The early 1960s were a crucial period in both Stan’s personal life and his inventive career, marking new beginnings in each that would set his direction for decades to come. These strands also now became more closely intertwined, so that in following them we need to keep shifting our focus back and forth between them.
A New Family
Iris had carefully timed her return to Detroit to occur on Stan’s thirty-seventh birthday, November 24, 1959. She brought a cake, as well as both her children. When Stan met them at the train station, he and Iris were jubilant, but Robin, days away from her seventh birthday on December 5, and Steven, who had turned five on October 6, were both anxious. Robin remembered feeling as though she was falling into an “unknown and uncontrollable situation.” Steven recalled being ill with flu-like symptoms during the long train ride from Boston. Decades later he remembered lying awake during the night “and just feeling terrible.” They were too young to understand why they had left their father in Boston and why he had gradually moved out of their home in Worcester, by the end spending just weekends with them.
Figure 5.1 Robin and Steven Dibner, May 1960.
Both children had already met Stan when he visited their home in Worcester and at Anita and Henri’s apartment in New York. They had been charmed by the smiling man who entertained them by drawing fanciful animals or people, building on numerals or letters they wrote. But they had no idea yet that he would become a second father to them, or that their parents were separating permanently. In the late 1950s, divorce was uncommon in middle-class American families. “All the way into high school,” Robin recalled, “I was the only kid in my class who had divorced parents.”
After the initial welcoming hugs and kisses, Stan drove his new family to the tiny rented house at 16818 Gilchrist Street, which they would call home for the next year and a half. In a lower middle-class neighborhood, where most of their neighbors worked for the auto companies, their new home was hardly bigger than a garage, and a tree “blocked the whole damn house,” Stan recalled. He had already begun to fix up the place, for it had been in very poor condition at the time he signed the lease. But since many Detroit landlords would not rent to Jews, there were few options. The location, however, was extremely convenient. The kids could walk to school, and the storefront was just five minutes away by car. And when Stan and Iris were done decorating, the house “was just beautiful,” Stan said, “a small gem.” Herb remembered it as “filled with love.”
On arriving, Iris found a card that Stan had written on a shirt cardboard that said, “Welcome home, wife.” (Iris and Stan did not marry legally until 1962, but their official wedding date was less significant to them than the day of Iris’s move to Detroit.) Robin told how when Stan’s shirts came back from the laundry he would save the cardboards and use them for writing such messages, especially on the anniversary of their getting together. “And every year after that on November 24, there would always be a big bunch of red roses, with one of these shirt cardboards propped up, and in some colored pen he usually would have written, ‘Happy anniversary,’ and some loving message, half in English and half in Yiddish.”1
The new family arrangement was confusing for both sets of children. For Stan’s boys, who continued to live with Norma, “suddenly, there were two Mrs. Ovshinskys,” Harvey recalled. And because Iris and Norma both had Hudson’s credit cards, there were frequent phone calls from the department store. “I remember my mother on the phone once, in tears, trying to explain who the real Mrs. Ovshinsky was.” Norma did not hide her strong feeling of having been betrayed and made it clear she would need adequate compensation for letting Stan go. Inevitably, the boys absorbed some of her anger and resentment. Harvey recalled, “I remember screaming at Dad, and accusing Iris of being a prostitute. It was so ugly. But, to their credit, they both endured it. They knew it was the price they had to pay for falling in love.”
Despite the initial obstacles, Iris was pretty sure the move would work out well for all involved. She had seen how Anita became noticeably happier after leaving André, and how they had remained friends. Things would indeed eventually work out for all five of Stan’s and Iris’s children, but their experience of having divorced parents would be much more complicated than Iris’s had been. And despite her overall optimism, Iris also continued to fear she might be “ruining seven people’s lives to make us happy.” As for Stan, he experienced Iris’s return to Detroit as “a turning point in my life, the start of real happiness.” “We really fell in love,” and he felt they were “falling in love every day.”2
Nurturing Invention: The Storefront
In January 1960, Stan and Iris set up the new company they had often talked about over the years of their separation, a company guided by their progressive values. As Stan put it, their mission was “using science and technology to solve the world’s societal problems.” Iris described their goals in less exalted terms. “Stan and I never were that unrealistic to think that we could solve all the world’s problems. We wanted to do what we could for society, and also we were very committed to making sure it was a successful company, not just a dreamer’s company.”3
For their work on the Ovitron, Stan and Herb had moved out of the modest storefront on West McNichols Road that had housed General Automation, but since the building was available after their break with Allen, they now moved back. Despite its drab surrounding neighborhood, which included a small drugstore next door, a flower shop, and a barbershop, the space became an oasis of creativity.4Family members contributed to launching the new company. Anita helped Stan and Iris move in, set up the files, and ordered stationery, while Mashie set up the bookkeeping. Stan assembled an oscilloscope from a Heathkit. Iris hung pictures, including a large chart of the periodic table, and she helped Stan furnish shelves upon shelves with books on all subjects.5
Those diverse books reflected Ovshinsky’s insistence on the freedom to disregard conventional scientific disciplinary divisions. The pamphlet he and Iris produced describing their new laboratory expresses the conviction that “science is indivisible, that one must be able to utilize seemingly unrelated information from one discipline and apply it to another, to accomplish new and unique solutions to technological and scientific problems.”6 This declaration offers a notably early instance of a recurrent theme in his later reflections on creativity (see the interlude).
