Growing up, Ron Hintz had no idea how smart he was. In fact, he hadn’t planned on going to college at all. “I thought I was a dummy,” says the 82-year-old Hintz, a resident of Washington Center in Argyle, New York. But then he was tested in junior high school, and his teachers realized Hintz was smarter than they all thought. A lot smarter.

“The teacher comes wide-eyed and tells me I did very well on the test,” he says. “And that was a big surprise for all of us.”
Hintz grew up in Oakland, California, where played baseball and intended to join the Navy. But his stellar test scores sent him on a different path. Hintz was accepted to the University of California at Berkeley on a Navy scholarship.

In college, Hintz started working with magnets. He worked his way through college at the Lawrence National Laboratory, where he dabbled in superconducting magnets. His work would eventually lead to work with some of the very first MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) machines. MRI machines are primarily used as a diagnostic procedure to render images inside a patient.

He worked at the Lawrence Lab through college and graduated in 1962. He now holds numerous patents on magnets. His work eventually brought him to Latham. He most recently lived in Corinth before a mini-stroke landed him at the Washington Center about a year ago.

“I probably have and share more patents on these magnets than anybody in the world,” says Hintz. “If you Google my name, you find out I’m into these patents quite a bit.” There are good ways and bad ways to build MRI machines, Hintz says.

“If they quench, they lose all their liquid helium and you have to start all over. And liquid helium is a precious commodity,” he said. “So now we make these magnets—we call it ‘zero boil off,’ because we have a refrigerator on that maintains the helium. And if it’s a good design, you never have to refill it and you never have to recharge it. They’re in persistent mode.”

One of his very first magnets was put into a machine in New York City, he says, and was in persistent mode for 10 years. Another he helped design was a large magnet for fusion power, and it weighed a million pounds. The most important magnets he ever built were a pair for a cyclotron used to confirm the existence of a new element, named seaborgium after nuclear chemist Glenn T. Seaborg.

Hintz has also been inside an MRI machine as a patient. “Sometimes it feels like somebody has put a pail over your head and they’re banging on
it,” he says.

Hintz never planned to go into magnets, but his work at Lawrence Lab turned his life around. Here at Washington Center for Rehabilitation and Nursing, we’re honored to have him as a resident.