Roy Weinstein had given up.

To heck with the patent office, the 82-year-old physicist decided. After waiting two decades for a patent on his potentially revolutionary superconducting magnets, he'd had enough.

“As you might imagine, waiting 20 years is a pretty nasty chore,” said Weinstein, an emeritus professor at the University of Houston.

Then, amazingly, the patent arrived on Feb. 23 — 20 years and three days after he applied for it. The breakthrough came after the intervention of his son, Lee, an engineer and inventor who has had his own battles with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.

The patent lets Weinstein move forward with commercial development of his supermagnets that, when chilled to super-low temperatures, can produce a field with the strength of 2 tesla, billions of times stronger than the magnet on your refrigerator.

Weinstein's magnets are about the size of a stack of five dimes, weigh an ounce, and cost $300. Commercially available electromagnets that can produce a comparable magnetic field weigh two tons and cost $60,000 to $100,000, he says.

The most immediate application may be in motors, which use magnets to create motion. The stronger the magnet, the more powerful the motor. Although the magnets would have to be kept cool with liquid nitrogen, this would be cost-effective in larger motors, Weinstein said.

The prospect of a more powerful, much smaller magnet has experts excited.

“The basic design of motors has been understood for about a century,” said Robert Hebner, director of the Center for Electromechanics at the University of Texas at Austin.

“It's new materials that make it exciting, and it seems to me this is a material that has the potential to revolutionize motors.”

Weinstein said he is developing a $7 million agreement with Round Rock-based TECO-Westinghouse Motor Co. to construct a 1 megawatt motor that will be a prototype for a 10 megawatt version. The company declined comment.

New field ‘looked like fun'

The U.S. Navy is expected to provide much of the funding, Weinstein said, because of the potential to reduce the size of ship-borne motors by three-fourths.

“On a Navy ship that extra space is pure gold,” the physicist said.

And there are other potential applications, a gusher of which Weinstein expects to flow now that the patent has been approved.

His patent odyssey began back in 1987 with perhaps the most momentous physics discovery in Houston's history.

It was then that UH physicist Paul Chu discovered that a specialized material called yttrium barium copper oxide, or YBCO, acted as a superconductor of electricity at minus-294 degrees Fahrenheit, launching the field of “high-temperature” superconductivity.

Although that's still plenty cold, it is in fact warm enough that liquid nitrogen can be used as a coolant.

In 1987 Weinstein was not quite 60 years old, and he'd arrived at UH four years earlier to become dean of the College of Natural Sciences.

Weinstein had spent nearly four decades in the field of particle physics, working at all the major particle accelerators around the world and amassing himself a nice career studying atoms.

But Weinstein began to become disenchanted.

When he was starting out in the early 1950s, a group of two or three scientists could use a $10,000 machine to make basic science discoveries. Now it took groups of hundreds of scientists and billion-dollar-machines.

Then Chu found the YBCO compound, and the field of superconductivity tantalized Weinstein.

“It looked like fun,” he said. “You get to play with liquid nitrogen and you get to blow things up.”

Weinstein began experimenting with the new high-temperature superconductor material.

It was well-known that when a material “transitions” into a state of superconductivity, and begins to carry electricity with no loss, the material expels its magnetic field.

What Weinstein soon discovered was that drilling tiny cylindrical holes inside pellets of YBCO — making the superconducting material look like Swiss cheese — allows it to trap a magnetic field, and thus become a powerful magnet.

Reason for delay unclear

By 1990 he was ready to apply for a patent.

Weinstein might well have felt he was entering a real-life Circumlocution Office — the fictional government agency Charles Dickens created in his novel Little Dorrit to ridicule out-of-control bureaucracy.

It's not clear entirely why the patent office didn't approve Weinstein's application, which he and his lawyers actively pursued for the first 15 years or so.

“It is very rare for patents to be pending this long,” agreed Jennifer Rankin Byrne, a spokeswoman for the office.

What is clear is that the patent didn't start moving until Lee Weinstein became involved about a year ago.

Son picked up the phone

The younger Weinstein himself had wrangled with the patent office before, having earned 15 patents and having another 40 applications outstanding. Among the electrical engineer's claims to fame is the development of laser tag in 1984 while he worked in Houston at Schlumberger.

Weinstein's “Star Laser Force” in Houston and George Carver III's “Photon” in Dallas were the first two businesses in the world to offer laser tag to paying customers.

Instead of communicating by letters, Lee Weinstein called the patent examiner directly and struck up a relationship. He assuaged the examiner's concerns that a patent for the magnet would cover too many existing technologies and might restrict billions of dollars in trade.

“To be honest, this is an area of science that almost certainly a patent examiner wouldn't understand,” Lee Weinstein said. “It's deep physics. I tried to help him understand that by granting a claim this wasn't reaching out and covering some technology it shouldn't cover.”

When the patent finally gained tentative approval, it was further delayed because when it was originally filed the patent office didn't use computerized records, Lee Weinstein said.

But it finally did come through. And how did that make Roy Weinstein feel?

“It made me feel pretty dang good,” he said.

eric.berger@chron.com