In defining their social mission, Stan and Iris had focused on the topic of energy, particularly the problems resulting from reliance on oil.7 They began working on ways other resources could be converted into energy, and to signal this research direction they named their new company Energy Conversion Laboratories (ECL).8 Later, as the focus expanded to include Ovshinsky’s work on information, he would describe energy and information as “the twin pillars of our global economy,” conceiving them as complementary, for to store or transfer energy requires information, and vice versa. Understanding information as both the means and the result of energy conversion, as “encoded energy,” gave a larger meaning to the name he and Iris had chosen for their company in 1960.9 Two decades later, they would celebrate its twentieth anniversary by issuing medallions whose two sides showed the brain and the sun.
Figure 5.2 ECD’s two-sided medallion.
Ovshinsky had been thinking for many years about the geopolitics of energy. He remembered when the United States had cut off Japan’s oil supply in 1941 and how that soon led to the attack on Pearl Harbor. “You can’t cut off the energy supply to a country and not expect that there’s going to be a war,” he observed, adding that in ancient times there were wars over salt. That perspective, as well as his sensitivity to pollution from his personal history of asthma, contributed to his concerns, whether about the potential for future wars over oil or about increasing environmental damage, even before the growth of the environmental movement and the energy crisis caused by the oil embargoes of the 1970s.10
In addition to these concerns, Ovshinsky felt strongly that developing countries deserved affordable and up-to-date technologies. In talks he gave during the early 1960s, he pointed out that the out-of-date equipment being shipped to them by the industrialized countries was too expensive, inefficient, and polluting. He believed they should have “their own technology or their own branches of science.” Here he was also ahead of his time, anticipating what would later be called appropriate technology.11In later years, when Ovshinsky and his company, ECD, developed thin-film solar panels, he would advocate their use not only in the developed countries, where the problem was dependence on fossil fuels, but also in the developing countries, where the problem was lack of infrastructure. He would often close his talks with an image of a young Mayan woman in the Chiapas rainforest carrying a box of thin-film solar panels on her back and a baby in front. “Look at this woman,” he would say. “She is carrying the future on her back and in her arms.”12
Figure 5.3 Mayan woman with baby and a box of solar panels.
For most of Ovshinsky’s audiences in the 1960s, such ideas were too progressive (and perhaps too undeveloped), so he decided to bring them to the attention of the left-wing radical leader Fenner Brockway, an Indian-born member of the Independent Labour Party, a friend of Gandhi and Nehru, and at that time a member of the British House of Commons. In a letter to Brockway in May 1960, Ovshinsky expounded some of his ideas for using “solar energy, nuclear energy, ordinary forms of heat, or energy differentials of various types to create electricity directly,” and explained that he and Iris wanted to offer them “to interested governments of underdeveloped areas,” which could implement them using available natural materials such as wood or sand. Summarizing, he declared, “We must use our imagination to exploit technology rather than people, if the underdeveloped areas are to make great progress.”13
When Brockway came to Detroit, Ovshinsky invited him to enjoy a home-cooked dinner on Gilchrist to discuss his energy ideas in a comfortable setting. Brockway congratulated Iris on her delicious vegetarian meal, saying that he had never had a better one. Suddenly an ashen-faced Iris called Stan over to speak with her in the kitchen. She told him she realized that she had used oxtail soup in preparing the dish and thought she had better let Brockway know. But when she asked him whether he was a vegetarian out of principle, he replied, “Oh no, I am long past that. Out of habit.” A much-relieved Iris again called Stan into the kitchen to explain that she would not tell him after all. “If it was principle I would have to tell.”
As for Ovshinsky’s energy ideas, Brockway was an appreciative listener, and he arranged for meetings with a number of influential Indian politicians. But Ovshinsky could find no way to relate to their bureaucracies, and he was similarly frustrated when he tried to explain to a group of African ambassadors at the United Nations how to avoid exploitation by US industries by developing their own technologies from local materials.
Funding ECL’s ambitious mission in the storefront was a continuing problem. Stan and Iris quickly spent the $10,000 that Iris brought from the sale of her father’s house. They turned to writing proposals to government agencies, but ECL was a small and unknown company, and the subject of their work fell outside the existing categories, so their proposals were rejected. One preliminary proposal to develop a thin oxide-film computer, whose logic circuits would have extended the Ovitron nerve cell analogy, drew initial interest, but when they submitted a full proposal in late 1960 to build a prototype it was rejected in favor of one from Westinghouse.14 Iris remembered being “so annoyed” when they later got “a call from Westinghouse saying that they got the contract and could we help them!”
