can a simple equation like that generate such complex patterns?” he asks. “You can go infinitely close to [a fractal pattern] or infinitely far back, and it looks the same.” A tiny section of a beach, for instance, can mirror the shape of a vast stretch of coastline.
Jacobsen’s office is cluttered with souvenir inventions from the past as well as half-assembled projects from the future. There’s a century-old crystal ball that measures the sun’s illumination, a glass-encased radiometer for keeping tabs on electromagnetic waves, a Watt fly ball for controlling the speed of a steam engine, and an encoding device for triggering a hydrogen bomb. Down the stairs from his office Jacobsen keeps a second-stage Saturn rocket engine, circa 1968, capable of expelling two hundred thousand pounds of thrust. “Some people collect this stuff just for the sake of owning it,” he says, “but I collect it because I’m interested in the thinking that went into it.” Also on display is a piece of the famous O-ring from the ill-fated Challenger space shuttle as well as a twisted section of molten metal from the World Trade Center, which he possesses “not as a morbid thing,” he says, “but to show how violent things get” when things go horribly wrong.
Jacobsen wants to peer into the visualization process of both invention and destruction to understand not only how things work but also how they sometimes fail. This is even more essential now that most of the things he and others build are constructed from microchips and software. Modern technology is superior because you can program computing devices to do whatever you want, and yet something is lost. “With mechanical inventions, you can see what was going on,” Jacobsen says. “You can use these things to teach.” He calls such devices “is machines.” He explains, “The is machine is the machine that is. The behavior is due to the physics of the device.”
With many of the things Jacobsen invents, however, almost nothing is apparent to the unaided eye. “You can’t see much with a microprocessor,” he says. “A digital chip is emulating a behavior you want. But to do the software-based things, you still have to understand the principle.” Jacobsen does that by enlarging microscopic devices in his mind, building mental models of physical devices. Inside his head, these virtual machines work in the same way that his collectibles work. After he visualizes a physical machine in his mind, he can go about constructing robots from chips and software. The materials are different, but the thinking strategy is the same.
It’s the same kind of visualization that existed in the minds of the people Jacobsen spends his time studying. Among his favorite visual thinkers are Leonardo da Vinci, Isaac Newton, Michael Faraday, James Clerk Maxwell, James Watt, Alexander Graham Bell, Albert Einstein, Thomas Edison, John von Neumann, Leo Szilard, Richard Feynman, and Benoit Mandelbrot. Jacobsen’s bookshelves are overflowing with biographies that show how brilliant scientists and inventors got that way, as if he is trying to discern the patterns common to technological and scientific breakthroughs. And the one thread that he has picked up on, above all others, is how these great minds learned to visualize.
Jacobsen’s drive to visualize grew out of daydreaming and distraction. Descended from Presbyterian pioneers who came to Utah around the same time as the Mormons, Jacobsen seems to have inherited a restless spirit. His mother was a teacher, and his father was a commercial artist, and ideas were always discussed vigorously in the household. “I was hyperactive,” Jacobsen recalls. “As a kid, I was always building things and taking them apart. Everything I could get my hands on. But I could never remember names and dates and places. I was a lot of trouble in school. Teachers would say, ‘Little Stevie can do it, but he just doesn’t.’”
John Warnock, a friend of Jacobsen’s since childhood, recalls that both he and Jacobsen responded poorly to authority and refused to accept the way most of their teachers taught. “We were not your normal, sedate students,” says Warnock, who went on to cofound Adobe Systems, among the all-time most successful Silicon Valley software start-ups.3 He adds, “We didn’t even think much about school.” Actually, he says, they were part of a group of drinking buddies who spent much of their time partying. Warnock flunked ninth-grade algebra, and Jacobsen’s grades were equally dismal. “I hated school,” Jacobsen recalls. “Teachers would get up at the front of the room and the clock would stop.”
But the two buddies ended up graduating and attending the University of Utah, where they thrived in a culture that emphasized experimentation instead of letters on a transcript. Other troublesome, rebellious students converged on the place, or emerged from the place, at around the same time, inspired by campus luminaries such as computer graphics pioneers Dave Evans and Ivan Sutherland, who originated head-positioned display devices. Classmates also included Alan Kay, who would go on to create the software for the original Apple Macintosh; Jim Clark, who would start Silicon Graphics and Netscape; Nolan Bushnell, who dropped out to form Atari Games; and Ed Catmull, the future cofounder and president of Pixar Animation Studios.
