Stanford Robert Ovshinsky not only saw tomorrow, he helped make it happen.1 His inventions and discoveries led to many developments in later twentieth- and early twenty-first-century technology that we now take for granted but that seemed like science fiction when he foresaw them decades earlier. To take just one emblematic example, in 1968 he said we would one day have flat television screens that could be hung on the wall like a picture, a prediction that most electronics experts of the time scornfully dismissed. But Ovshinsky could confidently make it because he foresaw how the flat screens would be made from the new kind of materials whose possibilities he had discovered.
That prediction, along with another anticipating the creation of affordable “small, general purpose desktop computers for use in homes, schools and offices,” was made almost incidentally in a press conference announcing Ovshinsky’s creation of a new kind of electronic switch, resulting in a front-page New York Times article, “Glassy Electronic Device May Surpass Transistor,” published on November 11, 1968.2 The story sent shock waves through not only the world of commercial electronics but also the world of academic science. Ovshinsky’s announcement was met by outraged denunciations, both from big corporations that were economically invested in transistor technology and from established scientists who were intellectually invested in theories that could not account for this new glassy device, or for any semiconductor device that wasn’t made from crystalline materials. Yet on the same day as the Times story, Ovshinsky’s discovery was published in one of the most prestigious physics journals, Physical Review Letters, giving scientific credibility to his unforeseen findings.3
Ovshinsky also played a key role in creating the rechargeable nickel metal hydride (NiMH) batteries that have powered everything from portable electronics to hybrid cars. He invented a system for mass-producing affordable thin-film solar panels, and he is furthermore responsible for rewritable CDs and DVDs and the electrical phase-change memory that is poised to enable the next advance in computer architecture. All these inventions and many more followed from his use of amorphous and disordered materials, whose possibilities he continued to explore and exploit throughout the rest of his career.4 As “the master chef of the periodic table,” he experimented with combining as many as eleven elements to tailor the properties of his new materials, using them in his own inventions and, by showing their possibilities, also contributing importantly to the growing field of materials science.5
No wonder The Economist called Ovshinsky “the Edison of our age.”6 Like Edison, he moved from being a solitary inventor to creating a large research and development laboratory, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), and to manufacturing several of his inventions. Also like Edison, Ovshinsky not only produced important new individual technologies but also linked them in technological systems.7 Just as Edison’s light bulb was part of a system that included power generation and transmission, the basis for mass electrification, so Ovshinsky conceived his energy technologies as part of a continuous system he called the “hydrogen loop.”
Yet even the comparison with Edison, which several others have also made, doesn’t capture all of Ovshinsky’s achievement. As Robert R. Wilson, the Manhattan Project physicist and founding director of Fermi National Laboratory, pointed out, “Edison was primarily an inventor. There is a larger component of pure science in Stan than there was in Edison.”8 For unlike Edison, Ovshinsky made his discoveries on the frontiers of late twentieth-century physics, manipulating molecular structures and envisioning the new materials they could yield, learning “to put together something that nature hasn’t done.”9 And perhaps most remarkably, he did all this without any advanced training: his formal education ended with high school. He drew instead on his lifelong voracious reading, his hands-on experience, and his penetrating intuitions.
Ovshinsky was distinguished not only by his inventive genius but also by the purpose that came to guide it. Unlike most successful innovators and entrepreneurs, he was not concerned with empire building or getting rich. Instead, while always intent on commercial success, he believed that technology should tackle important social problems, and he focused his inventive efforts on finding solutions to those he considered the most urgent. When in 1960 he and his partner Iris Miroy Dibner began a research company, they called it Energy Conversion Laboratories because they considered energy a crucial social problem, and as the company grew it developed ways to replace fossil fuels with alternative energy sources—with solar power (and batteries to store it), with hydrogen in fuel cells or internal combustion engines. To Ovshinsky, the information technologies the company also developed were another way of addressing social problems; he envisioned a world where greater access to information would empower citizens and promote democracy.
Driven by this vision of a better future, Ovshinsky also had the charismatic power to inspire others and gain their support, though at every stage he also met strong resistance. Ovshinsky was always a controversial figure, an outsider who many dismissed or mistrusted, though many others, including the most gifted, recognized his genius. But even most who admired him did not know the whole story of this remarkable man.
