Late in 1951, Stan, Norma, and their three young boys left New Britain and moved to Detroit so that Stan could begin his work as the director of research at the Hupp Motorcar Corporation. It was a move to the center of Ovshinsky’s world, for Detroit, with its booming automotive companies, was the mecca of the industrial age and was to be the setting for the rest of his career.
Detroit
The city had developed dramatically since the seventeenth century, when Louis XIV authorized building a French settlement on le détroit (the strait) of the Detroit River connecting Lake St. Clair and Lake Erie. The fertile region that had attracted French fur traders became a site of territorial dispute, was taken over by the British in 1760 during the French and Indian War and was ceded to the United States at the end of the American Revolutionary War. Shipping, shipbuilding, and manufacturing drove the city’s growth through the nineteenth century.1
Detroit’s proximity to the Great Lakes was also an asset for the motor vehicle industry that grew there in the early twentieth century. Raw materials were shipped by boat and train—coal from Pennsylvania and West Virginia, iron and copper ore from northern Michigan and Minnesota, and steel from Pittsburgh, Youngstown, Cleveland, Gary, and Chicago. In 1908, Henry Ford’s motorcar company began producing its legendary Model T, which by 1914 was being manufactured incredibly quickly and cheaply thanks to Ford’s invention of the moving assembly line. As was memorably dramatized in the opening segment of Charlie Chaplin’s classic film Modern Times (1936), the efficiency of producing this historic car often came at the cost of the workers who mindlessly performed repetitive tasks.2
General Motors (GM), founded in 1908, arose as Ford’s major competitor when the Detroit-based Buick company controlled by the salesman William Durant began to incorporate other car lines, including Oldsmobile, Cadillac, Oakland (later Pontiac), and Chevrolet.3 With the start of Chrysler in the mid-1920s, the third member of Detroit’s “Big Three” automobile companies was in place. Unlike other Detroit car companies, Ford, GM, and Chrysler all survived the Great Depression because of their size and their many innovations. A decade later, the Detroit auto industry profited enormously from war production.4 It was thus mature and thriving by the time Ovshinsky joined it in late 1951, hoping to modernize it with his innovations.
Arrival in the Motor City
The weather was icy when Ovshinsky arrived in Detroit. “I remember the weather more than anything,” he said. But he was warmed by his enthusiasm for moving to this “vibrant city with everything I wanted.” Stimulated by the rows of humming machines in the plants, he felt “in the middle of things that were going to change. There was an excitement to Detroit,” he recalled, “a dynamism that I liked, and I thought I’d be freer to express my ideas.” He looked forward to working with the kinds of talented people he had met earlier at Ford and Chrysler, and he already knew many of the city’s industrial leaders. As for family needs, Detroit had an active Jewish community, excellent public schools, and a Workmen’s Circle school.
Ovshinsky was also eager to help solve Detroit’s seething social and political problems. Like Akron, Detroit had attracted large numbers of immigrants and migrant workers to its thriving industries, producing ethnic and racial tensions that at times exploded in violence.5 Ovshinsky initially stayed in touch with the Detroit labor unions, especially the United Automobile Workers (UAW), but he slowly withdrew when they opposed his talks about the promise of automation. In his view, his smarter machines were designed to free workers from mind-numbing repetition. “I was trying to convince the leadership that automation needn’t be their enemy and we should start training people now who could understand it and respond.” But the unions continued to see automation primarily as a threat to jobs, a view that subsequent history seems to have confirmed.6
In December 1952, the Ovshinskys moved into a modest three-bedroom ranch, ample for the family, at 19935 Forrer Avenue, in the 7 Mile and Greenfield section of Detroit.7 Its unfinished basement became an office space, which Ovshinsky crammed with papers and books, including medical texts that he later encouraged eight-year-old Ben to read, as he himself had done eagerly at that age. Ben, however, recalled it as “terrifying stuff” and preferred baseball or basketball to such reading.
Not long after moving to Detroit, Ovshinsky reconnected with his old Akron friend B. J. Widick, now also living there. Irving Howe, the eminent left-wing intellectual and critic, with whom Widick had co-authored the important book The UAW and Walter Reuther in 1949, was launching the intellectual quarterly Dissent, which Howe would edit for the rest of his life. Howe wanted Ovshinsky to help find subscribers, and he invited him and Widick to a meeting at a working-class restaurant near the General Motors building. Reluctant to attend, Ovshinsky explained to Howe that he and Widick “used to have violent quarrels.” “For Christ’s sake,” Howe responded. “We’ve got to get this journal together and it’s got to represent the point of view of non-totalitarian, democratic socialism.” He added that Widick had changed. Although dubious, Ovshinsky joined the dinner. “And then BJ comes in,” he recalled. “And the first words out of his mouth were, ‘Hi Stan! Gee it’s great to see you. You know, you were right and I was wrong.’” As their friendship instantly resumed, it seemed to both that only days had passed since their last discussion. To help publicize Howe’s magazine, Ovshinsky organized a series of talks, which were well attended.
Still active in Detroit’s labor movement, Widick chose Ovshinsky as his campaign manager when he ran as the socialist candidate for mayor. Ovshinsky assembled a large audience, but it was strangely unresponsive. “I just couldn’t move that crowd,” Widick recalled, “and I was a pretty good speaker in those days.” He later learned that everyone in the group Ovshinsky had gathered was Russian-speaking. “I don’t think I’ll hire you again as campaign manager,” said Widick, who failed to get many votes. The two socialists remained close friends for the rest of their lives. Years later, Widick remarked that Ovshinsky “really didn’t belong in formal radical politics,” but he added that he knew “Stan was going to be somebody” when he “started telling me some of his dreams,” particularly about getting affordable power from the sun.
