Portable Stereo's Creator Got His Due, Eventually

[Christopher]

From the IHT.

In the late 1960s, Andreas Pavel and his friends gathered regularly at his house here to listen to records, from Bach to Janis Joplin, and talk politics and philosophy. In their flights of fancy, they wondered why it should not be possible to take their music with them wherever they went.

Inspired by those discussions, Pavel invented the device known today as the Walkman. But it took more than 25 years of battling the Sony Corporation and others in courts and patent offices around the world before he finally won the right to say it: Andreas Pavel invented the portable personal stereo player.

"I filed my first patent a complete innocent, thinking it would be a simple matter, 12 months or so, to establish my ownership and begin production," he said at the house where he first conceived of the device. "I never imagined that it would end up consuming so much time and taking me away from my real interests in life."

In person, Pavel seems an unlikely protagonist in such an epic struggle. He is an intellectual with a gentle, enthusiastic, earnest demeanor, more interested in ideas and the arts than in commerce, cosmopolitan by nature and upbringing.

Born in Germany, Pavel came to Brazil at the age of 6, when his father was recruited to work for the Matarazzo industrial group, at the time the most important one here. His mother, an artist named Ninca Bordano, had a home built for the family that included a studio for her and an open-air salon with high-end audio equipment, meant for literary and musical gatherings.

Except for a period in the mid-1960s when he studied philosophy at a German university, Pavel, now 59, spent the remainder of his childhood and early adulthood here in South America's largest city, "to my great advantage," he said. São Paulo was experiencing a period of unusual creative and intellectual ferment then, culminating in the Tropicalist movement, and he was delighted to be a part of it.

When a station called TV Cultura was licensed to go on the air, Pavel was hired to be its director of educational programming. After he was forced to leave because of what he thinks was political pressure, he edited a "Great Thinkers" book series for Brazil's leading publishing house in another effort to "counterbalance the censorship and lack of information" then prevailing.

In the end, what drove Pavel back to Europe was his discontent with the military dictatorship then in power in Brazil. By that time, though, he had already invented the device he initially called the "stereobelt," which he saw more as a means to "add a sound track to real life" than an item to be mass marketed.

"Oh, it was purely aesthetic," he said when asked his motivation in creating a portable personal stereo player. "It took years to discover that I had made a discovery and that I could file a patent."

Pavel still remembers when and where he was the first time he tested his invention and which piece of music he chose for his experiment. It was February 1972, he was in Switzerland with his girlfriend and the cassette they heard playing on their headphones was "Push Push," a collaboration between the jazz flutist Herbie Mann and the blues-rock guitarist Duane Allman.

"I was in the woods in St. Moritz, in the mountains, the snow was falling down, I pressed the button and suddenly we were floating," he recalled. "It was an incredible feeling, to realize that I now had the means to multiply the aesthetic potential of any situation."

Over the next few years, he took his invention to one audio company after another - Grundig, Philips, Yamaha and ITT among them - to see if there was interest in manufacturing his device. But everywhere he went, he said, he met with rejection or ridicule.

"They all said they didn't think people would be so crazy as to run around with headphones, that this is just a gadget, a useless gadget of a crazy nut," he said. In New York, where he moved in 1974, and then in Milan, where he relocated in 1976, "people would look at me sometimes on a bus, and you could see they were asking themselves, 'Why is this crazy man running around with headphones?"'

Ignoring the doors slammed in his face, Pavel filed a patent in March of 1977 in Milan. Over the next year and a half, he took the same step in the United States, Germany, England and Japan.

Sony started selling the Walkman in 1979, and in 1980 began negotiating with Pavel, who was seeking a royalty fee. The company agreed to that in 1986, he said, but would not acknowledge him as the Walkman's inventor, so in 1989 he began new proceedings, this time in British courts, that dragged on and on and ate up his limited financial resources.

At one point, Pavel said, he owed his lawyer hundreds of thousands of dollars and was being followed by private detectives and countersued by Sony. "They had frozen all my assets, I couldn't use checks or credit cards," and the outlook for him was looking grim.

In 1996, the case was dismissed, leaving Pavel with more than $3 million in court costs to pay. But he persisted, warning Sony that he would file new suits in every country where he had patented his invention, and in 2003, after another round of negotiations, the company agreed to settle out of court.

Pavel declined to say how much Sony was obliged to pay him, citing a confidentiality clause. But European press accounts said that Pavel received a cash settlement for damages in the low eight figures and is now also receiving royalties on some Walkman sales.