Becoming an Inventor
Ovshinsky is best known for inventions that built on his pioneering work in materials science, but that work came after he had already been an inventor for nearly twenty years, following a twisting path. He began as a machinist and toolmaker in the machine shops and factories of Akron, Ohio, where he was born in 1922, and his first invention, made in the mid-1940s, was an advanced machine tool, a high-speed automatic lathe (chapters 2 and 3). His development of other kinds of automation and control devices later took him to Detroit in 1951, where he created new automotive components such as an electrical automatic transmission and power steering (chapter 4).
These devices all used sensors and feedback mechanisms. To gain a deeper understanding of such processes, Ovshinsky plunged into the scientific literature on neurophysiology, following the lead of Norbert Wiener’s cybernetics, which considered “control and communication in the animal and the machine” in the same terms.10 Ovshinsky not only studied but also contributed to the field, and on the basis of his writings on nerve impulses and intelligence, he was invited by Wayne State University Medical School to join in pioneering brain research (chapter 4).
Ovshinsky’s scientific investigation of how the brain sends and receives signals was both a departure from his work as an inventor and a way to advance it. He considered the nerve cell as a switch that will fire when incoming signals accumulate and reach a threshold, releasing energy through the cell’s semipermeable membrane. To model this mechanism, he created a device he called his “nerve cell analogy,” in which the analogue for the cell membrane was the thin film of oxide on two strips of tantalum immersed in an electrolytic solution. The result was a new kind of electrochemical switch he named the Ovitron (chapter 4).
Another twist came when, prevented from developing the Ovitron by the settlement of a lawsuit, Ovshinsky had to find new materials for his switches. (His career was punctuated by many legal disputes, mostly resolved in his favor.) His search led him to study the electronic properties of amorphous and disordered (non-crystalline) materials, particularly chalcogenide glasses. (These are compounds of chalcogen elements such as selenium and tellurium. See the fuller discussion in chapter 5.) Making this choice showed Ovshinsky’s willingness to follow his independent intuitions, for in the late 1950s nearly all researchers and manufacturers focused on crystalline materials for microelectronics. Ovshinsky, however, sensed that amorphous materials offered more possibilities. Working in the newly established Energy Conversion Laboratories, housed in a modest Detroit storefront, he experimented with combining various elements and compounds, grinding powders like a modern alchemist and pressing them into thin layers.
This solitary work led to Ovshinsky’s crucial breakthrough, his discovery in 1961 of the new switching mechanism that is now called the Ovshinsky effect (chapter 5).11 Thin films of variously composed disordered materials formed the basis for the reversible action of his threshold switch and phase-change memory, inventions whose importance for information technologies is still growing. These were the culminating achievements of Ovshinsky’s work as an independent inventor, and they were also the pivot on which his career turned toward more collaborative creation.
Inventing with Others
With the growing recognition of his discoveries, as well as the growing revenues from licensing them, Ovshinsky expanded his operations. In 1964 the company was renamed Energy Conversion Devices to signal its increased commercial orientation, and in early 1965 it moved to a much larger building in the northern Detroit suburbs (chapter 6). Recruiting an increasing cohort of scientific consultants and hiring many highly trained researchers, Ovshinsky developed ECD into a productive research and development company, supported by both public and private funding.
With this support, and with a staff that eventually numbered over a thousand, Ovshinsky pursued several concurrent R&D programs in energy and information technologies. Some of these grew into significant manufacturing operations. The program in thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells, and Ovshinsky’s revolutionary technology for making them “by the mile,” grew into the United Solar subsidiary that became for a time the largest US producer (chapter 8). The program in hydrogen storage unexpectedly yielded the NiMH battery, still in wide use (chapter 9). Both these energy technologies were the result of Ovshinsky’s collaboration with the many scientists at ECD who worked over decades to realize his ideas and continually improve the devices. The inspiration and direction always came from him, but the work of innovation was now teamwork.
In ECD’s information programs, the capacity of amorphous semiconductors to cover large areas that had been exploited in the thin-film solar panels also enabled the construction of flat panel displays, just as Ovshinsky had predicted in 1968. Though ECD was a pioneer in developing this technology, the Japanese and Korean electronics giants, who in fact had help from ECD in getting started, ended up dominating the multibillion-dollar industry (chapter 10).