Ralph Geddes Redux
The dominant industrial figure for Ovshinsky in his early Detroit years continued to be Ralph Geddes, always known to the family only as Mr. Geddes. Ben recalled that during the winter when he was seven, the family drove to Cleveland in their luxurious new green 1953 Packard Clipper to visit Geddes at his home in Shaker Heights, a posh section with “block after block of lovely Victorian Gothic, Colonial brick, and Tudor mansions.” Norma had dressed the children up in their best clothes, with their long coats. After “knocking and knocking on the door of Geddes’s mansion in the snow,” the family was ushered into the presence of Mr. Geddes, who to the seven-year-old looked like “the tycoon with a big mustache and a cigar” in the Monopoly game. Even at that age, Ben could sense that Geddes embodied power, for his father treated him with uncharacteristic deference.
Ovshinsky’s feelings toward this old-school industrialist were complex. On the one hand, he said, he resented the fact that Geddes “depended on me for everything,” not only for business decisions and technical advice, but also for help with raising his son.8 And Ovshinsky was bothered that the rich Taft Republican “didn’t share his wealth as he said he would,” not to mention that he was “a bit of a paranoid.” At the same time, he considered Geddes “very talented as a manager,” especially “when it came to the financial side.” He felt indebted to Geddes for hiring him at Hupp after helping him sell the failing Stanford Roberts Machine Company.
Ovshinsky was also grateful for Geddes’s protection during the McCarthy era, when he came under government surveillance because of his socialist politics. During his last years in Akron, the FBI had been checking on him regularly. When investigators visited the Workmen’s Circle and asked the old-timers whether they considered Ovshinsky a radical, they answered, “He’s the best radical we ever produced in Akron.” Such testimony confirmed the FBI’s worst suspicions, and they pressured Geddes to fire Ovshinsky as a threat to national security. Geddes refused, pointing out that Ovshinsky had made “hundreds of machines working for the military.” He added that Ovshinsky’s association with the socialist Norman Thomas did not make him a disloyal American, noting that his own banker had voted for Thomas. Ovshinsky had in fact always been part of the anti-Communist left, but the FBI was oblivious to such distinctions. Although he did not lose his job, he was denied clearance even to enter places where his own Benjamin Lathes were serving the government. “It was surreal,” he recalled.
Smarter Cars
Among other projects, Ovshinsky worked at Hupp on developing cybernetic components for cars. Most of these used sensors to control basic automotive functions, such as braking, steering, or power transmission. As he later put it, he wanted “to put sensors all over your car,” an aim achieved by automakers decades later with the advent of the microchip. One of Ovshinsky’s automotive inventions was a new kind of automatic transmission. Unlike the existing hydraulic systems, which wasted power and fuel because of slippage, Ovshinsky’s design used electromagnetic clutches that adjusted gear ratios in response to road conditions. “It shifted by itself,” he said, anticipating the torque converters in today’s systems. Ovshinsky filed for a patent on this invention in January 1955, and it was issued in October 1957.9
Another invention responded to reports that children were being injured or even killed by the new power windows that Hupp Motorcar was the first to make. The children would push the button to close the windows “and then they couldn’t stop the thing and it was like a choker or a guillotine,” Ovshinsky explained. To remedy this tragic situation, he invented a sensor-based device to prevent the window from closing if it sensed a hand or other object in the way. But when Ovshinsky showed this invention to an engineer at Ford (which, unlike Hupp, actually made and sold cars), explaining that it would cost only pennies when produced in volume, the reply was “we don’t spend pennies when we don’t need to.” The incident illustrates the kind of frustration Ovshinsky routinely encountered in his work at Hupp.10
The most important automotive invention Ovshinsky produced at Hupp was electric power steering. Herb remembered the night his brother phoned him in Connecticut soon after starting at Hupp to talk excitedly about his idea to adapt the closed loop electromagnetic steering mechanism they had developed in New Britain for the automatic tractor (see chapter 3) into a design for electric power steering in cars. “That will be great,” Herb said.11 The invention was a simple application of cybernetics. A sensor based on a few inches of rubber tubing inserted into the steering column registered turning resistance, and a potentiometer would respond by sending current to two slipping electric clutches to match the resistance with the right amount of power assistance. Such feedback offered the same kind of closed loop intelligence that human brains use in making corrective decisions based on sensing. Even in icy weather, Ovshinsky claimed, his power steering was more sensitive, and much safer, than GM’s recently invented, expensive, open loop hydraulic approach, which could generate too much power and lead to a loss of control. Ovshinsky’s device also made for a smoother drive by eliminating road vibration because the slipping of the clutches changed with the resistance. Moreover, he said, “It was simple, cheap, and could be put on any car as an add-on.”
Figure 4.1 Ovshinsky’s Electric Power Steering.
On Saturdays, Ovshinsky tested his power steering at the General Motors proving ground in Milford, Michigan. Sometimes he brought along Ben, who remembered, “We packed pastrami sandwiches, and salami sandwiches, and we would drive around the track all day in a Class 8 truck tractor-cab, talking about his father, Yiddish theater, Bolshevism, politics, history, mythology.” When Ovshinsky felt satisfied with the tests, he and Geddes showed the invention to General Motors, which had recently set up their big hydraulic power steering manufacturing unit in Flint. Engineers from GM’s Saginaw Steering group tested Ovshinsky’s device and “wanted to make a deal with us.”
But as the attorneys who met with Ovshinsky and Geddes on the top floor of the General Motors building in Detroit were writing up the papers, Geddes suddenly walked out of the room. Ovshinsky and Geddes’s son-in-law followed him, thinking that he might want to have a last-minute talk before signing. But Geddes continued on toward the elevator. When they asked him what he was doing, he replied, “Walking out. They’re out to screw us.” Ovshinsky objected: “There’s not one show of any kind except extreme gratitude that we’re going to work with them.” But Geddes insisted, “You guys just don’t know.”12 And when he took the elevator down, it marked the end, said Ovshinsky, “of one of my great inventions that was never used and still today is better than what you have now.”13
Ovshinsky felt even worse when he later learned that the patent application he had filed for his electric power steering invention had disappeared from the files of the patent office. One of Hupp’s vice presidents had secretly asked their patent attorney, Richard (Dick) Dibner, to cancel the application, but Ovshinsky didn’t hear about it until after he had left Hupp.14 “It couldn’t have been done without Geddes knowing it,” he said. These disappointments and frustrations might well have discouraged someone else, but Ovshinsky displayed the resilience and self-confidence that continued throughout his life. “I learned that from my boxing days,” he once said. “It’s not just about the punches. How long you survive in the ring also depends on how you take the blows.”
