The El Granada inventor has helped develop a new guidance chip for improved versions of robo-vacuum cleaners — the little disc robots that clean up as they scoot around the interior of rooms.
Designing components for new products is how Jayne makes money, but his real vocation is teaching robotics at Peninsula schools and developing nanotechnology for medicine.
 Bill Jayne talks about his life and his work at a Princeton lab, where he is working on one of his latest projects. |
“If this work saves one person from catastrophic heart failure, it’ll be worth it,” he said.
For Jayne, the goal is personal as well as professional. Over his years, Jayne dabbled in engineering, computer programming and robotics, but those skills left him unprepared when the mechanics of his own body failed. In the 1990s, Jayne’s heart was weakening from uncertain causes, leaving him drained of all energy. Trying to move from his car across the parking lot and into Seton Medical Center Coastside took him 15 minutes and left him winded for the day.
For three years, he couldn’t work, much less pay for a heart transplant -- the one procedure that could have saved him.
Jayne survived by the generosity of strangers. In 2000, donors on the Coastside contributed about $200,000 to pay for Jayne’s heart operation. Jayne got his transplant and now 10 years later, he says he is still working to repay that act of kindness.
Jayne rode his bicycle out to the Pillar Point Harbor to meet a reporter for coffee. A middle-aged man with thinning dark hair, he looks a bit like Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.
“I want everyone to realize their charity was worthwhile,” he said. “Every day is a gift and it’s a gift you have to pay back.”
Jayne was an engineering prodigy. He was 16 years old when he filed his first patent for making bicycle wheels out of plastic. Now in his 50s, he considers that invention among his most successful.
“It was the most successful injection-molded product ever,” he beamed. “I was working as an engineer before I could even spell ‘engineer.’”
He studied at the University of Chicago and later at Harvard.
Since then, he has developed robotic appendages to help invalid patients, a more efficient satellite dish, and a computer matrix to track climate effects on food production. He helped invent a large-scale printer for billboard advertisements, a six-year process. He suspects that manually working with printer inks and chemicals may have contributed to his heart problems.
After his operation, Jayne says he had trouble re-entering regular life. He and his wife separated, he needed time to recuperate after surgery, and for a period he was living homeless on the Coastside.
It took years to get fully his life back in order. As a way to benefit the community around him, Jayne began leading seminars to share his knowledge. He has previously held Coastside inventors’ workshops with local teenagers to teach them the basics of innovation and how to pursue a patent. Meanwhile, he has also been hosting robotics workshops for teachers and talented students.
Jayne is most hopeful about his nanotechnology project to transform human cells, which he is pursuing cooperatively with Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and Stanford Medical Center.
For now, their research in still in progress, and Jayne continues to support himself by taking side jobs. His most recent project was designing a robotic milkshake machine for a private client. Making thousands of milkshakes every day to test out the device made him very popular among the children in his neighborhood at Shelter Cove Drive.
“Every day I’d have children knocking on my door asking for more milkshakes,” he said.
w