Jacobsen’s learning style meshed well when it came to working in campus research labs, and yet he was so distracted from schoolwork that at one point he found himself on the verge of receiving straight D’s. Briefly kicked out of the university, he was reinstated only when he promised the dean of students that he’d never let his grade point average slip below 3.5. Jacobsen put his mind to adapting quickly, drawing on his ability to compensate for his poor ability to memorize facts by using a visual approach he calls “playing games with ideas” that he still uses. Jacobsen received straight A’s for the remainder of his college career and through his Ph. D. at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Warnock went through a similar transformation when he had trouble concentrating on his class work. For an entire year, Warnock hyperfocused almost exclusively on trying to solve an open question in the world of mathematics. It was an esoteric conundrum posed by a professor ten years earlier, involving a field known as ring theory. Warnock spent almost all his time visualizing three-dimensional mathematical structures. When he came up with the proof, his life turned around. “It’s amazing when you solve an open question in mathematics how differently people start perceiving you,” he says.4
Later, while working at the storied Xerox Palo Alto Research Center in the 1970s, Warnock used his visual thinking skills to attack the gnarly problem of getting printers to produce the exact image seen on a computer screen. Although it’s hard to believe now, the problem was then thought to be unsolvable. For a novel approach, Warnock went into deep visualization mode. “I think graphically,” he says. “I see images in my mind, as opposed to formulas.” He left PARC to form Adobe and market his resulting invention, PostScript, a program that describes endless variations of fonts and graphics to printers. Warnock’s visual language became a standard for the Apple Macintosh and later for IBM PCs running Windows. Along with his friend Steve Jobs, Warnock launched the desktop publishing revolution. As a result, the multibillion-dollar PostScript became the first building block of the Adobe software house.
Time and again, Jacobsen has seen this visual approach fuel the ability to invent among friends and colleagues. The reason? Visualization fosters originality. You need to understand something in a concrete way in order to picture it in your mind and make changes to it. Memorizing facts, figures, and formulas—the central task in much of the educational system—simply doesn’t lead to this kind of thinking. “I can tell you a story of a guy with best memory I’ve ever seen.” Jacobsen says. “He can read books and know everything on every page. I read nothing—well, I read general things. I read biographies. I only read technical things after working in those areas. That sounds arrogant, but when you learn something in a certain way, it freezes in the way you approach it. Your brain is not magic. It’s a visual imaging machine.”5 In other words, learning someone else’s way of thinking about something can cause you to fall into someone else’s patterns and ruts. Jacobsen is more interested in perceiving problems and quandaries firsthand—unburdened by the knowledge of prior approaches—and then visualizing a new idea on his own.
His favorite historical example of how others have done it is the story of Michael Faraday, an apprentice bookbinder who had no scientific training. One day, at the age of twenty-one, Faraday attended a scientific lecture given by Humphry Davy, head of Great Britain’s esteemed Royal Society. After showing the scientist his notes and colorful diagrams, Faraday was hired as an assistant. Later, while playing around with batteries, wires, and pieces of iron, Faraday came to understand firsthand the principle of electromagnetism, which had only recently been discovered by Hans Christian Oersted, a Danish physicist. Faraday experimented with turning pieces of metal into magnets, in much the same way that modern science students will attach batteries to wires, wrap those wires around nails, and discover they can attract paper clips. But Faraday did something new. He visualized the lines of force emanating from these electromagnets. He saw these invisible force fields so clearly in his mind that he was able to draw pictures that showed how strong they were in each direction.
These lines of force became so concrete in Faraday’s mind that he began to visualize an experiment. Yes, electricity causes magnetism. But what about the reverse? Could a magnet cause electricity? The idea of moving a magnetic field past a wire was an image that popped into Faraday’s head. He was able to conjure that image because he actually saw magnetic fields as concrete things. That is how Faraday, in 1831, became the first to “induce” electricity. He invented the generator, perhaps the greatest electrical discovery of all time. Chemical batteries were expensive and weak. Electric generators were cheap and strong. Faraday did it by visualizing those imaginary lines of force in his mind. In 1867, James Clerk Maxwell formalized Faraday’s discovery with a series of universal field equations.
But equations can kill a child’s curiosity, according to Jacobsen. “Teachers start out teaching you the formalism [of Maxwell’s equations] because it’s easy to teach, and they can get some points for it, and then students can go out and do tricks like some monkey. But you don’t know the essence,” he says. “The equations are a manifestation of the reality. They aren’t reality itself.” When Jacobsen teaches engineering, he has his students learn about force fields by playing around with electromagnets, as Faraday did. They can begin to “see” these force fields firsthand, in their mind’s eye. Only then can they really know how Maxwell came up with the equations in the first place.