Hupp and General Automation
Like several other companies, Hupp had received a government order to machine a large number of 105-millimeter artillery shells. Ovshinsky explained to Geddes, as he had earlier to the New Britain management, that the company could produce them efficiently by commissioning one or more Benjamin Lathes; Geddes approved rebuilding two lathes, one for the shells and one for aluminum rocket tubes. To help with this project, Geddes arranged to bring Herb back from New Britain. Driving back to the Midwest during the summer of 1953, Herb brought along the automatic tractor that he and Stan had worked on (see chapter 3). Playing on Detroit streets with the bright orange tractor remains one of Ben and Harvey Ovshinsky’s fond childhood memories from that time.15
Meanwhile, Herb’s wife Selma and the couple’s ten-month-old baby Pam flew from New York and moved in with Selma’s mother in Toledo. Herb initially lived with Stan and Norma in Greenfield, visiting Selma and Pam on weekends. But the arrangement “got old for Norma pretty quick,” Herb said. She helped him find a townhouse on Wyoming, where Herb and his family moved in later that summer.
For rebuilding the Benjamin Lathes, and for later developing other smart machines, the Ovshinsky brothers formed the General Automation Corporation on March 16, 1954. The new venture was initially funded by a $5,000 loan from the National Bank of Detroit countersigned by Geddes. The Ovshinskys had already conceived it before the move to Connecticut, and now with the help of their lawyer friend, Nate Peterman, they filed the papers.16 Ed Watkins, a talented advertising man and general adviser, developed announcements.17 They also contacted two Chrysler master mechanics Ovshinsky had come to know during his Stanford Roberts days, Charles Vanderkirk and Arthur Swigert.18 Herb remembered meeting with them to talk about plans for General Automation at Cliff Bell’s, a Detroit restaurant where automotive and manufacturing people often ate. Vanderkirk then put them in touch with Agnew Machine Company, a small machine tool firm in Milford, roughly 30 miles from northwestern Detroit, which would serve as the base for rebuilding the two lathes.
The Ovshinskys also worked together at the old Hupp plant. On Saturday mornings, Stan often brought along Ben, who recalled an “archetypical old-fashioned” plant in “a cavernous building with hundreds of machine production tools lined up and down hundreds of yards.” The mostly empty plant would “reek of machine oil and chips and sawdust and hot metal, which I loved,” recalled Ben, who also remembered Uncle Herb “sitting at one of these big drafting tables. And I would look at the blueprints and smell the blueprinting.” Saturday work at Hupp often also included a visit to one of the ethnic eating places where automotive executives and engineers would eat lunch in the 1950s in downriver Detroit, not far from Henry Ford’s famous River Rouge plant. Besides the food, Ben remembered the hundred-year-old talking parrot at one Italian restaurant, and “the wonderful ambiance downriver. Factories all over.” Even a child of seven or eight could sense that Detroit’s industry was “very, very vibrant.”
Cone Company and the Programmable Automatic Lathe
After completing the two Benjamin Lathes for Hupp, the Ovshinskys turned to their next General Automation project, an ambitious automatic lathe that could be fully programmed. Adapting the drum control from the automatic tractor and the electronic controls of the “industrial computer” he had worked on in Connecticut, Ovshinsky envisioned a machine intelligent enough to make a part automatically from blueprints. The contours of the part would be traced on an oscilloscope and locked in to form an electronic template that the drum-controlled cutting tool would follow. Through a Cleveland friend, Charlie Coffin, then working in the sales office of the New Britain Machine Company, the Ovshinskys now connected with the manufacturer’s representative for Cone Automatic Machine Company in Windsor, Vermont. A good-sized, old-fashioned machine tool company that made reliable automatic screw machines, Cone knew Ovshinsky’s reputation and agreed to support his plan for the programmable lathe.
In April 1954, while the negotiations with Cone were proceeding, Herb located a suitable space for building the programmable lathe. It was a modest double storefront in a working-class Detroit neighborhood at 14121 West McNichols Road, a section of 6 Mile Road not far from its intersection with Schaefer Highway. It was common in that period to house small engineering companies in storefronts, because they were low-rent properties. The storefront would not only house General Automation but would later become the site of Ovshinsky’s most important inventions (see chapter 5).
The Ovshinskys worked for sixteen months in the storefront on the programmable automatic lathe, but once again they were frustrated by the shortsightedness of their patrons when the owners of Cone discontinued the project before it could be completed. “They thought that it could never work,” Ovshinsky said, adding regretfully that “it would have been a marvel of its time.”19 Cone went out of business some years later.
Leaving Hupp
One summer day in 1955, Geddes surprised Ovshinsky with the news that he had just sold out his interest in the Hupp Corporation. Ovshinsky was disappointed that Geddes reneged on the promise he had made when he hired him to split his profit with him if he ever sold the company. But Ovshinsky decided to overlook this injustice, realizing there was nothing he could do, and he and Geddes continued to have a limited friendship until Geddes’s death.