The flair with which Ovshinsky pitched his mission brought in just enough funds to support ECL in this period, but the work of raising money was never easy. Nor would the company ever make much profit, for as one project succeeded, he would immediately follow up with a more ambitious and more costly initiative. In this period, some support came from Ovshinsky’s connection with Alcoholics Anonymous, which his old friend Bill W. (William Griffith Wilson) and his partner Dr. Bob (Robert Holbrook Smith) had founded in Akron in 1935. Wilson told Ovshinsky, “All these drunks that I know, they run banks, they run big companies,” and he convinced several friends who were recovering alcoholics to support ECL. Wilson, who would sleep in the attic when he visited Stan and Iris’s home in Detroit, later served on the company’s board of directors.15
A substantial addition to ECL’s operating budget came in March 1960 with the settlement of the Ovshinsky brothers’ dispute with Robert Allen about his takeover of the Ovitron Company. Since he had no case, his lawyers forced him to settle, and the Ovshinsky brothers won $96,000 to be divided equally between them. Stan divided his half with Norma as part of their divorce settlement, which was then being negotiated but not completed until two years later, on March 28, 1962. The $24,000 that he and Iris received covered ECL expenses (salaries, rent, equipment, and supplies) for the time being. When Stan asked Iris whether there was something she might like to buy with the money, she recalled saying “a set of matched towels would be my interest, not all these different old towels we have around.” Iris insisted that financially “we were okay,” if not flush. “We even went to Florida once for a vacation. And we’d go to New York occasionally.”
Early Energy Conversion Work
In its early days, ECL seemed to lack a well-defined research program. With unlimited ambitions but limited experience and resources, Ovshinsky’s initial experiments with energy conversion had inconclusive results, though some anticipated later successes. One yielded a high-temperature lithium battery, whose prototype was patented and gained support for a while from the Lithium Corporation of America.16 But when that funding ended, so did Ovshinsky’s battery work for nearly two decades. Another thermoelectric device attempted to get energy by splitting and recombining hydrogen molecules and at least succeeded in producing a mysterious spot of bright light without heat. Ovshinsky was unsure about the validity of his results, however, and didn’t pursue the idea further.17
More generally, Ovshinsky thought about how to use hydrogen as a clean fuel, starting a quest he would pursue for half a century. He conceived of a complete energy system he called the “hydrogen loop,” in which solar-generated electricity would electrolyze water and create the hydrogen to be used as fuel either in combustion, fuel cells, or other devices. The hydrogen would, of course, need to be stored safely; that problem would only be solved at ECD two decades later. It is notable, however, that at the outset of his energy work Ovshinsky was already thinking not just of individual inventions but of systems.18 And eventually Ovshinsky’s interest in hydrogen bore fruit when ECD’s hydrogen storage program led to the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery, a hydrogen fuel cell, and a hydrogen-powered car (see chapter 9).
Figure 5.4 Explaining the hydrogen loop.
Figure 5.5 Experimenting with hydrogen conversion, 1960.
The Early ECL Family
ECL began as a family operation, and even when the company eventually grew to employ over a thousand staff members it kept some of that family feeling (see chapter 7). In its earliest days, Iris would join Stan at the storefront soon after getting Robin and Steven off to school, typically beginning her day’s work with a visit to the library to find articles and books for Stan. Herb, now the sole head of General Automation, continued to work in the storefront too until December 1960, when he moved his company to Troy, but both before and after that he would help Stan and Iris any way he could.
The first paid employees were high school students who worked after school or on weekends and two young men from the nearby drug store who worked at ECL during their off hours and learned how to mix chemicals and run tests. Among the high school students was fifteen-year-old Harley Shaiken, whom Ovshinsky came to consider “like my son.” Harley had met Stan and Iris through their early involvement in the civil rights movement, first on a picket line protesting Woolworth’s segregated lunch counters in the South, then at a meeting of the Congress on Racial Equality (CORE), whose Detroit chapter Stan had helped organize. Harley could sense immediately how, as Stan talked about the larger context of a civil rights protest, his mind connected politics with everything else in life, with “a generosity and an openness and an engagement that I’ve never seen.” The encounter had a lasting influence on the young man.
Max Powell, the first African American and one of the longest serving among ECL’s and ECD’s employees, also began working part-time in 1960, when he had a small office-cleaning business. A few years later, Stan persuaded him to join ECL full time as the official driver, a role he performed for many years. Born in 1910 in Selma, Alabama, Max had moved north to get away from racial violence after seeing one of his friends tied up with fireworks that were then set off.19 Max appreciated Stan’s intelligence, but was just as impressed with Iris: “She was the glue that brought together whatever he had.” He also noted that Stan and Iris were “never further apart than they could touch each other.” All the children loved Max, who soon became a family member and friend who would take them out for candy and share his life experience, making them more aware of problems like racism.20
In July 1963, at about the time that Max began working full-time at ECL, another long-serving employee joined the laboratory. Lionel Robbins, an electrical engineer who had worked in sales at Perkin-Elmer, was able to understand Ovshinsky’s technology and consider its commercial possibilities. As Robbins saw it, his job was to “to find people who could figure out a way to bring the technology into their product lines,” and he had some success. With a conversational facility that Ovshinsky lacked, he also assumed the role of guide, leading visitors through the laboratory and explaining its work.
