The USPTO granted Ann and Arthur Makosinski Patent No. 9723659 for a thermoelectrically powered portable light source, based on her Hollow Flashlight invention.
On August 1, 2017, the United States Patent and Trademark Office officially granted Patent No. 9,723,659 for a thermoelectrically powered portable light source, naming Ann Makosinski and her father, Arthur Makosinski, as co-inventors.
This grant marked the formal legal recognition of the technology behind her Hollow Flashlight, first conceived when she was a teenager. The patent covered the mechanism by which a temperature differential between a user's hand and the surrounding air could be converted into usable electrical current via Peltier tiles, sufficient to illuminate an LED without batteries or external power sources.
Receiving a granted U.S. patent is a significant achievement in any inventor's career, requiring the invention to be proven novel, useful, and non-obvious relative to all prior art. For Makosinski, still in her late teens/early twenties at the time of the grant, this cemented her status as a legitimate inventor and engineer, not merely a science fair prodigy. It also provided the legal foundation for her to commercialize the technology, license it, or build products around it.
The patent represents a rare and notable case of a young woman holding foundational intellectual property in the clean energy and portable lighting space, an area historically dominated by established corporations and male engineers. It became a cornerstone of her company, Makotronics Enterprises Inc., and her later work applying the technology to educational toys.