Geddes’s departure, however, gave Ovshinsky the opportunity to leave Hupp too, a move he had been considering since he realized that he was again working in an industry that was resistant to change.20 But, as Herb explained, Stan “wouldn’t just walk out” on Geddes because he felt indebted to him. A day or two after Geddes’s departure, the company held a management meeting. Ovshinsky was appalled when “these guys who kissed his ass all the time” now were tearing Geddes apart. When they turned to Ovshinsky and said, “Stan, you’re now going to become the vice president,” Ovshinsky replied, “No, I’m not. I’m leaving.”21 He informed Herb about his decision to leave Hupp soon afterward, when they had dinner together. “There’s no reason for me not to join General Automation full time and make a go of it,” Stan told him. Ovshinsky’s realization that the machine tool and automotive industries were far behind the times anticipated their later decline and hastened his own growth into the kind of inventor who helped foster the new high-tech economy that succeeded them.
Tann and the Multiple-Ball Switch
The Ovshinskys now turned to new projects. One of the first was a version of the electrical power steering that Ovshinsky had invented at Hupp. He also created a new kind of switch for the steering device that used small (0.235-inch diameter) ball bearings, which a varying magnetic field could align to conduct more or less current. An additional advantage of the design was that the infinitely changing points of contact offered by the surfaces of the balls prevented the switch from wearing out like ordinary mechanical relays. The switch was featured in the February 1958 issue of Control Engineering; as the article noted, it could also be used in many other devices like “mechanical rectifiers, potentiometers, function generators, logical elements, and proximity switches.”22
Seen in retrospect, the multiple-ball device anticipated Ovshinsky’s crucial invention of switches based on disordered materials, even though here the disorder was on a macroscopic scale. The experience of working with such switches may even have helped him to think about how the change from a disordered to an ordered state on an atomic level could become the basis of a new kind of switching. It also anticipated some of his later information devices. By varying the applied magnetic field, he said, “I showed logic uses for the balls. I could have them partially on, partially off. They were models of what I wanted to do by then, to copy the brain.”23 His later project of creating what he called his cognitive computer would also depend on such variability (see chapter 10).
When the initial $5,000 bank loan proved insufficient, Ovshinsky realized he needed a financial partner. Early in 1956, he found backing for the work on electromagnetic devices from the Tann Corporation, a family business run by several brothers whose father had started it after World War I. The company began by manufacturing huge dies for automotive companies and had become very successful during World War II. By the mid-1950s it included not only the original die shop and another making die castings but also a division called Congress Controls. Interested in developing the magnetic switches through this division, the Tann Corporation supported the Ovshinskys’ work, but after some months, the Tanns insisted that they join their company instead of working independently. Ovshinsky recognized the move as a takeover. “Of course Stan wouldn’t stand for that,” Herb said, so their association with the Tanns ended abruptly in 1957. It would take until October 1963 to settle the suits that the Tanns and the Ovshinskys brought against each other.24
Iris Dibner
Meanwhile, Stan’s personal life was changing dramatically. About a year after he began at Hupp, a shy, warm, attractive, and highly intelligent woman in her mid-twenties stepped into his life. Iris Miroy Dibner was deeply concerned about the same social and political issues that engaged Stan. He could hardly believe it. “I didn’t think a girl like Iris existed.” It took some time for them to realize they were powerfully attracted to each other, but once they did they became inseparably bonded. As one friend later put it, “They were soul mates. Two bodies and one soul.”
Iris was born in Manhattan on July 13, 1927, into a radical culture. Her parents subscribed to the philosophy of anarchism, which advocated freedom from the domination of religion, property, and government. In the words of the anarchist and feminist Emma Goldman, it envisioned a social order that would “guarantee to every human being free access to the earth and full enjoyment of the necessities of life, according to individual desires, tastes, and inclinations.”25 Stan admired philosophical anarchism as a “beautiful” movement aimed at a better life for the oppressed, but like his father Ben, he considered it an impractical ideal.
Iris’s pacifist father André Herrault had fled conscription in the French army when World War I broke out, and he lived for a time in Canada with a changed name, Miroy. There he worked on the docks loading and unloading ships. When he later moved to New York, he became a teacher and translator of Spanish. He spoke five languages, including Yiddish, “even though he wasn’t Jewish,” Iris noted, adding that at the time he died, “he was reading War and Peace in Russian with the dictionary.”
Figure 4.2 André Miroy and Anita Spiegel.
Iris’s mother, Anita Spiegel, was born of poor Jewish immigrants in Haverhill, Massachusetts. She and André met at a meeting of the Francisco Ferrer Association, founded in 1910 by Emma Goldman and others in honor of the recently executed Spanish anarchist educator (1859–1909).26 Like many anarchists, Anita and André did not believe in institutionalized marriage and simply lived together. Only years later, after their separation, did they became legally married at a point when André needed a visa to visit France.27 The first in her family to attend college, Anita majored in French and earned a teacher’s certificate at Hunter College. Having had Iris at age thirty, she was over forty by the time she was appointed to a school. Now considered too old to be a new classroom teacher, Anita was assigned to homeschool handicapped children.
By then Anita and André had gone to live with other anarchists in the Mohegan Colony, the oldest of several Westchester County leftist summer enclaves. Spending her childhood there, Iris attended the colony’s progressive school until sixth grade. “We did plays and dances and things like that and caught frogs,” recalled Iris, but she did learn to read. She immediately excelled. Despite being “awfully shy,” she admitted to being “first in my class in everything.” Her parents stressed culture at home, speaking French with each other and with Iris, who typically answered in English.
As a child, Iris witnessed the unraveling of Anita and André’s relationship. André was “a good human being” with “very good values,” Iris said, but he was “quite a stick-in-the-mud,” extremely quiet and always reading. By the time Iris was five, Anita had separated from André and was living with the dashing Henri Dupré, also an anarchist, who liked to dance and was a protégé of the great French chef Auguste Escoffier.28 (Anita “would have liked to take me with her,” Iris explained, but André said “No. You have Henri.” So Iris continued to live with André in the Mohegan colony.) In their tiny Greenwich Village apartment at 5 Minetta Lane, Anita and Henri would dine on the fancy French food that Henri brought home from the Essex Club, the exclusive Newark men’s club where he worked.