These days, Pavel divides his time between Italy and Brazil, and once again considers himself primarily a philosopher. But he is also using some of his money to develop an invention he calls a "dreamkit," a personal, multimedia sense-extension device, and to indulge his unflagging interest in music.

Recently, he has been promoting the career of a somewhat overlooked flutist named Altamiro Carrilho, whom he regards as "the greatest living Brazilian musician."

He is also financing a project that he describes as "the complete discography of every record ever released in Brazil, so that we will know every track and who is playing on it."

In addition, some of his friends have suggested he might have a case against the manufacturers of MP3 players, reasoning that those devices are a direct descendant of the Walkman. Pavel said that while he sees a kinship, he is not eager to take on another long legal battle.

"I have known other inventors in similar predicaments and most of them become that story, which is the most tragic, sad and melancholic thing that can happen," he said.

"Somebody becomes a lawsuit, he loses all interest in other things and deals only with the lawsuit. Nobody ever said I was obsessed. I kept my other interests alive, in philosophy and music and literature.

"I didn't have time to pursue them, but now I have reconquered my time," he continued.

"So no, I'm not interested anymore in patents or legal fights or anything like that. I don't want to be reduced to the label of being the inventor of the Walkman."

[leonyuhanov]

This guy is my hero, wheer would i be without my countless walkmans! Probably in an insanse assylum.

Ill drink to him at my next party

Leon

[bland10000]

An interesting read. I had always subscribed to the story on Sony Japan's website that a Sony-man asked the gadget department to come up with something for him to listen to music on the plane for a business trip and wallah the first walkman was created.

[Guest Stuge]

Pavel, Hero of Walkman Industry !! We Salute you>>

Cheers!!!

I think now Wakman company should add his name on the top of there boxies

[bobt]

Senor Pavel, where would we bw without you? We salute you for your vision, and hope your next venture is as world encompassing.

BTW Bland10000, it;s voila, not wallah, even though that's sort of how it's pronounced.

Best of the season to all,

Bob

[bland10000]

"voila"...I've seen it before but never knew how it was pronounced, thanks. Now I know why I have never seen "wallah"...

[tekdroid]

hate to be the voice of dissent here, but what exactly did Pavel patent? The concept of portability? Honestly, I think general patents like this hamper the progress of technology (as far as I can tell from the article, it doesn't sound like he actually did much to make a better Walkman (or, shall we say, portable audio device), and it really is a 'general concept' patent - which I think shouldn't even be patentable.

I don't think this guy is my hero at all. The ones that deserve credit are those that actually refine and innovate on a technology angle, getting through power supply and size and cost issues, and actually building it. In other words, making breakthroughs on the tech side. That takes a lot of work and deserves rewards. Not general ideas or concepts.

[leonyuhanov]

Unfortunately, these guys you speak off that make all these amazing new strides froward work for Sony. If they had names i would thank them! but they work for Sony or some other corp, brilliant minds are USED(in the most terrible use of this word) by Sony and other corps so to say this is useless. They cant get any credit because They work for sony and anythign they do is Owned by sony.

Pavel on the other hand, was a non tech person, who created a concept, yes you could say a general idea, BUT he did have a wokring prototype and when you have a working prototype, how can you say "he came up with a general idea"?

A rebutle would be great

Leon

[tekdroid]

Unfortunately, these guys you speak off that make all these amazing new strides froward work for Sony. If they had names i would thank them! but they work for Sony or some other corp, brilliant minds are USED(in the most terrible use of this word) by Sony and other corps so to say this is useless. They cant get any credit because They work for sony and anythign they do is Owned by sony.

Pavel on the other hand, was a non tech person, who created a concept, yes you could say a general idea, BUT he did have a wokring prototype and when you have a working prototype, how can you say "he came up with a general idea"?

A rebutle would be great

Leon

←

It all comes down to seeing the working prototype, I think. I haven't looked into his design yet. I think if he thinks Sony stole some design of his, he could have a case (of course we know the case is over now, apparently). But if it's anything like "hey, I strapped on this blah blah and stuck a 1KG battery here, and blah blah" well then, that's nothing more than an idea with piss-poor implementation.

Of course, if Pavel's prototype is anything like the first Walkman (I haven't searched it up yet) and if it actually is marketable, sellable and convenient, then all my respect to him. Then he might be able to say Sony and possibly others copied his design. But I doubt they did. The feeling I get is he comes across to me as being an ideas man but not much of an implementation man. Could be wrong, though.

I personally feel the implementation (design) is what counts, and that's where patents should be given out. Many of us come up with great ideas but piss-poor implementation, and that's where the real work goes in.

[leonyuhanov]

I agree with you on that!

Leon