Lanny Smoot, The Imagineer Behind Realistic Lightsabers, Inducted Into National Inventors Hall Of Fame

TV & Film

Feb 15

Walt Disney World Imagineer Lanny Smoot has officially been inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. He is the second Disney employee to be inducted and given this honor, the only other being Walt Disney in 2000. At the time of writing this, Smoot has 106 patents and isn't stopping anytime soon. He is the first Disney employee to have reached the milestone of 100 career patents. Over 70 of those patents are tied to Disney projects and research, including a realistic lightsaber, several special effects in the Haunted Mansion ride, and contributions to Where’s the Fire? at Innoventions.

Smoot has been interested in science and engineering from a very young age. The inventor went to Brooklyn Technical High School, where he simultaneously served as a Bell Labs Engineering Scholar. He attended Columbia University on a full scholarship, and following the achievement of a bachelor’s and master’s degree in electrical engineering, he joined Bell Labs in a full-time capacity. In his 45-year career, he has spent 25 of them as an Imagineer, joining the Walt Disney Company after being approached in 1998.

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This Imagineer had a pretty important hand in the development of Star Wars at Walt Disney World. In an interview with IGN, Smoot briefly told the story of his realistic lightsaber, “Well, our former head of R&D, a fellow named Jon Snoddy, knew that we needed to have some sort of lightsaber as Star Wars was beginning its massive move into our parks. He asked a few of us, ‘Hey, do you have some ideas of how you might do this?’” He continued, “I'm a bit of a show-off and I do like to show new technologies and surprise people, so I walked into his office and slammed something down on the table. I won't tell you exactly, but I will say it was pretty crude. He says, ‘That's pretty good,’ and the rest is history.”

Smoot also had an unintentional hand in the development of BB-8 from the sequel trilogy. He had previously made a prototype for a moving robot that was “the very same mechanism that BB-8 is” well before the droid was finished. The model used in the movies had to be able to function, which is where Smoot came in. He explained, “We wound up licensing my design to help that design do certain things."

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