Figure 4.3 Henri Dupré, standing, with Auguste Escoffier.
To spend more time with Iris, André worked at home as much as he could manage. He would leave at 7 a.m. to catch the train to lower Manhattan, where he worked at the Lawyers and Merchants Translation Bureau, returning in time to be with Iris when she came home from school. Iris’s friends loved to visit with André, “the man who knew most about everything,” but she herself felt the pressure of being his whole life.
It was comforting for Iris that Anita and André remained friends, considering themselves comrades. On Friday evenings, when Anita came by train from Manhattan to visit Iris, bearing “jelly donuts from the wonderful store next to Grand Central,” the three would have dinner and spend the evening together doing “homework or whatever.” Anita slept over before taking Iris with her the next day, keeping her through the weekend. Iris always felt a little depressed on Sunday nights, because “the excitement of being at my mother’s was always more fun.” All four would spend Thanksgiving, Christmas, “or any important thing,” as a family. “My mother and Henri would have the dinner, probably, but they would invite my father.” Summers were spent with Anita and Henri and “we’d go on picnics.”
Academically, Iris was ready for high school by the age of eleven, but since she was so young she instead attended the progressive Putnam Valley Central School. When she entered Swarthmore at age sixteen, she “studied, studied, studied every minute.” Before leaving Swarthmore at age nineteen, Iris married her childhood sweetheart, Andrew Dibner, “the boy that everybody thought was handsome and wonderful.” The Dibner clan was also part of the Mohegan community.29 Andy and Iris had decided when Iris was just thirteen that when they grew up they would marry, as they did shortly after Andy came out of the army.30 “Everybody in those days got married pretty early,” Iris said. It would be through Andy’s three-years-older brother Dick Dibner, Stan’s patent attorney at Hupp, that Iris later met Stan.
The newlyweds then moved to New York City, where Iris attended Brooklyn College and then Hunter College to make up the credits she needed to graduate from Swarthmore in the spring of 1948 with a degree in biology. They next moved to Michigan, settling in Wyandotte, 10 miles or so south of Detroit. Andy attended graduate school at the University of Michigan in clinical psychology and, supported by the GI Bill, did clinical work for his dissertation at the Veterans Administration hospital in Dearborn. When Iris wasn’t accepted by the University of Michigan’s medical school, she gave up the idea of becoming a physician and took eighteen hours of education courses to earn both a master’s in biology and a teacher’s certificate. She then taught biology for two years at Fordson High School in Dearborn.
After becoming pregnant, she stayed home and found “it was almost too quiet.” Then in analysis three times a week as part of his professional training, Andy seemed distant.
Stan and Iris
Iris and Stan had met several times between 1952 and 1955 in the normal course of their lives. One of their first meetings was at the Workmen’s Circle, where she was intrigued when he took out a notebook in which he had collected clippings about nerve physiology. A memorable exchange between them took place in the spring of 1952 at a party hosted by Dick Dibner and his fiancée Ursula. Introducing Stan to Iris, Dick said, “You have to meet this exciting man.” For the rest of his life, Dick would regret making the introduction.
Andy and Stan got into a heated discussion at the party. As Stan recalled, Andy and his psychology colleagues were talking shop and voicing the conventional 1950s view that people have to “make a certain mental adjustment” to their society. Stan took issue, raising the example of Spartacus and the rebel slaves who were condemned to die. “Do you think that they should have adjusted to going quietly to their death?” he asked. As Andy and his colleagues had no ready response, Stan asserted, “I would have said, let’s get together and fight these guys.” Iris did not respond well to Stan’s challenge, finding him “unpleasantly argumentative, arrogant, and generally rather conceited,” certainly “not her type.” But she also remembered being annoyed by his flirting with a “buxom blond dopey lady,” and thinking that he was “extremely handsome.”
Some months later, Stan had another argument with Andy when he and Iris visited Norma and Stan at their home and they all went out to eat at a delicatessen. They discussed the purges in Russia, which Andy interpreted as “social growing pains.” Stan challenged this reduction of political conflict to psychological terms. He insisted that collective struggles shouldn’t be seen as ordinary growing pains. This time Iris supported Stan’s side of the argument, and Stan remembered feeling very pleased. Clearly, interest was developing between the two. On another occasion, in December 1954, Stan remembered sitting behind Iris at a Workmen’s Circle event and patting her head. In Iris’s memory, “I was sitting behind Stan,” and “suddenly I was very interested. He seemed like a very super bright guy and seemed so handsome.” It was not long after this that both realized they were in love.
Both remembered vividly when their worlds changed on January 1, 1955. They were at Dick Dibner’s New Year’s Eve party. Iris had had her long blonde braid cut off before the party, and her hairdresser had put stars in her stylish short hair. “When Stan walked in the door,” Iris said, she and Andy were already there. “I felt sort of—wow, what happened? Boy did we hit it off. It was really madly falling in love.” She remembered, “We talked and talked and talked. And I even said, ‘Why don’t we go into the bedroom?’ It was crazy.” Afterward, Iris “was thinking about Stan, Stan, Stan, Stan, Stan. And a few weeks later he called.” They decided right then that “sometime, somewhere, some place, we’ll get together,” said Iris.
Stan and Iris each told their spouses about the sparks that had unexpectedly flown between them. Norma and Andy were both shocked. Iris became enraged when Andy remarked that he felt like “somebody took his watch. That’s how important I was to him!” She decided that Andy “was shocked, but not, I don’t think, that devastated.” After that, Stan and Iris saw each other whenever possible. Both felt sorry to be causing pain to their spouses, but the feeling between them was stronger and deeper than any other feelings. The Dibner family soon forgave Iris and blamed Stan for sweeping her off her feet. Dick Dibner “didn’t talk to me for about ten years,” Stan recalled.