Family Life
Iris and Stan were committed to making their new family succeed, but there were predictable complications. Robin and Steven came to love their “Stan-Dad,” who was happy to help raise them. At the same time, they continued to miss their father Andy, whom they would see some half dozen times a year and for a month in the summer; he would also call them once a week. In time, Andy remarried, but he never accepted Stan.
Also harboring resentment, Norma made it difficult for Stan’s boys to see him and Iris in the years before they were legally married. Like Harvey, Ben admitted reflecting a lot of the “antagonism and some degree of hostility” that he absorbed from Norma back to Iris, and he later felt grateful that “Iris took it well. She was quite saintly.” In turn, Robin and Steven heard Norma described in bitter terms at home, especially when she asked for more money or tried to curtail Stan’s visits with the boys. Robin remembered being asked to ring the bell at Norma’s house one day when they had come to pick up the boys for the weekend. She braced herself and was ready to run if a “witch-like person” appeared. Then “this very nice lady opened the door and said, ‘Would you like to come in?’”21
On March 30, 1962, two days after Stan and Norma were divorced, Stan and Iris were married in Toledo by a justice of the peace. But in true anarchist fashion, they considered their formal marriage but a legal detail, “an unimportant event,” Iris said. In later years they often forgot to celebrate their wedding anniversary, but neither ever forgot their two important dates: Stan’s birthday, November 24, marking the day when Iris, Robin, and Steven arrived in Detroit, and January 1, marking the day in 1955 “when we fell in love.” To have one less date to remember, they decided to celebrate their marriage each year on New Year’s Eve.
After Stan and Iris’s marriage, Ben, Harvey, and Dale were able to visit them on a regular schedule that included both a weekend and a weekday. Iris would cook “some wonderful meal that the kids would enjoy, like spaghetti.” And, as she recalled, “We’d try to do things together as a whole family as often as possible. We’d go to an art museum, or to Greenfield Village.” In summer, “we’d take the car for a picnic and go swimming.” Whenever possible, Iris would separate the children, so that she or Stan could do something special with each of them. Harvey particularly enjoyed the times when Stan took him to buy magic tricks or monster masks, and he fondly remembers the time when Stan took him to see the monster film Gorgo. Stan was generous in supporting Harvey’s interests, buying him a chemistry set and a telescope when he showed interest in science, and then “a great little printing press with rubber stamps and ink pads” when he began focusing on journalism, an aspiration Iris encouraged by typing what he wrote. One of Harvey’s most prized childhood possessions is a letter he received from Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling, who wrote to him with advice on how to become a writer. “Unbeknownst to me, Dad and Iris framed the letter. They wanted to surprise me, and they did.”
But the children’s lives were also restricted by Stan and Iris’s political beliefs. Stan prevented them from watching TV shows like Zorro because of its violence, or Victory at Sea because it glorified war. The boys were also not allowed to join the Cub or Boy Scouts because, as Ben recalled, “they were a ‘para-military fascist youth organization.’”22The younger children were also kept from scouting; instead, Robin recalled, “Mom started an after-school science club for Steven, me, and friends.”
As children, the boys did not share Stan and Iris’s political passion and found standing on picket lines intimidating. “I probably knew segregation was wrong,” Harvey said, “but I wanted to swim at the local swimming pool, not protest against it.” Ben enjoyed the UAW Labor Day parades with their hotdogs at the end, but like Harvey and Steven, he found some of the CORE and SANE (Society for a Sane Nuclear Policy) protests “scary a little bit.”23When younger, Ben would be disappointed when told on Saturday mornings that they would be going off to picket rather than test cars in Milford, but by the time he was eighteen, in 1964, he went south in an old VW Microbus and spent six months in Mississippi living in tar-paper shacks to help register voters for the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. Being younger, Steven “enjoyed all of the songs and May Day celebrations without knowing completely what was going on.” But despite any misgivings about joining their parents at demonstrations, all the children were proud that their family stood up against social evils.
Dale, who was ten at the time Iris joined Stan, continued to struggle developmentally. When he was fifteen, Norma and Stan sent him to a special school on an Arizona ranch, where he thrived. The school psychologist took him with her to the library at the local university, where she was studying for her PhD, and where Dale could read books that weren’t available at the school. “I will always be grateful for that,” he said, “and proud of the fact that in the Rorschach test she gave me I scored high on creativity.” Stan and Iris were proud too, but not surprised. Still, during this time their relationship with Dale was uncertain and tentative. At one point, Iris recalled, he “didn’t want to see us at all.” But when they stopped off in Arizona to see him while traveling to California, “he was thrilled,” especially when they took him on a trip in the desert. And then “he was very close again.” After Norma and her husband moved to Los Angeles, Dale left the ranch school to live with them and attended Rexford Junior and Senior High School, a private academy in Beverly Hills.
An exceptionally sweet child, Dale eventually became articulate and well read about the things he found interesting. “Despite his struggles,” Harvey said, “Dale always had the biggest and most generous heart of all the brothers, and in his own way, the most clever sense of humor.” Much later, he moved to Florida where he became a born-again Christian, proud of his Jewish heritage but “a devoted believer in Jesus as my Messiah.” Stan and Iris were happy that Dale now had a circle of friends, but they were not pleased when he passed out religious tracts at Robin’s wedding. Every year Stan would bring Dale to Detroit for his birthday. On those visits, Max listened with interest to Dale’s stories about his life in Florida. Marveling at the power of Dale’s memory, Max suspected that Dale was “the other genius in the family.”
