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In 1965, the Ohio-based Battelle Memorial Institute opened its Pacific Northwest Laboratory in Richland, to took over management of Hanford's lab, and James Russell joined the effort as Senior Scientist. Thus he gained an audience for his more far-fetched ideas and immediately began to pepper Battelle with proposals for new commercial concepts. The optical digital technology was initially met with skepticism, as it was not believed that one could digitize sound. "Here I was at Battelle, enmeshed in the scientific community, and one of the first things I had to demonstrate was that you could digitize music and reproduce it" he said. "Music into numbers? Come on now, Russell."

ple to convert into an audible or visible transmission.

Through the 1970s, Russell continued to refine the CD-ROM, adapting it to any form of data. However, like many ideas far ahead of their time, the CD-ROM found few interested investors at first. In 1971, Eli S. Jacobs, a New York venture capitalist, pioneered the commercialization by forming Digital Recording Corporation to further enhance the product for the consumer video market, and hired Russell and a team of technicians to come up with a video disk. Their efforts led to a 20-minute video disc in 1973.

"The vision I had in mind was of television programs on little plastic records. The networks, instead of putting programs on television, would print records. And if you wanted to watch your favorite programs you'd get them in the mail and put in the disk whenever you want," Russell said. "Jacobs thought, if we can do it, hey great, we've got the whole world by the tail. And if we can't, well at least you know where you are." In 1974 Digital Recording Corporation announced an optical digital television recording and playback machine, the first device to digitize a color image, at a Chicago trade show. The response from large potential investors was rather cool. Philips Electronics representatives visited Russell's Battelle lab in the summer of 1975, and they discounted the entire premise of his work. "They said: It's all very well for data storage, but you can't do that for video or audio." recalled Russell. Philips had just released its laser disc, an analog optical video player, and they were convinced that analog was the only way. "Philips put $60 million into development of the laser disc. We were advised that nobody would tell them they had made a mistake."

Sony launched its CDP-101—the first commercialized CD player in 1982. Sony and Philips paid royalties from CD player sales to Battelle and to Optical Recording Corporation. Time-Warner and other disc manufacturers settled with the Optical Recording Corporation in 1992, paying $30 million for patent infringement. The court determined that Optical Recording had the sole rights over the technology mentioned in the patents. But because the patents properly belonged to Russell's employer, he never got a cent out of either deal. By 1985, Russell had earned 26 patents for CD-ROM technology. He then founded his own consulting firm, where he has continued to create and patent improvements in optical storage systems, along with bar code scanners, liquid crystal shutters, and other industrial optical instruments. His most revolutionary recent invention is a high-speed optical data recorder and player that has no moving parts. Russell earned another 11 patents for this "Optical Random Access Memory" device.

James Russell has more good ideas before breakfast than most people do all their life