Figure 4.4 Stan and Iris in upper Michigan, summer 1955.
Andy sent Iris to see a psychiatrist, and “she came back laughing,” Stan recalled, because the therapist had suggested that to “get over this thing” she go away with Stan for a weekend. They went to the beach in upper Michigan and “had a great time,” said Stan. “It wasn’t anything we were going to get over.” From then on, despite all the struggles and mishaps in his career, “I was a happy man,” Stan said. “I felt that I had achieved the peak of what life was about.”
Soon, Andy decided on his own to separate Iris and Stan. On completing his PhD he found a position in the psychology department at Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts. Iris, Andy, and their two young children moved there late in the summer of 1955. At this point, Stan seriously considered divorcing Norma, but the speech psychologist working with Dale predicted that would have a “devastating effect” on the child. Stan decided against the divorce, but “from then on we were a couple,” Iris said.
The next years were extremely difficult for all involved. Iris remembered, “We wrote letters every day and called every day and we each had separate lives.” Stan managed to see Iris roughly half a dozen times a year, typically on business trips. “And we always knew we were going to get together,” said Iris, “so it was pretty rough, but it was crazy. Every day I’d skip lunch and go talk on the phone. And I had my own mailbox. And he’d write ten-page letters every day. They were mostly ‘I love you. I miss you.’” Stan remembered being “on the phone every day, several times a day, and writing every day, pages and pages, and she was doing the same.” And they lived for the rare times when they could manage to get together.
Their letters and phone conversations were filled with all the things both cared about—work, family, love, science, politics, and how to make the world better for everyone. They shared a commitment to social justice, and both cared much more about fighting against exploitation than they did about money. “We thought we’d end up in a very small house with just bricks and wood for our book shelves,” Stan recalled. “We were ready to live in utter poverty.” Their many exchanges about their shared values over the years they were apart set the direction for their later work together. When Stan and Iris later started a new research company, they aimed to develop technologies that would help solve social problems (see chapter 5).
Stan recognized congenial social values when he met Anita and Henri. He and Iris would stay with them in their Greenwich Village apartment, where Stan felt at home, like he “was among old friends.” He showed Iris a bowl filled with mail and said, “I get this same damn mail, Workers’ Defense League.” Stan appreciated that Anita was a “very bright woman” and liked the same Wobbly songs that he did.
Stan and Iris’s romance put Herb Ovshinsky in an uncomfortable spot. He wanted to stay friends with Norma, as well as Andy and Dick Dibner, but that proved impossible. All broke off their relationships with him, and having been sworn to secrecy, he couldn’t even tell Selma about Stan and Iris’s romance. It was at the same time clear to Herb that Stan’s and Iris’s love “was stronger than all the strong family. And it was as strong the last day we were with her as it was in 1955.” Herb saw how they complemented each other. Iris supported Stan’s work in science and technology, while his brother’s love and admiration caused the naturally shy Iris to blossom.
Schizophrenia and Epilepsy
Among the topics of Stan and Iris’s daily communications during their years apart were the neurological questions that he was exploring as he continued to develop the cybernetic analogy of animal and machine control and communication (see chapter 3). Ovshinsky hoped to gain insight into the functioning of healthy nerve cells by considering cases where nerves fail to function properly, when signals were misdirected or distorted, or when people couldn’t respond appropriately.31 To do that, he began studying epilepsy and schizophrenia.32
Applying his reading of the medical literature on nervous disorders, Ovshinsky began to ponder whether both schizophrenia and epilepsy might have to do with changing electrical thresholds, building on the hypothesis that electrical waves from the brain control human actions. He suggested that, because of an injury or a genetic problem, “those waves are just the wrong ones” and result in neural disease. Driven by his interest in intelligence, Ovshinsky wanted to understand the difference between the wrong and right waves and contribute to medical science by learning how to control them.
Relating the behavior of nerve cells, intelligence, and electrical thresholds, he argued that epilepsy and schizophrenia are essentially “the same problem,” both resulting from chemical, thermal, or physical interference with the ability to receive and act correctly upon messages from the brain. The resulting misdirection of messages in both diseases shows up, he argued, as lack of control. But while epilepsy arises from interference with the parts of the brain controlling motion, schizophrenia arises from the parts dealing with cognition. Schizophrenia, he maintained, was “epilepsy of the mind.”33
As a machinist working on automation, it was natural for Ovshinsky to conceive of muscles as machines instructed by the brain and to try to understand the process of movement in terms of signals and feedback. He thought about the communications between the cortex and the cerebellum involved in any movement and how faulty feedback could produce irregular movements like tremors. In the early 1950s, he had begun to set down such ideas for himself in a number of papers, some of which he later published or delivered as talks between 1957 and 1961.34 This line of thought, though it may seem to diverge from Ovshinsky’s earlier work, not only emerged from his efforts to build smarter machines but would also lead to his most important inventions.
Iris, meanwhile, decided to further their ongoing discussions about epilepsy and schizophrenia by getting a PhD in biochemistry. She chose to study at the nearby Worcester Foundation for Experimental Biology, which had an advanced research program in the biochemistry of schizophrenia.35 Her study proved more grueling than expected, however, because she was missing prerequisite undergraduate courses in quantitative analysis and physical chemistry. Worcester Polytechnic offered these, but she was denied admission because there were no facilities for women, so she had to commute to Boston and take the courses at Harvard. Stan “was so proud of her,” Herb said, and “helped her every bit of the way.” When the two were together, he would sleep on top of the desk while she worked.
