Mario Cardullo

RFID Pioneer

If you’ve been driving long enough, you probably remember the days when lines at the tollbooth seemed interminable — when the wait to cross the George Washington Bridge back into New York City, for example, may have left you questioning whether a day at the Jersey shore was worth it. 

Now, that process is immeasurably easier, with most of us automatically paying tolls via a small “E-ZPass” transponder that interacts with overhead sensors in the toll gantry as we drive through. Alum Dr. Mario Cardullo (‘57. ‘59), a registered professional engineer and senior IEEE fellow, is largely responsible for that time-and-frustration-saving technology, known as Radio Frequency Identification (RFID).

Embodying the American Dream

The term “American Dream” was famously coined by alum James Truslow Adams (1898), who defined it as “that dream of a land in which life should be better and richer and fuller for everyone, with opportunity for each according to ability or achievement... a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.” 

While a half-century separated the men’s times at the School of Engineering, Adams might well have been describing Cardullo’s trajectory.  

Cardullo was born in 1935 into a family of Sicilian immigrants in Brooklyn’s Park Slope, then a working-class Italian and Irish neighborhood. Although his mother had trained to be a teacher, his father had been forced to drop out of school to support his family at the age of 14, after Cadullo’s grandfather died during an epidemic of influenza.

A naturally curious child, Cardullo loved to tinker and experiment, and he took to keeping a small notebook with him to jot down ideas. Although he still modestly describes himself as an average student (and he did not speak English until he was seven, because he spent most of his time with his Sicilian-speaking grandmother), one of the teachers at Saint Augustus Grammar School, Sister Helen Claire, recognized something special in him and suggested that he pursue engineering. This path that had never before occurred to him. At her urging, he took the entrance exam for Brooklyn Tech, one of the city’s most selective and prestigious high schools, and much to his surprise, he was among the ten percent of applicants to gain admission. 

Brooklyn Tech was a lively place: Cardullo recalled one class of aspiring engineers designing and building airplanes and another erecting truss bridges. He became deeply interested in rocketry and one day excitedly informed his mother that he intended to become a rocket propulsion engineer and help put a man on the moon. Ever pragmatic, her response was to wonder why anyone in their right mind would want to go to the moon.

The high school was not far from what was then known as Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute (now the NYU Tandon School of Engineering), recognized worldwide for its researchers’ pioneering work in polymer science and microwave technology. It was also celebrated locally as a welcoming place for smart, first-generation students — a perfect milieu for Cardullo, who worked as a shoe salesman to fund his tuition. (He kept the sales job throughout his undergraduate years, sometimes supplementing that income by working as a junior engineer for New York State.) 

At Poly, as it was called, Cardullo divided his time between aeronautics and mechanical engineering, and he also spearheaded the establishment of the first-ever student chapter of the American Rocket Society (later merged with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics). Among his fondest memories of those years is building and firing a liquid rocket engine. Poly was also home to a hypersonic research facility, where Cardullo worked as an assistant to the director, and the Mach 13 blowdown tunnels were another major source of fascination for him. 

A varied career

Cardullo earned his bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering in 1957. While studying for his master’s at Poly he found work at the Naval Air Rocket Test Station, in Northern New Jersey — a trip that involved a train, ferry, and subway. The commute was worth it: the civil service job was at a GS-5 level, and his employment papers, listed him as a rocket propulsion engineer, the dream job he had told his mother about years earlier. Cardullo spent his work hours formulating equations related to variable thrust and testing monopropellants. By the time he earned his master’s degree in 1959, he had moved up several grades, to GS-11.

He went on to a post at Honeywell Aeronautics, in Minneapolis, Minnesota, which was seeking to enter the small rocket engine business. While he enjoyed the work, it stung when Honeywell refused to allow him to accept an invitation to speak at a rocketry conference in Germany; he ended up sending his slides instead, to be presented by someone else. He also disliked Minnesota’s especially harsh winters, so he took on a post at Bellcom, a company set up by Bell Labs and President John F. Kennedy to employ systems engineers for the Apollo mission. It was a heady time. A large percentage of the engineers there had doctoral degrees, and it was not unusual to bump into a consulting Nobel laureate strolling the halls. Working with the future president of Bell Labs, Ian Ross, Cardullo had a hand in all the main engines on Apollo.

Although he ultimately held a series of other high-profile jobs, including one at the Washington-based Communications Satellite Corporation (known as CommSat), it was not a professional post that led to the development of RFID, but a research project that he took on as a master’s student at George Washington University. (Cardullo holds a Master of Engineering Administration degree from George Washington, and a Ph.D. from George Mason University.)

Divine intervention

While working and earning his second master’s, Cardullo was living in the Washington neighborhood of Potomac Woods with his wife and small children. Then Catholic, he was intrigued when he discovered that the Church owned property nearby. He floated the idea that the lot should be used to build either a house of worship or a school, but was rebuffed by the Bishop, who informed him that only God could decide where and when a new facility was needed.

Undeterred, Cardullo conducted studies and prepared a thick report with statistical analysis that proved the need for the capital project. Catholic leadership not only acted on his findings (resulting in the establishment of one of the largest congregations in the Archdiocese of Washington) but hired him to conduct similar studies in other locales. (The project also provided Cardullo with an unusual topic for his master’s thesis.)

It was on a plane ride back from speaking to the Archbishop of St. Paul, Minnesota, that Cardullo was seated, by chance, next to an engineer from IBM. The two began chatting, and his seatmate explained that he was working on a barcode system to keep track of railroad cars, but was running into technical challenges.

The birth of RFID

Cardullo’s thoughts immediately went back to an exhibit he had seen when he was about 10 years old. With little money to spare for entertainment, his father had taken him to a free museum set up in the basement of Manhattan’s RCA Building, where he learned about a system installed in Allied aircraft during World War II. The system called for pilots to use transponders to send radio signals that were then interpreted and answered by another craft, allowing them to determine whether the second plane was “friend or foe.” He wondered whether a similar system could provide the answer to IBM’s conundrum, and pulling out the notebook he always carried, he sketched out a rough plan for what would eventually become RFID. 

In 1969 Cardullo founded a company, raised $500,000, and filed a patent for an “encoder,” which was issued in January of 1973. Initially, transit officials were unimpressed, asserting that no one would mount such a device in their car, and it took some 20 years for the idea to gain traction, by which time his patent had expired. While that meant that he made no money from his innovation, Cardullo remains unbothered by what many would view as an injustice. “You don’t invent things to make money,” he says. “You do it to solve problems.”

While others have filed patents for variations of his original work, Cardullo, who has taught at multiple universities and written hundreds of scholarly papers, is generally considered the “father of RFID.” (He holds the first patent for nano RFID devices, smaller than a human cell, and also owns a number of other patents.)

RFID technology is now a multi-billion-dollar industry, used not just for tolls, but for real-time tracking in sectors from construction to pharmaceuticals. Cardullo is proud to have played a part in bringing it to widespread use, but does admit to one minor quibble. Early on, transit officials had worried that the data-collection and memory functions of his encoder posed possible privacy and civil liberties issues. Yet recently, when his E-ZPass transponder malfunctioned, the Port Authority had absolutely no problem with tracking him down and billing him for his toll.