Internet Articles

June, 2008
http://www.seyoung.co.uk/GuyLesticianHistory.html by SHEILA YOUNG

Pocono Record - November 2007
www.poconorecord.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20071105/
NEWS/711050319/-1/NEWS16 by DAVID PIERCE

Northeast Pennsylvania Business Journal - May 2001
www.allbusiness.com/business-planning-structures/starting-a-business
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Published Articles


Guy Lestician Invents A Better Light Bulb
By Janet Bregman-Taney
Dignity Magazine Editor

By Jeanne Quinn Photos by David W. Coulter "Out of Chaos comes cosmos", an old metaphysical saying, is one aptly applied to 52-year-old Guy Lestician -- inventor, entrepreneur, microbiologist and president of the Marshalls Creek property owners' association in the development where he lives.

"The life of an inventor isn't an easy one," he said in a recent interview.

"People don't take you seriously, as though what I do is a hobby instead of a living. They are always trying to exploit me or my ideas."

Lestician decided seven years ago that he wanted more anonymity; so he moved to the Eastern Poconos, where he could work in relative obscrity, away from the prying eyes of big corporations. A quiet person by nature, he finds he works best at odd hours.

"I work all hours of the day or night. Some idea wakes me in the middle of the night, and I just have to go try it out. I get my best ideas when most everyone else is asleep," he acknowledges.

Not a still person by nature, despite his gentle demeanor, and elected recently to the presidency of his property owners' association, Lestician can be found filling potholes in his development's 10 miles of roads ro plowing snow after a winter snowstorm. In his spare time he replaced the lighting in the community center with new "quiet" lighting, an invention of his and at no cost to the community.

As president of the property owners' association, Lestician is full of ideas for streamlining the community, from rewriting the bylaws to initiating building codes; all of which must meet with the approval of the membership or fellow board members.

His frustration comes when others can't "see" his vision. While his mind works mostly in the 21st century, he finds most people are still dragging their minds over the millennial threshold. It's in this sphere that his patience is tried, but mostly because he doesn't understand why others don't see what he sees.

Known in his field as "Edison 2," Lestician reinvented the light bulb, among other things. To this reporter one light bulb is the same as another, but that's not so. Edison's had mercury and filament and burned for 13 hours.

Lestician's light bulb contains neither filament nor mercury; his uses sodium, burns indefinitely and has a purer light.

Lestician was born the youngest of three children in Hamilton, N.J., where an early anthrax poisoning incident was reported. Within 48 hours of the incident, he found an antidote. This is only one of Lestician's many cutting-edge inventions.

In addition to his inventing and presidency, Lestician, the father of six, finds time to rebuild antique cars with the help of older son, David, and enjoys the neighborhood kids who come in "to get some grease on their hands/" Mentor and friend, he believes less in book learning than in hands-on-projects although he, himself, boasts a great deal of book learning.

A graduate of Hamilton High, Lestician went on to study at Trenton State College and later to Mercer County College and Trenton Tech. He also taught at the latter schools. More recently he attended East Stroudsburg University for two years, studing microbiotics. He was offered a Ph.D. and a teaching job, both of which, for now at least, he refused, preferring to work asa a free agent inventing or, as he says, "tinkering."

From the age of 11, Lestician knew he wanted to "make things." His father owned a trucking business, but Lestician left that work to his older brother, as he wanted to pursue a life in electronics.

An invetnor is a singluar person, the silent partner to making life easier.

Lestician didn't invent the camera, he made it better when he invented the sonogram, so doctors expectant parents can see their babies before that are born, to be sure all is well. He didn't invent the postal service, but he invented a device that reads the bar codes at the bottom of each envelop, making the mail delivery go faster. Lestician didn't invent the cash register, but he invented the price scanner at the register, so busy people can get out stores faster.

Among his many inventions, Lestician also found that UV lighting kills germs, a discovery he made by accident, while helping his son, Christopher, with a school project. Through his lighting experiments, he has also developed the true spectrum light that helps poeple over the depression casued by Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD).

Another invention of his called the "goose chaser," which keeps geese from landing ona lake and polluting the water with E coli from their droppings. This work on high frequency sound much like sonic mousetraps.

"It was fish that got me started," he remarks. When, as a youngster, he raised fish, he would sell the babies to local pet stores and take meager earnings to an electronics shop to buy parts for his lastest invention. His love of saltwater fish remains strong today, as is noted by the many flashes of color that dart in and out amongst the anemones and sea grass in a wall-to-wall saltwater fish tank in his lab.

Whie investors don't flock to his door (after all, he did move to the Poconos for anoymity), he has his supporters and investors. He likes problems, because he lives to solve them with new inventions; but it isn't an easy road.