To be able to visualize, then, is to be able to understand. For another example of how to learn this thinking strategy, Jacobsen cites an anecdote about Richard Feynman. The Nobel Prize–winning physicist remembered the tale decades after it happened. “Say, pop, I noticed something,” began the young Feynman. “When I pull the wagon, the ball [inside it] rolls to the back of the wagon, and then I’m pulling it along and I suddenly stop, and the ball rolls to the front of the wagon. Why is that?”
Feynman’s father could simply have said, “This is called inertia” or “This is called Newton’s first law of motion.” Instead, the elder Feynman focused on what his son was seeing. “Nobody knows why,” he said. “The general principle is that things that are moving try to keep moving, and things that are standing still tend to stand still unless you push on them hard.”
“Now that’s a deep understanding,” explained Richard Feynman. “He doesn’t give me a name. He knew the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something, which I learned very early.”6
Feynman developed a deep understanding of matter at the molecular level, and he called on it to imagine things that might be invented in the future. He was able to predict the coming miniaturization of physical devices because he saw it all in his mind. In a 1959 talk at Caltech, Feynman challenged physicists to make a working motor that was “no more than 
of an inch on all sides.” He wondered how you’d go about building a machine by rearranging individual atoms, how you would lubricate a machine the size of the period at the end of this sentence, and how you would store an entire set of encyclopedias on something the size of the head of a pin. It’s because of these thought experiments that Feynman later became known as the “father of nanotechnology.”
Steve Jacobsen is one of those who took Feynman’s challenges seriously. Jacobsen named his company, Sarcos, after sarcoplasm, the medical term for muscle fiber. His vision was to simulate the functions of living creatures, “to use miniaturized stuff to solve new problems,” to create “information-based machines that moved.”7 Jacobsen came up with a new term, micro electro mechanical systems, or MEMS, that was soon adopted by other researchers, spawning a new subindustry. Jacobsen started building motors that were five hundred microns thick and testing them by doing things such as drilling holes in hair. “These machines are really simple and cheap, and they run forever,” he says, “but we didn’t know what to use them for.” He began searching for ways to match these new technological capabilities with real-world applications, visualizing a new world populated by micromachines doing thousands of tasks.
But to imagine how things work on such a small scale, or even on a large scale, you need to conduct thought experiments and play mind games. Sometimes, the simplest of these mind games can yield the most remarkable results.
Albert Einstein was a master of this kind of simple visualization. Legend has it that it all began with something concrete. Presented with a gift compass at the age of six, Einstein began to wonder why it worked. Such a question naturally led to basic visualizations of phenomena such as magnetism and polarity. He hated like poison the rote methods of his grade school in Germany, but he embraced his later school experiences in Switzerland for enabling open-ended inquiry.
Early in his career, while working as an examiner for the Swiss patent office, Einstein would daydream in his spare time. He pictured himself as a painter falling off a roof. Wouldn’t it seem as if the ground were rushing at him rather than him falling to the ground? He wondered what it would be like to fall through the ground to the center of the Earth. Would he know which direction he was moving at any given moment? Wouldn’t he feel weightless? What if gravity as we know it were not a universal force, as Newton said? What if it were only an artifact in our particular corner of the universe, only a warp in space-time?
Einstein imagined what it would be like to ride a beam of light. How long would it take to travel from the Earth to the moon this way? How long would it take if you were traveling on a train going fifty miles per hour? What if you turned on the train’s headlights? Would the light move any faster if the train was moving? What if you were riding on the light beam and checked your watch? How could you measure the speed of the train? Wouldn’t your watch on the light beam seem to run slower than the clock on the train? What if time weren’t constant, as Newton said? What if time were relative? Do moving clocks run slow?