Iris, for her part, urged Stan to publish his ideas on the synapse and nerve impulse in the scientific literature. “I wouldn’t know really what to do about that,” he replied. Iris decided to teach him how to write a scientific paper, drilling him on the technical jargon, typing and critiquing his writing, and teaching him about making indexes. “We used to have fun—what’s an axon, what’s a dendrite, etcetera,” she recalled. From Stan’s perspective, “She gave me my PhD, and we had a great time.” On trips, the two often visited bookstores and libraries to learn about relevant research and find references.36
Neurophysiology at Wayne State
By the time Iris moved to Massachusetts, an important new opportunity had opened up for Ovshinsky. After helping him rewrite his paper on the nerve impulse, Iris helped him bring it to the attention of Ernest Gardner, a professor and the chair of anatomy at Wayne State University School of Medicine. Gardner found the article fascinating, as did his colleague Ferdinand A. Morin, who later succeeded Gardner as chair of anatomy when Gardner became associate dean and then dean of the medical school. Ovshinsky was surprised and delighted to receive Gardner’s enthusiastic letter of June 17, 1955: “Dr. Morin and I read your paper with a great deal of interest. We both feel that it contains some extremely worthwhile and provocative ideas.” The letter extended an invitation to work at Wayne Medical. Gardner asked, “Have you ever given any thought to the possibility of testing out some of these things experimentally? It seemed to us that experimental proof should certainly be sought for.” He suggested that Ovshinsky and Morin get together for a discussion.37 Overjoyed with the invitation, he soon joined them.
Gardner’s letter profoundly changed the course of Ovshinsky’s life by offering him the chance to add an identity as a scientist to his professional persona. Still working at Hupp, he now also conducted research at Wayne whenever he had free time. With Morin, he proceeded to explore the neurophysiology of the brain experimentally by implanting electrodes in the brains of cats and monkeys. Noting the twitching responses, he could tell which cells they were exciting or inhibiting. Herb helped by making micro-manipulator-controlled needles for implanting the electrodes accurately. “It was a little shocking,” Herb recalled, but “I don’t think it hurt the animals.”
This first taste of membership in an academic community was “a wonderful experience” for Ovshinsky. “It sort of spoiled me. I was accepted immediately by these guys at Wayne, who were very good and did really valuable work. And what was so important to me was they accepted me. And so I thought that’s the way science was, if you were making contributions.”38 He and Morin published on the relationship between the cerebral cortex and cerebellum, which Ovshinsky described as a servomechanism. He also lectured about his work, initially to the medical students. He encountered very little politics or backstabbing in this period, and he especially enjoyed interacting with the well-known Chicago-based neuroscientist Heinrich Kluver, who invited Ovshinsky to visit him in Chicago for scientific exchange. Unfortunately, he had no money for such travel. Morin and Ovshinsky did, however, regularly attend the Saturday scientific symposium on recent work in neurophysiology organized at the University of Michigan by Ralph W. Gerard, whose own interests included the biology of schizophrenia.39
The Ovitron: A Turning Point
Ovshinsky’s work in neurophysiology may not have had a significant impact on that field, but it led to a pivotal development in his own inventive career. The paper on the nerve impulse that brought Ovshinsky to Gardner’s attention proposed an analogy between the signals transmitted from one neuron to another and electrical circuits. Conceiving neural circuits cybernetically as organic equivalents of the sensing and feedback mechanisms of automation, he began to think of the nerve cell as a kind of switch that allows signals to pass once an electrical or chemical threshold is reached. He wanted to locate the threshold at which the cell fired and identify the electrochemical processes that allowed the impulse to pass between cells. To help him answer these questions he decided to build a physical model that worked the way nerve cells do, with a semipermeable membrane that allowed it to fire when the activating impulses reached a certain threshold.
Ovshinsky’s model, which he referred to as his nerve cell analogy, was a new kind of switch. The Ovitron, as he called this invention, is arguably the pivotal achievement of his career because it motivated so much of his later work, as subsequent chapters will show. Working with Herb in the same storefront on McNichols Road that housed General Automation, he assembled a device that resembled an electrolytic battery, with tantalum electrodes immersed in a hydrochloric acid electrolyte containing a small amount of zinc. When an AC voltage was applied, no current flowed because of a thin insulating oxide film on the electrodes.40 But when an additional low positive DC voltage was introduced by a third, nonreactive (palladium or platinum) electrode, the device switched on. Reversing the DC polarity switched it off again. Ovshinsky thought of the electrolyte as being like the fluids surrounding neurons, and, more importantly, of the oxide coating on the tantalum electrodes as being like the cell membrane, a semipermeable barrier that allows transmission when stimulation reaches a certain threshold.
Figure 4.5 Operation of the Ovitron.
The Ovitron was an impressive switch. It was extremely fast, switching in 8.3 milliseconds, and it yielded an enormous power gain: the DC current of only a few milliamps at about 3 volts could control an AC current of as much as 20 amperes at about 100 volts. Because, unlike the transistor, it could handle such heavy AC loads, and because it worked differently from previous switches, it in time became the subject of several articles in electrical trade journals that repeated Ovshinsky’s explanation of its principles.41 It is now clear, however, that the analogy with the nerve cell is imperfect. Rather than acting like the neuron’s semipermeable membrane, the insulating oxide layer on the tantalum electrodes simply becomes so thin that the current can pass between the electrodes; the electrochemical process of switching on and off is one of de-plating and re-plating rather than crossing a threshold.42 Nevertheless, it was by pursuing the nerve cell analogy, boldly coupling biological and electrical processes, that Ovshinsky made this important discovery.43 As with his later switching inventions, he was guided by his unique intuitions; scientific explanation came later, sometimes decades later.
