An Outlook

During the past few weeks, I have thought of Gordon Matthews on a number of occasions. And, I confess, most of these thoughts have been less than kind. Matthews is no longer around to face my curses (he died five years ago this week at the age of 65), so perhaps it is time for me to come to terms with Mr. Matthews – time to forgive him for sins that were never really his to own. So let’s start out with some background.

Mr. Matthews was an inventor but, like so many inventors, you have probably never heard his name before now. Nonetheless, Mr. Matthews’ genius changed the world in many ways and his influence touches all our lives several times a week, if not several times each day.

Though he held approximately three-dozen patents, Mr. Matthews will be remembered for Patent No. 04,371,752 issued on February 1, 1983. Indeed, it was this patent that led him to being popular on the lecture circuit for many years and, invariably, he always started out his discourses with “Half of you love me and half of you hate me.” In this, at least, I believe Mr. Matthews was wrong. Indeed, I feel quite certain in asserting that far more than half the people hated him – even though they never even knew his name, let alone knew him personally.

In 1982, Matthews told Forbes Magazine, “When I see something that irritates me, I invent something to fix it. Sometimes I think the universe could be flawless if only I could design it.” As you can probably tell, Mr. Matthews was not a humble man.

Back in 1974, while Matthews was working in the corporate world following service in the Marines, he was visiting a client’s headquarters in Denver, CO. During his visit he became extremely frustrated when he was continually running into difficulties contacting individuals at his company’s home office in Dallas. While waiting, unsuccessfully, for another call to go through, he glanced into the wastebasket near where he was sitting and noticed a considerable number of pink “While You Were Out …” slips, with handwritten messages scrawled on them informing so-and-so to call so-and-so, etc.

Matthews began thinking and when he returned home he told his wife, “I’ve got this crazy idea.”

In 1979, Matthews had filed a 49-page patent application and founded a small company, ECS Telecommunications. One year later, he landed his first major client: Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing, Inc. (3M), and other major corporations were soon knocking at his door.

Matthews’ invention was described in the same Forbes Magazine article mentioned earlier as “a computerized telephone message storage and retrieval system with greater capacity than a tape recorder and a novel ability to reroute and replicate messages.” With his invention, users within a company could exchange, send, receive, store, forward, and erase voice messages from any phone. Matthews called his invention “Voice Mail Express” (or VMX, which later became the name of his company). Today, of course, we simply call it voice mail and now you know who is responsible for its invention.

I would venture to say that almost all of us have, at one time or another, unknowingly cursed Mr. Matthews. I freely admit that I have hoped he would endure all manner of suffering as I pressed “1” to confirm that I wanted to talk with customer service representative, pressed “5” to confirm that I was over 6 feet tall, pressed “3” to confirm that I had not experienced any urinary tract disorders within the past 12-months, etc. Still, opinions can change and forgiveness, we are told, is a virtue.

In the years before his death, Mr. Matthews expressed dismay at the way his invention was being utilized. He stressed that he never invented the “automated attendant” that offers the caller a series of push button options with no human voice on the line. Indeed, he expressed the same frustration you and I have felt with “voice mail.” In the year before he died he commented, “If I call someone and have to go through four or five steps to reach a person, only to reach his message machine, I won’t do business with him. People hide behind it.”

An even worse spin-off of Mr. Matthews’ technology is automated calling. These are the phone calls you answer only to find moments of dead silence before you hear someone pick up the phone on the other end, or hear a message like “Please hold for an important phone call.” This spin-off technology makes those political phone calls possible where you hear recorded messages from candidates without having any possibility to ask them questions or tell them why their platform is preposterous. But Gordon Matthews isn’t responsible for this application of his basic technology, either.

Despite the way the technology has developed, the TeleMessaging Industry Association estimates that 80 percent of large American companies utilize voice mail technology.

Whether I have convinced you to forgive Mr. Matthews or not, there is no mistaking the impact his invention has had on our lives and the way we conduct business. And it should be noted that not all of his inventions achieved the same success. One week before his death he had filed a preliminary patent for a still secret invention that he promised his wife would be bigger than voice mail! This turned out to be a spin-off voice mail system for use in individual homes allowing every family to own and operate a voice mail system similar to the ones used in giant corporations.

He also invented a device called “Automatic Marshal” that tracked how long each player plays on the golf course and sets off an alarm when they “dawdle.”

Press “1” if the “Automatic Marshal” excites you; press “2” if this device causes you panic; press “3” if you don’t really care about anything in this week’s column; press “4” is you’ve experienced any type of urinary tract disorder in the past 12 months.

(Note: The National Inventors Hall of Fame has a Web site, located at http://www.invent.org, which I’d like to encourage all of you to visit. I was dismayed to discover that Gordon Matthews has not yet been inducted into this esteemed assemblage. The good news is that you and I can send in nominating papers. From the Web site you can download the forms, which, I assure you, are quite brief. You will need Adobe Acrobat for this procedure, but this program is available for free through the same Web site. All the information you will need to complete the form is contained in this column and all it will cost you is a few pieces of paper, a few moments of your time, and a stamp. After all the curses and damnations he knowingly or unknowingly endured in his lifetime, let’s see if we can give Gordon Matthews a little love…albeit, posthumously.)