The visualizations seem simple now, but the results were so profound that people refused to believe them. The Times of London called Einstein’s special theory of relativity “an affront to common sense.” In 1914, Einstein famously predicted that the eclipse of the sun would show that the sun’s rays bending around the planet Mercury would warp in different ways depending on where on Earth you observed the phenomenon. Even when that prediction turned out to be correct, when he had the data to back up his theory, many Newtonian scientists refused to believe it.8
Steve Jacobsen performs these sorts of visual mind games all the time. So does Woody Norris. “Einstein is always getting challenged,” Norris says, “but he usually emerges closer than anyone else. I think we’ll find that he was the most brilliant guy who ever lived. But he was still a child. We’ve got collective brains now. We have communication and instruments he never had. We have data he never had. Yet most of what he came up with, which was amazing, was based on these little thought experiments.”9
Norris invents using his own visual experiments. “What if I could speed off just fast enough to get beyond the edge of the expanding universe and go off into empty space?” he says. “I did this for a couple days. Every time I would get five minutes, I sat down, closed my eyes, and picked up from where I was. I zoomed off, and I found another universe that had its own big bang and was expanding into space at a rate near the speed of light. I thought, ‘Wow, that is cool.’ Those guys are over there, and we’re over here. And there are probably others. You don’t bump into a wall. There is no end. The big bang isn’t pushing the wall out of the way, it’s pushing into emptiness. Whatever mechanism caused the big bang can’t be unique. I was just zooming around watching all this. Then, a few weeks later, while reading Scientific American, I read about the ‘multiverse.’10 I said, ‘What’s the deal here? That’s my idea!’”
Norris’s inventions are fueled by this process of pure imagination. “What’s so cool about the human brain is that you have the ability to go anywhere. You can stand on the moon right now. You can see all the little rocks. You can look out the slit in the eyes of the Statue of Liberty. You can visualize it. You can picture a polar bear in a car speeding down the freeway. You can walk around it, get above it. You don’t need a ladder. You can float up above it and look down from the top, or pick it up and tilt it around with your hand. It doesn’t matter what it weighs. Weight, size, shape, gravity—nothing matters. Some people think this a useless skill. But if you work at that process and apply it to creativity, it can be very productive.”
This is how Norris came to invent what he calls the AirScooter. “I have a private pilot’s license,” he says. “Every time I fly I complain that this is like being in a soapbox derby. These things are so dang rickety, so noisy. The floor is only a quarter-inch thick. They’re just a tin can. I don’t like to be going one hundred miles an hour just to stay in the air. They’re a death trap.”
Norris tried to imagine his ultimate flying machine. “Here is what I’d like if I had my druthers,” he says. “Number one, I don’t want to have to go one hundred miles an hour. I want to lift up one foot and hang there. Number two, I don’t want to go to the airport. Number three, I don’t want to have a license. That can cost $50,000. Number four, I don’t want a helicopter. Helicopters are nonintuitive. The blades want to spin the body around. They crash too easily. Every hour of flight requires an hour of maintenance. I want this to be safe and affordable.”
With these goals in mind, Norris went into an empty room, dimmed the lights, and built his AirScooter in his mind. “I can fully construct anything I can think of,” he says. “I can look at it from every angle. I can see it screwing together. I do this all the time. I think it’s an ability we all have. It’s like learning to jump rope or dive. We all have a lot of skills we don’t tap. I wasn’t very good at it at first. But anyone can do this with practice, and I mean that honestly.”
In his visualizations, Norris found that there were many barriers to inventing his ultimate flying machine. He used mental simulations to attack each of these barriers. He pictured controlling his new aircraft with a bicycle-like handlebar that moves it in any direction. He visualized ways to eliminate complex linkages that would cause high maintenance. He pictured it as a single-passenger machine. That gets rid of liability lawsuits. Before you can start the engine, you push a button to sign an electronic contract and accept the risk. Norris pictured his machine as lightweight. (If it weighs less than 254 pounds, it would be classified as an ultralight hobby aircraft, the least-regulated category of aircraft governed by the Federal Aviation Administration.) Norris wanted to be able to take off and land vertically. He wanted there to be no tail rotor to destabilize the aircraft. He pictured a pair of helicopter-like blades mounted on the top, rotating in opposite directions, to provide balance. He also envisioned the device moving like a hummingbird, with the user having the ability to constantly adjust speed going sideways, forward, backward, up, or down, or to hover in midair.
The biggest barrier that Norris saw was the engine. “The only lightweight ones out there are two-stroke engines,” he notes. Two-stroke engines mix oil with the gas, and that eliminates many of the valves that are required by four-stroke engines. The problem is that two-stroke engines are highly polluting because they operate at six thousand revolutions per minute. “I couldn’t see putting my life in the hands of a two-stroke engine screaming at me and scaring me to death.” Such high-rev engines are prone to seize up, and there would be no way to glide to a safe landing.
Norris searched online for a company making a lightweight, four-stroke “Otto” engine that operates at lower revs. He found one made by a New Zealand company now called AeroTwin Motors Corporation. These aluminum and titanium engines weigh only 78 pounds and operate at 65 horsepower. Norris was so impressed that he acquired the company outright and opened a factory in Texas to begin producing them.