All the children enjoyed visiting the storefront, typically on weekends or after school. Only later did Steven realize that Stan and Iris took them because “they didn’t have enough money for baby-sitters.” Harvey likened the storefront to Santa’s workshop. “Drilling holes in shards of plexiglass was especially fun.” Robin remembered being “given little jobs,” like pressing the amorphous material for switches. She was pleased that her switch, dubbed the Robin Device, “worked the best.” Steven, who often played his violin there, remembered the fun of going to the corner ice cream shop with Max and looking under the counter at “the incredible number of pieces of gum that people had stuck there.” Explaining their father’s livelihood was at times challenging for the children. Harvey at twelve told Stan he felt he couldn’t tell his teacher that his father was an inventor, because from the teacher’s viewpoint Stan was not a “real” inventor like Alexander Graham Bell or Thomas Edison. Stan replied, “Tell them I'm an engineer if it will make you feel better.”
Stan and Iris tried to give the children some sense of their Jewish heritage, sending his boys to Shalom Aleichem, a secular Yiddish school, and all the children to a social democratic Workmen’s Circle school. But unlike Stan, the children did not take to their Jewish cultural training. Ben recalled attending Yiddish school with Harley Shaiken at the Workmen’s Circle. It was “too many afternoons a week, and I never learned a single word of Yiddish except ‘schmuck.’” When Harvey at thirteen did not want a bar mitzvah, Stan and Iris gave him a used Nikon camera and thirteen volumes of an encyclopedia that he wanted. Norma was not impressed and complained that Stan and Iris were “buying his love.”
In August 1962 the family was suddenly evicted from their house on Gilchrist after Stan and Iris invited several black CORE members to a meeting there. The landlord, who had been contacted by a neighbor, arrived the next day to say he would no longer be renting the house. Iris remembered him peering into their living room and muttering, “You read a lot, don’t you?” She regretted having paid two months’ rent in advance. Now the family had to find a new house immediately, and Iris needed to enroll the children in new schools so they could begin on time in the fall.
Moving was already on the agenda by then because ECL needed more space. They had been thinking about moving the company to Troy and so started looking at houses in Birmingham, a pleasant nearby town with good schools. After three or four landlords turned them down because they were Jewish, they found a lovely house to rent at 1692 Villa Road and again decorated it beautifully. For the next two years, until Stan finally did move the company to Troy, he and Herb, who lived in Detroit but worked in Troy, often passed each other as they drove to or from work.
As it happened, the family moved to Birmingham the week when Stan and Iris had organized a SANE meeting to discuss nuclear fallout, an issue that worried many Americans then. Fearing the radiation exposure from strontium 90, Iris would “give the kids powdered milk.”24 Stan and Iris advertised the meeting in the local Birmingham paper with a full-page ad sponsored by SANE and signed prominently by “Stan Ovshinsky, chairman,” and “Iris Ovshinsky, vice-chairman.” But instead of listing the Central Methodist Church as the address for the meeting, the ad erroneously gave the address of their new home. “We were so afraid that our landlady would say ‘Go,’” said Iris, but she apparently never saw the ad.
Open housing was another issue Stan and Iris took up in that period. When one successful black man in the insurance business was denied a certain home, Stan bought it and sold it to him.25 Max Powell remembered a huge gathering that Stan and Iris arranged at Birmingham’s Society Hall on Woodlawn where Stan explained how the existing housing laws discriminated against blacks. At the same time he reassured the concerned whites, “If they can afford it, you don’t need to worry.” Even though many on the Birmingham city council opposed open housing, with Stan’s advocacy there were enough votes to push an amendment through.
Robin and Steven both loved Birmingham, which Robin compared to “a little New England village, nicer than where we lived in Detroit.” They attended the Adams Elementary School, and their neighborhood was filled with children. “We ran around with a gang of twenty-one kids,” recalled Robin, who especially recalled playing on the railroad tracks, while Steven remembered meeting with kids in the street. Although still very shy, he recalled, “By the end of the first day, I was playing with everybody.”
After the move, Stan’s boys interacted with Robin and Steven more than they had earlier. Steven and Robin felt as though they were in a younger generation, but “we never had any problems of feeling that we didn’t want them around,” Steven reflected. “Harvey was the most involved with us. He would make up these wonderfully creative hide and seek kind of games, almost like treasure hunts.” During one phase, sixteen-year-old Ben wasn’t getting along with Norma and moved into the basement of the Villa house. It was about then that Ben won a scholarship to attend the summer program of the Choate school in Connecticut, and the school’s Russian travel program took Ben to Europe in 1963.
