Among the institutions that supported this work, I particularly want to thank the Department of History of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Besides providing this book’s primary institutional home, with ample encouragement, criticism, and countless forms of administrative help, the department offered me repeated periods of released time from teaching to work on it. The Department of Physics provided a supportive secondary home. Most important were interactions with colleagues and students who helped me think about the meaning of the project. Thanks especially to the university’s Center for Advanced Study (CAS) and its Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (IPRH) for supporting released time and student assistants. I am grateful to Tom Siebel for endowing the Siebel Chair in the History of Science at the University of Illinois, which I was honored to hold during much of the time I spent working on this book, and which provided support for travel and research assistance. Special thanks go to the Department of History’s business manager Tom Bedwell for coordinating the book’s complex budgets.
For extensive help with finding and copying documents and photos, we are most indebted to: Rosa Young Ovshinsky, Ovshinsky’s widow; Freya Saito, Ovshinsky’s dedicated assistant at ECD and later at Ovshinsky Innovation; Kimi Williams, who continued Freya’s efforts for a time after Ovshinsky’s death; Irina Youdina, the Ovshinskys’ devoted caregiver, housekeeper, and friend in his last five years; and the physicist Genie Mytilineou, Rosa’s close friend. Thanks to the Bentley Historical Library at the University of Michigan, where the Ovshinsky papers are now preserved and available to researchers, and especially to Shae Rafferty for her help making the collections accessible to us. Thanks to my ever helpful friend Tracy McAllister for expertly processing photos and helping to prepare and circulate interim drafts to many readers during the later stages of this work.
For the many opportunities I’ve had to share parts of this work while it was in progress, I would especially like to thank the following additional institutions: the Lemelson Center for the Study of Invention and Innovation at the Smithsonian Institution, especially Art Molella and Joyce Bedi, whose conversations about invention and whose enthusiasm for this project were most helpful in the early stages of conceiving this book; the Department of the Philosophy and History of Science at the University of Athens, especially Professor Stella Vosniadou; the International History of Science Society; the Society for the History of Technology; members of the Laboratory History Conference; the Physics Department of the University of Minnesota; the History and Philosophy of Science Department of Notre Dame University; the Physics Department of the University of California at San Diego; the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas in Tel Aviv; the Van Leer Institute in Jerusalem; the History of Science Society; the Center for History of Physics of the American Institute of Physics; and the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology, and Medicine.
Given the enormous gaps in the existing physical documentation for this book, interviews (despite the hazards of using them) proved as important as documents in writing this manuscript. We are deeply indebted to the hundreds (most listed in appendix I) who offered their time and precious memories in interviews for this book. Without these contributions, our story would have been greatly impoverished. We are especially grateful to those who agreed to be interviewed repeatedly. Thanks also to those who worked to transcribe the interviews: Janet Abrahamson, Kathryn Dorsch, Kristen Ehrenberger, Ryan Jones, Tracy McAllister, Melissa Rohde, Erin Sullivan, and in the last three years, the anonymous and efficient transcription staff employed by Rev.com.
Thanks to Mike Lehman and Kristen Ehrenberger, then history graduate students and now PhD historians, who in the course of their research assistantships helped me to learn basic concepts (e.g., of climate change, renewable energy, and amorphous solids) that lay outside my training and professional experience. Thanks also to my daughter Carol Baym for clarifying certain neurological concepts.
Many of our interviewees helped greatly with our struggle to grasp new technical concepts essential to Ovshinsky’s work, but three worked especially hard to educate us: Hellmut Fritzsche, Rosa Young Ovshinsky, and Guy Wicker. We cannot thank them enough. To understand Stan’s personal life, we are indebted to many of his friends and especially to members of the Ovshinsky clan (Rosa, Herb, Ben, Harvey, and Dale Ovshinsky, and Robin and Steven Dibner). Special thanks go to Rosa, Herb, Ben, and Harvey for taking the time to read multiple drafts. Thanks also to Harvey for his extensive and energetic help with shaping the narrative, drawing on his own memoir, Detroit and the Art of the Impossible, as well as his personal archives from his decades of helping Stan tell ECD’s story in videos, brochures, annual reports, and the like. A list of Harvey’s interviews used in writing this book is included in appendix I. Harvey also provided our title, The Man Who Saw Tomorrow.
Many others also read our drafts and offered comments and corrections. They include Nancy Bacon, Dennis Corrigan, Ben Chao, Ruth Cowan, Subhash Dhar, Elif Ertekin, Subhendu Guha, Steve Hudgens, Chet Kamin, Alex Kolobov, Boil Pashmakov, Benny Reichman, Rita Smith, Srinivasan Venkatesan, Zvi Yaniv, and the anonymous reviewers who improved the manuscript by pointing out problems in an earlier draft. Many thanks also to the excellent staff at the MIT Press, including our copy editor Mary Bagg, our production editor Marcy Ross, and especially our acquisition editor Katie Helke, who worked patiently with us and the reviewers to bring this book to press. To all those who provided feedback, we want to say that while we have not taken all their suggestions, we are grateful for their help and hope that we have made the best use of their information to improve the book.
Last but not least, thanks to my extraordinary “extended family” that supported my work on this book. It is impossible to adequately thank my loving husband Peter for stepping in to help me complete the work at a point when doing so alone seemed impossible. As it happened, his efforts proved to be just what was needed to turn my crammed and awkwardly written manuscript into a much more readable representation of a fascinating life. And it was really fun!
Lillian Hoddeson
September 2016
Urbana, Illinois