Meanwhile, he opened an AirScooter plant in rural Nevada to begin building the same personal aircraft he had pictured in his dreams. More than anything else, Norris’s AirScooter looks like a catamaran. The aircraft sits on a pair of bright red rubber pontoons, with a red stabilization tail sticking out the back. The open-air cockpit has minimal instrumentation dominated by a handlebar-like control stick. The pair of rotor blades sits on top of a cage. The gas tank holds five gallons, and the machine can fly seventy-five miles per hour for about two hours before needing to be refueled. The whole thing is shorter than a midsized sedan. The target price is $25,000, depending on whether Norris can integrate the new engine cheaply enough. Norris claims that anyone can learn to fly an AirScooter in one afternoon.
Are these tall claims? Yes. Have dozens of other inventors over the past fifty years also promised the ultimate personal aircraft? Anyone who reads Popular Science knows the answer to that one. Will the AirScooter become the first “flying car” to succeed? No one knows yet. Is Norris crazy? That’s a relative term. Has he tapped into his power of visualization? No question. “You can do it, too,” he insists. “I’m not that smart. If you don’t believe me, ask my wife.”
Stephen Jacobsen’s early career was spent visualizing the organs of the human body and picturing ways to create machines to replace all of its parts, or at least most of them. In 1968, while working on his master’s degree at the University of Utah, he got caught up in this behavior when he became the first student to sign up as an assistant in the newly opened campus laboratory of Dr. Willem Kolff. As a physician working for the Dutch resistance during World War II, Kolff imagined a way to create an artificial kidney. “Meeting Kolff was a big, big moment for me,” Jacobsen recalls. He remembers being in awe of “this tall, aristocratic Dutchman.”11
Jacobsen had heard all the stories. He had heard how Kolff crafted the first artificial kidney using sausage skin as a semiporous membrane. Portions of a patient’s blood would be extracted and funneled through the membrane; it would retain the red and white blood cells, which are too big to pass through, while allowing urea and other harmful elements from the blood to be funneled into a container. Jacobsen had heard how Kolff used fruit juice cans for the containers in which the remaining portions of the blood would be cleansed with dialyzing solution before being recombined with the red and white cells and pumped back into the body. In 1945, Kolff revived his first patient using this handcrafted contraption. A comatose fifty-seven-year-old woman suffering from acute renal failure suddenly sat up in her hospital bed and blurted, “I am going to divorce my husband!” She went on to do just that and then lived another seven years.
In 1950, Kolff came to America. He never patented his invention, and while working for the Cleveland Clinic, he donated his intellectual property to Baxter Healthcare, which manufactured Kolff’s kidney dialysis machine and installed the devices in treatment centers all over the world, eventually saving millions of lives. “That was still the time when doctors did not take out patents,” recalls Kolff, now in his nineties.12 “The AMA [American Medical Association] considered it unethical to do so.” That started changing by the late 1960s, but Kolff remains ambivalent about medical patents. “People ask me all the time whether I’m worried about someone stealing my work. I tell them, ‘If it will benefit mankind, they can have it.’”
Kolff arrived at the University of Utah in 1968 to set up his artificial organ laboratory, which he ran for three decades. A young Steve Jacobsen enlisted in the first project: an effort to visualize an improved artificial kidney, again made with odd parts. At first, Kolff and Jacobsen used the drum from a Maytag washing machine; then they turned to a nose cone from a rocket. The project yielded Jacobsen’s first patent, held jointly with Kolff. The student was becoming an inventor.
Later, as a grad student at MIT, Jacobsen began searching for new artificial body parts to model in his mind. While pursuing his Ph. D. and working at the university’s famed Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, Jacobsen came across an early artificial arm called the Boston Arm. “It was crummy,” he says. “It was heavy and noisy and didn’t have fine motor control. You could tell it was artificial from a hundred feet away.”13 Jacobsen became obsessed with visualizing a far superior artificial arm.
“I got interested in the idea of grace,” he recalls. “I got intrigued by how groups of muscles got orchestrated by your brain. They really are like a symphony. Grace is a beautiful thing. It’s about your brain and your body making a deal.” He says he doesn’t buy the “dominant brain” theory, which suggests that the brain is in complete control of the rest of the body. “The intelligence in your body is distributed,” he says. “You’re a model-based controller. You have a one-hundred-millisecond time delay in your legs. If you’re walking down the stairs, you’re planning that the next stair is going to be there, and if it’s not, you have a catastrophe. You can’t stop yourself in time.” Jacobsen began seeing clear pictures of how the entire human body was a machine with parts that could be replicated by technology.