Phase-change memory, an offshoot of Ovshinsky’s original threshold switch, became the basis for optical devices in the late 1960s after he proposed using a laser to set and reset his amorphous switching material. The resulting rewritable CDs and DVDs were the first successful commercialization of the Ovshinsky effect, though the revenue from licensing the technology was never large. More important but much longer in gestation were electrical memories based on Ovshinsky’s chalcogenide alloys. Although these had several advantages over silicon-based memories, the computer industry saw no compelling reason to make the large investments required to adopt them. Recently, however, announcements of new phase-change devices by several major manufacturers make it seem likely that this invention will play an increasingly important role (epilogue).
The Intuitive Mind
Ovshinsky’s early independent work and later collaborative inventions both arose from the qualities of his exceptional mind. In some ways, his lack of formal scientific training beyond high school was a disadvantage, and he had to rely on others, first Iris and then his scientific consultants, to help him communicate his ideas. But in more important ways it was a great advantage. He was from the beginning self-educated, and his life-long, wide-ranging reading gave him an enormous and diverse store of knowledge to draw on. Many who knew him marveled at how quickly he could read and later recall everything; others were struck by his ability to deal with several issues at the same time—multiple phone calls, simultaneous meetings, or interrupted conversations—without losing track of any. Chester Kamin, Ovshinsky’s longtime attorney and adviser, observed, “His mind was capable of processing on all these different tracks, and he would actually be working on all the issues at the exact same time. It really is an astounding ability.” As Ovshinsky explained, this ability also fueled his creative process. “At any one time I have four or five deep things I’m thinking about simultaneously, and they feed upon each other. I’ll read a book or paper or journal and see something that has no obvious connection to what I’m looking for. That will spring another idea into my head. Then I start putting things together, and then I come up with something.”12
Instead of proceeding logically step by step, the process of “putting things together” often depended on seeing unexpected analogies. “When I do a new problem,” he noted, “I have much more to draw on in my mind in terms of analogies or things that other people are not associating at all, things that nobody else would think there are any connections to.” And “that’s where new invention, new discoveries, new science comes from,” he believed.13 A crucial instance of such creativity is Ovshinsky’s “nerve cell analogy,” the Ovitron. Disregarding the obvious differences between the organic and inorganic to focus on the structural similarities between the nerve cell membrane and the thin film of oxide enabled him to invent a new kind of switch, an essential step in his inventive career.
Ovshinsky’s innovations also drew on his highly developed visual imagination, which gave him a way to grasp the structure of atoms and molecules and sense their possible combinations. “I see electrons,” he would say. “I feel atoms. I know what they want to do.” This sounds at first like a grandiose claim to unique special powers, but like his use of analogies it was just a heightened form of a common cognitive strategy that served as an alternative to the more formal and abstract approaches of trained scientists. Richard Flasck, a physicist who worked for several years as an ECD researcher, recognized that “Stan thought in pictures, not in numbers and principles, and sometimes that gives insight that you can’t get from standard mathematics.”14
One example of the insight that Ovshinsky’s idiosyncratic visual equivalents for standard scientific formulations could yield comes from Arthur Bienenstock, a professor of physics at Stanford and one of Ovshinsky’s early scientific consultants. He recalled a time when they had talked about the structure of germanium telluride. “And Stan drew these pictures on the blackboard, little drawings, squiggles of chains of telluriums and germaniums. If Stan had gotten up and given a talk on that at a scientific meeting, no one would have paid attention to him. But I come along and I take those pictures and I put some mathematics to them and I do some x-ray diffraction and they’re well received. But those pictures of Stan’s were central and key to the paper. It was critical what he contributed to the thing. And they turned out to be right.”
Besides illustrating Ovshinsky’s scientific insights, this anecdote also shows why he often had trouble conveying them. An unsympathetic audience at a scientific meeting might well have dismissed his “squiggles,” but even those who wanted or needed to understand what he was saying could become exasperated by his frequently opaque and tangled efforts to express his thoughts. He needed his scientific consultants to communicate his insights effectively. As another Stanford scientist, John Ross, said, “Stan is a genius, but he’s not a scientist. Stan knows that certain things are correct, but he can’t possibly tell you why. He can’t write an equation. He feels science; he can’t explain it to you.”
Ovshinsky may not have been able to write equations, but sometimes his way of feeling science could reveal possibilities that escaped highly trained and accomplished scientists. Here is another example from Arthur Bienenstock, who told of a discussion with a group of physicists.