In Birmingham, Stan and Iris entertained guests even more often than they had on Gilchrist. Iris always cooked, and the children found interacting with the guests educational and pleasurable. “One thing that was always very consistent,” Steven recalled, was “this sense of the conversation around the table. Stan was always the dynamic leader, and the content always concerned important matters in the world.” Their many dinner guests included the eminent biochemist Linus Pauling, the physicist Edward Teller, the Alcoholics Anonymous co-founder Bill Wilson, the pioneers in LSD research Abram Hoffer and Humphry Osmond, the great socialist and pacifist Norman Thomas, and Fenner (now Baron) Brockway, who in 1964 had been made a life peer and taken a seat in the House of Lords.26 Whenever Thomas visited, he would sing the old labor songs with Stan and the children. The physicist Hellmut Fritzsche (whose relationship with Ovshinsky is introduced later in this chapter) would play violin with young Steven. A visitor from the Swedish company L. M. Ericsson, which became one of Stan’s first licensees for his chalcogenide switches, arranged for Ben to work in one of their factories in Sweden during the summer of 1964.
It was only much later that any of the children realized how hard Iris was working. While Stan “was in charge of the company,” said Harvey, she was “in charge of him and the family.” Steven recalled, “My mom managed to cook these amazing meals” after working all day. She would still be at work when he and Robin called to let her know that they were home from school, and then “she so patiently heard every little detail of our day. It wasn’t until decades later I thought about how generous that was and how wonderful,” said Steven. He also recalled that when Stan and Iris occasionally went on a business trip without them, Iris sometimes took “one of her handkerchiefs, and put her kisses in it and tied it up, and gave it to us. What I remember is that sometimes those were soaked with our tears by the time they got home. So there were times when we definitely were missing them.”27 The family did not always eat at home. “Once in a blue moon they would order pizza,” recalled Steven. But “best of all was going to this place called the New York Bagel Factory in the Jewish Detroit neighborhood known as Dexter-Davison. The four of us would be in the car, and we would buy a bag of hot bagels, a big package of Philadelphia cream cheese, an entire Hebrew National salami, and a half gallon of skim milk. And then like savages, we’d just eat the salami, and dip the bagels in the cream cheese, and drink the milk.”
The Search for New Switching Materials
In 1960 Ovshinsky’s development as an inventor reached a crucial juncture. His early work on energy conversion and his other ideas like the oxide film computer had not yielded any important results, and he was blocked by the settlement of the Allen suit from developing the Ovitron, his most important invention so far. The settlement provided funds to keep ECL going, but he could use neither the design nor the same materials. Yet as he sought better materials and a better design, Ovshinsky managed to turn this setback into an advance. His persistent search led to the breakthrough discovery of a new switching effect in the invention of his threshold and memory switches, the greatest achievement of his career as an independent inventor.
Tracing his path to these discoveries offers our best chance of understanding Ovshinsky’s idiosyncratic, intuitive creative process. We have to depend mostly on his later recollections, in which some gaps necessarily remain, but we can still assemble an account showing how several strands in Ovshinsky’s experience combined here. Ever since the time he built the Benjamin Lathe, he had been thinking about the limit switches used in lathes and milling machines that had the function of stopping or turning around the pieces being machined. These electromechanical switches often failed in an environment of metal chips, cutting oil, and constant vibration. Becoming dirty, they sometimes did not turn on when the contacts of the relay touched. Ovshinsky initially experienced this failure as an annoyance, but then he found that when he increased the voltage the contacts would conduct. He realized, as he later told Hellmut Fritzsche: “If that is so, I don’t need the relay. If that part [the film of dirt] is nonconducting, but with the higher voltage it does conduct, it is by itself a switch.”
Another strand came out of the nerve cell analogy that had resulted in the Ovitron. In his earlier thinking about nerve cells as switches, their semi-permeable membranes were the key to transmitting signals, just as the oxide layer on the tantalum electrodes was the key to the Ovitron’s switching behavior (see chapter 4). He believed that both thin films changed from insulating to conducting when the nerve impulses or voltage passed a threshold, and at some point he realized that the oxide layer he needed to replace had an amorphous structure. Could he draw directly on such disorder in materials to build a better switch than the Ovitron? This was an important step. In thinking along such lines, Ovshinsky was boldly diverging from the work of nearly every other researcher in the area of solids, who considered amorphous and disordered structures as useless “dirt materials.”28
Almost all solid-state physicists dismissed amorphous and disordered materials in favor of crystals, with their rigidly ordered lattice structure, and standard textbooks on solids like Frederick Seitz’s classic typically began with a presentation of the different possible crystalline structures.29 This bias was not an irrational prejudice. It followed from the history of the whole field, which began with crystallography and became systematic through the fundamental achievements of quantum mechanics, which enabled physicists to develop formal accounts of solids at the atomic level.30 Furthermore, crystals had become the basis for the growing semiconductor industry that took off with the invention of the transistor in 1947, and it was supposed that their success depended on their regular periodic structure. There were thus both strong theoretical and practical reasons for preferring crystals, and we need to recall that consensus to appreciate just how independent and original Ovshinsky’s intuitions were.
Figure 5.6 Regular periodic structure of a crystal (a) and irregular structure of an amorphous (glassy) material (b). Adapted from Zallen, The Physics of Amorphous Solids, 12.
