Inventions: Optical sensors, ionisation-chamber smoke detector, coded lock devices and more
Few individuals are as prolific as French inventor, physicist and entrepreneur Jacques Lewiner. Throughout his career as a researcher spanning more than four decades, he has authored over 500 patent applications worldwide. He holds 68 granted European patents.
Only few inventors can match the scale of Lewiner's innovative output.
Even fewer can match the diversity: with inventions in the fields of
electronics, medical sensors, security and telecommunications, Lewiner also has
a range of interests that is nearly as broad as his inventions are numerous.
The common denominator lies in transforming cutting-edge science and technology - often connecting several disparate fields - into practical solutions to everyday problems. A lifelong advocate of bridging the gap between science and industry, Lewiner also helps fellow researchers and students to transform their findings into real-world applications.
A strong proponent of the protection of intellectual property, the 74-year-old has managed to turn some of his patents into successful products. In 2000, he launched fire-detection specialist company Finsecur to market his novel smoke detector design, which has since grown into a EUR 34-million-per-year business.
Societal benefit
Lewiner's inventions have improved the safety of millions of people around the world. In 1977, he patented a bed sheet that triggers an alarm upon variations in vital functions like breathing or heartbeat. This bed sheet is ideal for monitoring sleep-apnoea patients or newborn babies and, unlike previous inventions such as patched sensors, allows for full freedom of movement.
Lewiner designed an algorithm-based coding system, one of the first technologies to make magnetic-key-card locks practical. The system was granted a European patent in 1989 and by Lewiner's own estimates has been used to secure hundreds of thousands of hotel rooms since.
In 1991, the serial inventor patented an improvement to the ionic smoke detector, making it less prone to false alarms - a common annoyance at the time, because a sudden gust of wind would trigger the alarm. The detectors have since been installed in homes across the world.
Economic benefit
Lewiner's ionic smoke detector became an intellectual-property cornerstone of the fire-detection specialist company Finsecur, which Lewiner co-founded in 1999. Since then, Finsecur has grown its patent portfolio to over 120 patents and is reported to have a turnover of EUR 34 million and employ some 168 people.
Many of Lewiner's projects involved collaboration across technical and scientific fields and several of Lewiner's start-ups were launched in co-operation with former students from the École Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles de la Ville de Paris (ESPCI Paris). One of the more successful of these was Inventel, which he started with his former student Éric Carreel. The company was bought by the French communications and entertainment company Thomson (now Technicolor) for EUR 146 million in 2005.
A more recent star is Sculpteo, a company specialising in 3-D printing set up by Lewiner, Carreel and Clément Moreau. The latest reported figures, from 2017, state that it has 55 employees and has so far raised around EUR 9 million in investments. Sculpteo is active in a global 3-D printing market estimated to have been worth about EUR 5.3 billion in 2017 and expected to reach EUR 26.5 billion by 2023.