The rest of them were arguing with Stan as to whether quantum mechanical tunneling could be an important mechanism in some of the materials of interest. And Stan was saying yes, and they were saying no, and they said no because they said that the relevant interatomic distances are too long for tunneling to be a factor. And Stan listened to this for a second, and he said, “You’re thinking statically. Remember that the tunneling probability is very strong. It has a very, very strong dependence on interatomic distance. And when the atoms vibrate, in the brief period when they are closer together, the tunneling probability would go way up, and therefore you could have tunneling.” And I remember that I thought it was remarkable that a man with only a high school education could invent that on the spot. Stan saw it intuitively and I just thought it was evidence of his enormous, educated intuition.
Stan the Man
Behind Ovshinsky’s achievements as an inventor and the qualities of his brilliant mind were the formative experiences that gave him the values and character traits that shaped his career. Both his vocation and his social values owed much to the influence of his father, Ben, who was a scrap-metal collector and took the young Stan with him to the machine shops and factories where he worked. It was there that Stan began to sense what he called the “glamour” of manufacturing and to feel the passion for machines that lasted all his life. Ben was also a highly cultured radical activist and took Stan to meetings of the Workmen’s Circle, a fraternal organization dedicated to promoting social justice and creating “a better and more beautiful world.”15 There Stan was exposed to the progressive political culture of working-class Eastern European Jews, which fed his commitment to causes like labor and civil rights. While still in school, he was a leader in the Young Peoples’ Socialist League, and when he began working he quickly became involved in union struggles (chapters 1 and 2).
Not until Ovshinsky joined his life with Iris Miroy Dibner’s, however, did these values begin to direct his work as an inventor. When they met in the early 1950s, they were both already married with children, and from the beginning of 1955, when they realized they had fallen in love, until late 1959, when they could at last be together, they talked and wrote to each other constantly about their beliefs and goals (chapter 4). Iris had her own progressive values, influenced by the philosophical anarchism of her parents, and when in 1960 she and Stan started ECL they aimed to use technology to address social problems. For over forty-five years they made the company not only a center for innovative research but also a social experiment based on their beliefs about how a just society should be organized (chapter 7).
Ovshinsky’s inventive ingenuity and idealism were hardly all he needed to succeed; he also had to be tough. He enjoyed boxing when he was young and in school preferred contact sports like football. Later, when he went to work in the Akron machine shops and rubber factories, he was not only learning to be a machinist and discovering his vocation as an inventor, but he was also learning to deal with violence. As he said, “I was brought up in a class war situation in a Midwestern town where the CIO had to face tear gas and bullets and clubs and blacklists,” and he was ready to fight when necessary. With his social democratic values, he soon became involved in union activities, and at age eighteen he led a work stoppage and picketing in protest over B. F. Goodrich’s violence against organizers at another plant. He was recognized as a leader not only by his fellow workers but also by the management, whose thugs tried to kill him (chapter 2).
Ovshinsky’s toughness in the face of this physical intimidation carried over into his later resilience in dealing with the intense and sometimes vindictive opposition that met his scientific claims, and as an executive he never shrank from confrontations in patent litigation with large, powerful adversaries like Toyota and Matsushita.16 As one of his patent attorneys, Larry Norris, observed, “Stan liked a good fight, particularly when he was in the right,” and Chester Kamin, his attorney in many of these battles, added, “Stan was never afraid. That’s not his personality.”
This combativeness, however, could also be a liability. Ovshinsky was a tough and effective negotiator, but there were times when he was too aggressive or intransigent, derailing talks rather than reaching agreement. His success in negotiations with the Japanese, whose social codes were quite different from his blunt American manners, often depended on the tact of a trusted translator (chapter 7), and Iris, usually by his side in meetings, sometimes had to intervene to restrain his temper.
On the other hand, when confronting technical challenges, Ovshinsky’s courage and determination could be decisive, leading to large financial commitments and ambitious technological advances. In the late 1970s, when ECD researchers were making experimental thin-film solar cells of just one square centimeter, Ovshinsky announced his plan to make them “by the mile” in a continuous process rather than one batch at a time. To those who understood the plan’s extreme technical challenges, it seemed impossibly bold, but with the major new funding Ovshinsky secured and the long, hard work of ECD’s scientists and engineers, it succeeded (chapters 6 and 8). Similarly, in 1982 when researchers on hydrogen storage found that one of the disordered materials they were testing could be used to make a battery, Ovshinsky seized on the idea. At a point when there was only a laboratory demonstration in a small beaker, he announced that ECD would develop and manufacture the new NiMH batteries and predicted that they would not only replace all existing rechargeable batteries but also one day power an electric car—all of which came true (chapter 9). And near the end of his life, when he had lost both Iris and ECD, he boldly committed his own savings to launching a new company, Ovshinsky Innovation, to develop his idea for a new process to vastly increase the rate of producing solar cells and so make solar energy cheaper than coal (chapter 12).