By turning to amorphous materials for switches, Ovshinsky opened up a new line of research that would be enormously productive. He made a major effort to learn what was known about amorphous and disordered materials. The only book with any information at all on the subject was Thomas James Gray’s, The Defect Solid State, published in 1957.31 But while the book covered the notion of materials having defects in their periodic structure, and spent many pages discussing glass, it did not deal with the electrochemical aspects that Ovshinsky was most concerned with. Indeed, the very designation of amorphous solids as “defect materials” presupposed the unquestioned crystalline norm that then prevailed, what he would later call “the tyranny of periodic constraints.”
As Ovshinsky came to realize, even crystals are typically disordered at their surfaces, where their periodic structure is interrupted, and in fact the success of the field-effect transistor, the basis of the microchip, depended on its thin surface layer of amorphous silicon oxide.32 Focusing on surfaces, as he had already done with the Ovitron, led Ovshinsky to work on creating thin amorphous films that, like the insulating film of dirt on the lathe relays, would act by themselves as switches. This was another adventurous step: making switches from thin films was radically original.33
Searching for materials to make thin films, Ovshinsky began working through the periodic table of elements, visualizing their electronic structures and looking for those that might offer the mechanisms he needed. Gray’s book on defect solids briefly mentioned tellurium and selenium, two of the chalcogens, the elements grouped under oxygen in the sixth column of the periodic table (group 16 in the present numbering). He began to think that compounds of these elements, chalcogenides, might be promising replacements for the oxides he had used in the Ovitron, because like oxygen, the chalcogens all have a valence of two, with six electrons in their outer shells.34
Ovshinsky tried to learn what was known about chalcogenide glasses and other amorphous materials. He attended scientific meetings of those studying glass but found them uninformative, despite the fact that the technology of glass is thousands of years old. He already understood from his experience with metallurgy that when molten material is cooled rapidly onto a cold substrate it does not form crystals. Beyond that, the scientists studying glasses were thinking only about their optical properties, ignoring their electronic structure and surfaces. He learned little more in visiting the existing research labs. At Xerox in Rochester, New York, people were friendly, but when he asked to see their amorphous work, “they said that they had none.” “But your drums are amorphous,” he pointed out, a fact Xerox later acknowledged. (They were made of amorphous selenium.)
There is one other possible source of guidance for Ovshinsky’s choice of the chalcogenides. In attending meetings and reading about amorphous materials around 1960, he may have come across the work of Boris Kolomiets, who with his collaborators at the Ioffe Institute in Leningrad had been studying amorphous chalcogenides and describing their properties in Russian journal papers since the mid-1950s. This, however, seems unlikely. Ovshinsky typically did not hesitate to get in touch with leading workers in areas he was interested in, but there is no record of any communication with Kolomiets or of any visit to Russia before 1967, and he never mentioned meeting Kolomiets before they met in 1967 (see chapter 6). In any case, although the Kolomiets group reported the semiconducting behavior of the chalcogenides in 1956, and extensively studied their electrical and optical properties, Kolomiets did not observe switching because his experiments used bulk materials instead of the thin films that Ovshinsky worked with.35 Indeed, Ovshinsky’s use of thin films distinguished his approach from those of nearly every other researcher in the field at that time and was crucial to his success.
Finding little help from others, Ovshinsky had to depend on his own intuitions as he considered the chalcogenides. He was especially intrigued by selenium and tellurium, which, unlike sulfur, have a molecular chain structure that reminded him of DNA, whose double helix chain structure was continuing to be widely discussed. (The discovery of this structure, which was published in Nature in 1953, would be recognized with the Nobel Prize in 1963.) To Ovshinsky the DNA discovery showed that a non-crystalline double chain structure with cross-links between the chains could carry information. As he later put it, “I chose tellurium because it was chained like that.”36This was another fruitful analogy, which, like the nerve cell, bridged organic and inorganic structures.
Ovshinsky was already prepared to appreciate the significance of such chain structures, drawing on a strand of experience that started two decades earlier than his thinking about switches. While working at Goodrich in 1941 he had taken a seminar on the chemistry of rubber, which he learned was a polymer composed of long molecular chains connected by cross-links.37 Reinforcing the DNA analogy, his recognition of the shared polymer structure engaged Ovshinsky’s distinctive ability to visualize molecules, and helped to confirm his choice of the chalcogenides. He later described his search for new switching materials: “I wanted something that could have cross-links, and none of the elements except the group 6 really has that. I wanted something that has built-in plasticity and flexibility,” presumably because he believed that would facilitate making thin films. He focused on tellurium and found that to get the switching effect he needed, “tellurium by itself doesn't work. It has to be able to have cross-links with other elements. And,” he added, “because I was brought up in Akron, Ohio, I was familiar with polymers and cross-links. Because that’s what rubber tires are made out of.”
Ovshinsky would learn to create cross-links in tellurium by adding small amounts of other elements such as germanium or arsenic. The role of these cross-links was explained in microscopic terms only later, when he could collaborate with trained physicists to publish scientific accounts of his discoveries (see chapter 6).38But well in advance of theoretical explanations, Ovshinsky’s intuitions led him to choose these elements and experiment with using them in different combinations. He could not afford expensive evaporation and deposition equipment for creating thin films, so he ground his materials into powders and experimented with combining them, like a modern alchemist seeking the magical formula. To help him test different ratios of elements, he built a small box he called his “universal tester,” where he pressed together the various powders and probed them with the electrical leads of his homemade oscilloscope.