Like his predecessors, Nikola Tesla (who invented the radio, which was claimed bt Marconi) and Robert Kearns (who invented the intermittent windshield wiper and spent his life suing Ford and Chrysler for remuneration), Lestician, too, is thwarted by lawsuits from malcontented investors and ex-business partners who want their property yesterday. He says people don't really understand how inventing works.

"You can't snap your fingers and there's the answer," he says. "It takes time to think, to see all angles, to try this or that and see what works and what won't. It doesn't really happen on a timetable."

He added that it's one of the reasons he likes working on cars or making repairs to the property associations's clubhouse.

"Physical activity makes the brain work better," he acknowledges.

Lestician has both national and international patents, and his products are used in Europe and Canada as well as in the United States. His most recent invention, currently being used by Poly Optics in Portland, Pa., is an energygg saver. It not only reduces the amount of energy used, but is environmentally friendly and cost efficient. The product has recently been sold to a large East Coast corporation.

Chaotic, visionary, exuberant, microcosmic, different, naif, understated, unimposing, all could describe the personality of Guy Lestician; a man who lives quietly with his wife, Brenda, their three sons and daughter (he has two daughters by a previous marriage). Here he lives in the quiet confines of an Eastern Poconos property association, where he oversees board activites and still have time to go snowmobiling with his kids, on the lake.

Download: Guy Lestician Invents A Better Light Bulb in Dignity Magazine
(PDF format)
Download: Guy Lestician Invents A Better Light Bulb in Pocono Record
(PDF format)


A Tale of Two [or more] Patents
By Ken Clark
Pocono Business Journel

Serendipity.
Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines it as "the faculty of finding valuable or agreeable things not sought for." Guy Lestician, an East Stroudsburg inventor who has been called "Nikola Tesla and Thomas Edison in one body," might expand upon that. For him, seredipity is a way of life.

Lestician, who works out of a tiny electronics lab in Analomink, holds more than 90 patents -- among them, the sonogram that enables pregnant women to view their fetuses in the womb, the "Pong" video game that was forerunner of the ones gamers now stampede to buy, the bar code scanner used in stores and supermarkets all over the nation, and now, an Energy Bank Unit that, simply plugged into the 220 outlet for a clothes dryer, is guaranteed to lower anyone's electric bill by anywhere from 30 to 45 percent.

Because thieves and legal entanglements lurk aloong every path taken by the inventor, Lestician will describe his lastest creation only in the most general of terms. It comes in six different models, each encased in a big green steel box, ranging from a 45-pound device for the average home all the way up to a 350-pound installation for large commerical and industrial operations. The residential unit is priced at $595. The big industrial unit can run anywhere from $30,000 to $100,000, depending upon how many units are necessary to get the job done.

"In some facilites we have four and five units, so it could be $100,000 worth, but believe it or nor, the payback could be less than two years because their electric bill is probably $100,000 a month," Lestician said. All models now are being marketed after extensive field testing.

So secret is the intricate winding of the copper coil at the heart of the EBU that Lestician encases every one of them in a hard, black brick of epoxy.

Break it in a bid to find out what makes it tick and you destroy it.

Lestician said the EBU works by
vacuuming up the spillover electromagnetic
"noise" emitted in every home or workplace
by microwave ovens, television sets,
computers, electric motors and even
clocks, leaving only the current actually
supplied by the electric company to turn
the meter. The harmonics are of no use
to the user, but they still show up on the
monthly power bill.

"You're paying for this noise in nwhat we call "peaks," Lestician said.

"This unit removes all those peaks, so now you're really paying for the true power that you're consuming. The savings are at least 11 per cent savings at various companies. We're really concerned that if we say that, people will think it's smoke oil to even get 3 per cent. They'd say we're nuts."

In a nation suddenly obsessed with saving energy, the EBU should be a demand natural, but what it does is not what it initially was designed to do.

Lestician invented it as a lightning suppressor for Verizon, which saw its cusomers' dial tones go silent every time an office was hit during a thunderstorm. It worked, but, to Lestician's surprise, when hooked up in regional offices, monthly electrical bills plummeted.

Another unit, installed in a Connecticut bowling alley, so cooled the motors that drove the pin-setters that maintenance needs practically vanished.

Another client, operating a diesel generator for electricity at a quarry, reported a bigger savings in diesel fuel than in electricity because the EBU made the generator run so much more efficiently.

"I never had a clue that the box would do that," Lestician said. "You build it for one thing and suddenly you get a by-product, and the by-product is what we need today."

And what does Pennsylvania Power and Light think about the dent the mass marketing of Lestician's unit might make in their income?

"They want to get involved," Lestician said. "They're cooperating. We thought they'd be enemies, but it's the reverse."

The power company is cooperating, Lestician said, because increasing consumption of electricity is pulling the grid down, causing brownouts and rolling blackouts. Loss of a few dollars to the EBU in homes and industries is miniscule compared with the price of building new power generating plants.

"It's not only here; it's all across the United States," Lestician said. "A lot of major electric companies are starving because they can't produce more power."