The courage to trust his insights and his belief in their potential to make the world better also made Ovshinsky a powerfully persuasive advocate for his programs. As the physicist Brian Schwartz said, “There was not a better negotiator in terms of being convincing, in terms of getting resources than Stan. It was his passion, conviction.” The success, and at times the survival, of ECD depended heavily on his charismatic advocacy. The unconventionality of Ovshinsky’s intuitive mind could make his convoluted efforts to explain his inventions exasperating for both his listeners and himself, yet his passionate conviction in expounding his vision of the future could make him eloquent and inspiring.
Finally, besides the formative experiences we have surveyed, there is a story that shows something deep in Ovshinsky’s character that preceded all influences, an incident from his childhood that became an enduring part of his legend. One of his aunts was handing out cookies to a group of children, prompting each in turn with “What do you say?” Each dutifully responded with the expected “Thank you,” until it was his turn. “What do you say?” his aunt asked. “I want more,” he answered. Like other legends, this story exists in several different versions, but they all end with “I want more.” Ovshinsky told it himself, and many others told it about him because they recognized how it captured an essential trait: his insatiable hunger not just for personal gratification but also for greater achievement and the fulfillment of his vision.
A Long Trajectory
Beyond the interest of what Ovshinsky accomplished and how he did it, beyond the interest of his story as an individual, there is the interest of how his story is related to its larger historical context. Spanning the period from his first inventions in the mid-1940s to his death in 2012, Ovshinsky’s work was part of the economic and cultural transformation that led from the industrial to the information age. Beginning as a machinist, toolmaker, and machine builder, he had his roots in the rubber, machine tool, and automotive industries, as well as the social and political values of industrial unionism. But even with his earliest inventions he was intent on using the power of information to advance manufacturing (and, he believed, to liberate workers) by building smarter machines and automating controls. He was already beginning to see tomorrow, sensing the direction the whole economy would take.
Ovshinsky’s work on control devices for automation led to his creation of switches based on amorphous materials, linking him to the exponential growth of microelectronic devices that became the basis of the information economy. Through the growth of ECD, his discoveries enabled the creation of other information devices and to the development of alternative energy technologies that have also become important parts of the postindustrial age.
Ovshinsky’s career thus tracks the profound socioeconomic changes since World War II, changes to which his inventions significantly contributed, but he also stood somewhat apart from those developments. For all his advanced technologies and visionary aims, he remained loyal to his roots, to the social democratic politics of his youth and to the working-class culture of the shop floor. More important, and of more than personal interest, Ovshinsky’s path from the shop floor to the research laboratory offers an alternative perspective on the birth of the information age itself.
Those origins are usually located in a very different world from Ovshinsky’s, in the efforts of highly trained physicists working in cutting-edge research facilities like Bell Laboratories, where the transistor was invented.17 But Ovshinsky developed his amorphous materials in a setting that was much closer to the dirty environment of the shop floor than to the purified atmosphere of the modern cleanroom. It was, as we shall see, the powdered materials contaminating the air in his storefront lab that led him to discover the Ovshinsky effect, produced with the micrometer he carried in his machinist’s apron (chapter 5). Here we can see the new age as not simply opposed to the old industrial world but arising out of it, and indeed it was partly the messy impurity of Ovshinsky’s new physics, not to mention its outsider origins, that antagonized some established researchers.18
In time, Ovshinsky would become recognized and honored with a long string of honorary degrees and other awards (appendix II), and in time ECD would build its own cleanrooms for developing its cutting-edge information devices (chapter 10). But just as his pivotal discoveries were marked by connections with his early industrial experience, so he never stopped trying to re-create the world of well-paid manufacturing work that the postindustrial age had eclipsed, and he promoted his energy technologies as the basis for “new industries.”19 Instead of seeing only a disruptive break between the two ages to which he successfully contributed, we can see Ovshinsky’s career as a bridge between them.
Figure 0.1a–b Stan Ovshinsky, young and old, with the same mischievous grin.