Before continuing with the development of the Ovitron, we should pause to consider just what Ovshinsky was doing when he created it. Was he testing his theory of the nerve cell or trying to invent a new kind of switch? Was he doing science or technology? The answer seems to be “both,” or maybe “something else,” which may help us understand more about his creativity. He was certainly interested in pursuing scientific knowledge about neurophysiology for its own sake, but his interest first arose from thinking about automation, and it led to a series of technological innovations. Later in his career, when Ovshinsky began to reflect more on creativity and how he invented, a recurrent theme was his disregard for divisions between disciplines, including a refusal of the distinction between science and technology (see the interlude). Neither a biochemist nor an electrical engineer would have been likely to arrive at the Ovitron. Ovshinsky’s omnivorous curiosity and willingness to go wherever his imagination led him were keys to his success.44
Support for the Ovitron
To develop the Ovitron, the Ovshinskys set up a new company, which they also called Ovitron, in 1958. They found support through Robert Allen, a schoolmate and friend of Ralph Geddes Jr., the son of Ovshinsky’s former boss at Hupp.45 Allen was very excited when he saw an early model of the Ovitron. Being the son of the legendary investment banker Charles Allen of the great Wall Street investment firm Allen and Company, he was also in a position to support its development.46
To look at the Ovitron, the Allen family sent their patent attorney, Leon Simon, from Washington, DC, to Detroit, where the Ovshinskys set up a demonstration on a Formica board, using a small transformer, a rectifier, and a light bulb. Simon was very impressed. He later told Herb “this was the only true invention he ever saw” and confessed that he had been “expecting to see this bunch of hustlers trying to take advantage of a young Bob Allen.”
The Ovshinskys then traveled to New York to meet with Charles Allen and arrange financial support. Stan and Charles liked each other and began to talk on a personal level. Charles confided that he was very worried that his son Robert was headed for failure. He promised to support the development of the Ovitron if Robert could be a partner in the company. Acknowledging that his son could be difficult, Charles promised, “All you have to do is call me, and I’ll take care of it.” When Stan agreed, Charles loaned them $67,000 in cash and also endorsed bank loans for another $100,000. For developing the Ovitron, the Ovshinskys moved out of the storefront on McNichols into a different building several miles away at 14830 Schaefer Highway, rented from the same landlord. The work began officially in November 1958.47
At about this time, the Tanns, who in 1956 and 1957 had supported Ovshinsky’s earlier work on switches, relays, and variable resistors, surmised that the Ovitron was an extension of the magnetic-ball switches they had supported, and sued the Ovshinsky brothers. As an electrochemical switch, the Ovitron was actually nothing like the electromechanical switch that Tann had supported, but the Tanns did not understand the distinction and proceeded with their suit.48 Despite the pending suit, Ovshinsky worked tirelessly on the Ovitron. He would gradually learn how to make lawsuits work in his favor.
Figure 4.6a Research area in the Ovitron storefront.
Figure 4.6b Ovitron shop area.
On July 8, 1959, after roughly eight months of development, the Ovshinskys publically disclosed the Ovitron. Organized by Ed Watkins, the disclosure took place at 10:30 a.m. at the Canadian Club on the eighteenth floor of New York’s Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Generously paid for by Charles Allen, the event included cocktails and a luncheon at noon. Ovshinsky expounded the theoretical basis of the Ovitron in the electrochemistry of the neuron, emphasizing its advantages over all existing control devices. Subsequent articles in trade publications, which repeated his explanations and claims, testify to the success of his presentation.49
At this point, the Ovitron was still a prototype, not yet a commercially viable device. Ovshinsky looked forward to using the concept to make electronic memories and to making it work with a better electrolyte. (“I don't like to have these electrolytes that can burn your fingers.”) Indeed, he hoped in time to find a way to avoid the liquid electrolyte altogether and make the Ovitron into a solid-state device. Another disadvantage was that the device gave off small amounts of hydrogen gas, a potential hazard. In fact, after it had cycled countless times and had worked beautifully during the demonstration, Ovshinsky got a call during celebratory drinks at a country club: one of the screws of the hand-made device had come loose back in the lab and it had blown up. It was clear that there was more work to be done.
Nevertheless, some who were working on the forefront of electronics could recognize the importance of Ovshinsky’s invention. Among those who read the articles on the Ovitron in the trade press was Willis Adcock, who had helped build the first silicon transistor at Texas Instruments. When Adcock visited Ovshinsky in 1959, he expressed his admiration for the Ovitron. “What you have here is remarkable, and you can do something the transistor can’t do. You can handle tremendous currents, and you can handle AC.” Adcock repeated the story years later when he spoke at the Institute for Amorphous Studies (see chapter 7).
Figure 4.7 Ovitron ad (designed by Ed Watkins).
Figure 4.8 Ovitron promotional photo, with Herb, Bob Allen, and Stan.
Most academics ignored the Ovitron, however, perhaps because it had been presented in a public disclosure rather than an academic paper. At Wayne Medical the scientists did not see the relationship between the Ovitron and the nerve cell, and when Ovshinsky spoke about his nerve cell analogy at the Detroit Physiological Society in 1959, “there was absolutely no response.” He soon found that he was no longer getting notices of the society’s meetings. A year or so later, when he bumped into the president of the society, he learned that they had simply dropped him because he had no credentials.
Work on improving the Ovitron was going well, but working with Bob Allen was not. Ovshinsky had for some months been suffering in the relationship with Allen, who was driving him crazy with foolhardy ideas about science and invention, sometimes phoning in the middle of the night to propose them. He would insist on their validity even when Ovshinsky explained they violated the laws of thermodynamics. The situation became critical when Allen informed Ovshinsky he was going to buy Ovitron out and go public, hoping to make a killing.
Ovshinsky went back to Charles Allen to remind him of his earlier promise to intervene if his son caused problems. “I did promise,” Allen replied. “But he's my son.” The final straw came when Bob Allen decided to run Ovitron without the Ovshinskys and simply locked them out of the building. Ovshinsky knew that Allen could not succeed because he didn’t understand the science behind the invention, but work on developing the Ovitron had to stop. Another lawsuit ensued, and it took until March 1960 to reach a settlement (see chapter 5).
It was also at this point that the Ovshinsky brothers ended their collaboration. Herb would continue working on automation, but Stan’s work on the Ovitron had made him redefine his goals. “From now on,” he announced to Herb, “my future’s in materials.”