After MIT, he returned to Kolff’s laboratory in Salt Lake City to begin work on his own artificial arm. Jacobsen set out to visualize an arm that was stronger, lighter, and far easier to control than the Boston Arm. He also wanted one that was mass producible so that it could be sold to the thousands of people who needed one. “Steve was the main person” behind what became known as the Utah Arm, Kolff confirms.14 The arm was equipped with bioelectrical sensors that detected the signals sent by the brain and relayed by the shoulder muscles when they expanded and contracted. “This arm moved before the owner of arm even knew it,” says Kolff. “It knew enough to go slowly near your mouth so it wouldn’t crack your teeth, but it was strong enough to crack a nut, and gentle enough to peel an orange.” As Jacobsen explains it, the Utah Arm is “electrically powered but body commanded.”15 With production spun off into an independent company, now called Motion Control, Inc., also based in Salt Lake City, the Utah Arm remains the leading artificial arm in the world.
Kolff was assembling a group of extraordinary medical inventors who visualized ways of recreating the basic functions of almost every major body part. A researcher named William Dobelle spearheaded an effort to create an artificial eye, an implantable visual processing machine that would literally connect to the optic nerve and map into the brain’s visual cortex. “We wanted to make a map of the brain’s visual cortex,” Kolff recalls. “Once you have that, you can begin to program visualization. The simplest thing to program is Braille. A blind person can read it three times faster when we stimulate the brain.”16 But Kolff couldn’t get the project funded. “The resistance has been enormous,” he says. Dobelle later went to Columbia University to continue his experiments. Today, nearly thirty years later, the Dobelle eye is reportedly working in a small group of test patients, literally connecting camera-like equipment with fiber-optic wires to the brains of blind people. Kolff claims that he will enable blind people to drive cars.
Kolff began imagining designs for artificial hearts when he was at the Cleveland Clinic in the late 1950s, and he even designed fist-sized pumps and implanted them in monkeys and dogs. A former medical student named Robert Jarvik heard about Kolff’s work and visited the lab. Jarvik had first learned about heart transplants years earlier when his own father had undergone open-heart surgery. Kolff hired Jarvik and raised funds to support an artificial heart team that grew to 147 researchers and scientists. Various researchers worked on various aspects of many different designs, with Steve Jacobsen pitching in to model the fluid flow of the blood inside the chambers.
What happened next gave Jacobsen enormous confidence in the power of imagination. He was a firsthand witness and a participant in one of the biggest medical spectacles of the century. As a way of identifying the different models of artificial hearts in the lab, Kolff assigned different researchers’ names to different models. One model, for example, was called the Jarvik-7. In 1982, Kolff’s team implanted the Jarvik-7 inside the chest of a dying patient named Barney Clark. “Nobody cared about the name Jarvik until Barney Clark,” Kolff recalls. The media responded to the news of the first human to receive an artificial heart with such swiftness and force that half of Kolff’s lab was suddenly filled with reporters and television cameras around the clock. The Jarvik heart was featured on the covers of Time and Newsweek. The public wanted to see how long Barney Clark would live. The suspense fed a media frenzy. Clark ended up living for 111 days, with newspaper and TV crews documenting his experience every step of the way.
Jacobsen keeps a Teflon-coated Jarvik heart on one of the shelves in his office. The invention represents many things to him.17 Among the lessons he learned is how circumstantial and disproportionate it can be when the media is in charge of assigning credit for a momentous lab breakthrough. Why do people remember Jarvik but not Kolff? But what Jacobsen remembers most is how exciting it was to be there when the big moment happened. He calls the first successful artificial heart “an immortal result.” Just being part of it gave him enough confidence and curiosity to visualize dozens of other immortal results that could be achieved.
Jacobsen decided to strike out on his own. He retained his professorship at the University of Utah and formed a separate company, Sarcos, to focus on building the most spectacular robots the world had ever seen—not toys but robots that mimicked human functions at a very basic level.
All the visualizations he had ever had would come into play. “When you were a little kid, didn’t you know there would be robots?” he asks. “Some would wash your car, some would perform medical functions, some would be your house servants, some would be entertainers.” Jacobsen cannot recall the exact year he started Sarcos to launch this massive new invention effort, but records show it was 1983.