Serendipity. But the unexpected hasn't landed always on the positive side in Lestician's career as an inventor. Along the way, he has been harassed by an IRS agent who demanded an exhausting audit because he would not believe Lestician actually could be making a living as an inventor. He has been robbed of his intellectual properties by patent thieves, buried in paperwork and red tape and stalked by major corporations that would love to have his work without having to pay for it.

"Oh, I could tell you war stories," he said, taking a break from the beehive of activity around the workbench in his little laboratory where his son, Christopher, and two workers were busy writing the core of his lastest creation. "It's not easy. I have, right now, nine lawyers."

Lestician said, "it's a given" that even major corporations occasionally will try to steal one of his inventions and, when confronted, will say "Well, sue us."

"There are some very good con artists -- damned good," he said. "It's tough trying to bring a product to the market. That's why we build the secret part here. This is like a little gold piece in the industry. Energy (use) is going to double in a lot of states and anything to reducec it becomes a Band Aid for that electrical problem."

Lestician, a man who wakes up at all hours of the night and rushes to his lab, entranced by a new idea, doesn't waste his time brooding about past legal misfortunes and betrayals. He's too busy marketing the EBU, planning to m ove into the old International Boiler Works building on the railroad tracks just off Courtland Street, and expand his staff to 300 workers, with hiring aimed at people who really need jobs but, for one reason or another, aren't being hired.

"I may bring in a lot of handicapped VA vets who are sitting at home, watching television," he said. "I might wind up with a lot of guys coming out of jail in need of a job. All they need is good, strong hands. Thirty people will basically give us about 1,000 units a month. If you scale that up, 300 people will probably give us what the marketing people expect."

Lestician won't be running the day-to-day operations of manufacturing or marketing areas personally. He plans to hire experts in those fields of management so that he can continue what he does best, which is invent new products.

"I've got to bring in good, expensive people to run the company so I can go play," he said. And what is he playing with now may be truly revolutionary -- a white and untraviolet light which has been shown to kill a wide variety of pathogens on contact. He calls it "the second generation of health care." In yet another case of serendipity, the concept came out of a science project which he was helping his son put together.

"We've tested it on many different things," Lestician said, "It will kill e-coli and a lot of different bacteria. We can actually kill certain spores. It's a tunable system for the particular thing you're trying to kill."

The system works by turning the frequency of an intense white light to that of the defensive shell of the target bacteria or spore. The white light shatters the shell and the ultraviolet destroys the cell inside.

Pennsylvania Senator Paul Kanjorski, for whom water conservation is a top priority, recently met with Lestician and asked him if he could mount his light on an inflatable dam across the heavily contaminated Susquehanna River to purify downstream water -- a feat Lestician says probably will work, but there is more. The light one dady also may serve as a new weapon in the never-ending war on cancer.

Lestician recently obtained a tissue sample from a malignant tumor just removed from a woman's breast at the Pocono Medical Center. When the tissue was placed under the microscope in Lestician's lab and subjected to the light, cancer cells visibly were broken apart and killed with no collateral damage to surrounding healthy cells. If approved for use, the process theoretically could be used to kill stray cancer cells left behind after surgery before they can migrate metastatically to other parts of the body.

But clinical trials and a long regulatory process lie ahead before the process can be cleared by the FDA. Again, Lestician has recruited the help he needs to get through all the paperwork and over the legal hurdles.

"I have a guy -- his name is Steve Yeager -- who works with the FDA," Lestician said. "He'll eventually come in and run this thing because he's the physicist who's into microbiology, not me. I was the one who winged it and accidentally found ways to make it work."

Douglas Kenney, founder and president of Bank Data Bank in East Stroudsburg, is Lestician's friend, chief cheerleader and financial consultant. He is helping Lestician complete purchase of the old boiler works that eventually will become his new lab and manufacturing plant. He said when they first went in to inspect the 100-year-old facility, they encountered an eerie sense of deja vu where Lestician's reputation of being a combination of Tesla and Edison is concerned.

"Inside the boiler works is an old power house where Guy plans to establish his lab, and it's almost a dead ringer for Edison's laboratory in East Orange, New Jersey," Kenney said. "He walked in there and said, "This is uncanny; I feel like I've been here before."

So, does Lestician believe in reincarnation? The question beings a chuckle and a self-deprecating confession.

"Who knows?" he said. "I'm one of the odd ones. Brenda is the one who puts up with it all." Brenda Lestician, Guy's wife of 20 years and mother of his three sons and one daughter, was asked what is it like to be married to such a man.

"It's very different and exciting," she said. "He sometimes gets up at three in the morning and goes into his lab and starts creating things, so when I wake up in the morning and he's not there, I know he's in a place where I can at least keep track of him."

Download: Tale of Two [or more] Patents in Pocono Business Journel
(PDF format)