Trying to achieve greater stability and conductivity, he combined tellurium with elements like arsenic or antimony from neighboring groups. When he inserted his probes into these powders, he saw an erratic switching effect on his oscilloscope, but he did not yet have a reliable switch. Then a new possibility occurred to him. The powders in the stagnant air of the storefront had given Ovshinsky a mild case of arsenic and tellurium poisoning, but they also gave him an idea. Suspecting that the polluted air had deposited an invisibly thin film on the micrometer he would carry in his toolmaker’s apron for measuring thicknesses, he attached a power source across the calipers and connected the leads to his homemade oscilloscope, which he had configured as a curve tracer, the X-axis showing voltage, the Y-axis showing current. He brought the calipers together and gradually increased the voltage. A dramatic “cross” pattern appeared on the screen. This could be called his eureka moment: Ovshinsky had in effect created his first amorphous threshold switch, for which the cross became the electronic signature.
Figure 5.7 Oscilloscope trace of the “cross” pattern.
Ovshinsky immediately sensed the importance of his discovery. The cross pattern indicated an extremely rapid, almost instantaneous switching (now known as the Ovshinsky effect) from insulating to conducting and back. Its symmetry showed that its behavior, unlike that of a diode or transistor, was reversible and bipolar.39No one else had seen this effect before. Ovshinsky’s hunch about making semiconductor switches from thin films of amorphous materials had been confirmed. Now he needed to learn how to reproduce the effect reliably.
To repeat the experiment systematically, Ovshinsky had to control the composition of the film, both the elements in it and their proportions, which was a demanding process. Still working with finely ground powders, he mixed different elements, heating and pressing them down in thin layers on a substrate. “Then I’d put electrodes on it,” he said, “and it worked.” He had done related metallurgical work much earlier when he was still in high school, hot-pressing powders. “I was used to mixing different elements into powders to get different things, right out of trade school,” he recalled. Even then, he would try to use as many different elements as possible that would hold together. Now again, he experimented with heating and compressing his combinations of disordered materials into thin layers. “I kept on making them thinner and thinner and they still worked,” he said. “And these were new things.”
Before following Ovshinsky’s next steps, we should pause to consider the historical implications of his breakthrough discovery. The thin-film amorphous chalcogenide semiconductors that developed from his threshold switch have found their principal applications in advanced information technologies, in devices such as phase-change optical and electronic memories (see chapter 10). Yet the story of his discovery takes place in a world far removed from the sites where accounts of the birth and growth of the information age are usually set. From the advanced research facilities of Bell Labs, where the transistor was created by highly trained physicists, to the rigorously controlled environments of the contemporary cleanrooms that are essential for microelectronic research and fabrication, semiconductor technology depends on resources and conditions that were notably lacking in the ECL storefront. And yet Ovshinsky’s discovery was made not just in spite of those deficiencies but also in some respects because of them.
The key here is dirt. The insulating thin film of dirt on the limit switches that conducted when the voltage was turned up, the polluted air that left a thin film on the micrometer in his toolmaker’s apron—all evoke the dirty environment of the shop floor and the tool room. Amorphous semiconductors have their material roots in the blue-collar working-class environment where their inventor had his social roots, just as his empirical research methods have their roots in the artisanal practices he began while in trade school.40And this impurity continued in the technology developed from these dirty materials: Ovshinsky’s threshold switch did not require the crystalline purity and perfection of silicon semiconductors or the delicate precision required to make them, and as he loved to demonstrate, its functioning was unaffected by contamination or rough handling.
Early Promotional Efforts
Soon the Quantrol (Ovshinsky’s original name for his threshold switch, because he believed that it worked by quantum control) began to receive attention and some support.41The British company Electronic Machine Control, Ltd. not only bought the first license (November 30, 1962) but also held a press conference in January 1963 at the Savoy Hotel in London to announce the new device.42One of the problems they encountered in the demonstration arose because the Quantrol was an AC device and the Savoy was one of the few DC hotels in London. Iris also remembered working in stadium boots “because it was so cold,” and that “when Stan would come back to the Savoy Hotel carrying his oscilloscope, the doorman didn’t want to let him in because he looked like a worker.” A larger problem, shown by the transcript of the press conference, was the frequent frustration of the audience with Ovshinsky’s explanations.43
By the summer of 1963, Ovshinsky had made some progress in promoting his new switch, but his efforts to attract major funding had failed. He realized that to succeed he would need an endorsement from a well-known scientist whose work was “beyond reproach or prejudice.” He sought out John Bardeen, famous for the invention of the transistor and the discovery of the BCS (Bardeen, Cooper, and Schrieffer) theory of superconductivity. Bardeen had already won the first of his two Nobel Prizes, in 1956, for the invention of the transistor.44
Ovshinsky didn’t know Bardeen, but he picked up the phone and dialed.45 Bardeen’s secretary came on the line and told him that Bardeen was in Pittsburgh. “Why don’t I connect you?” Ovshinsky thought this odd, but soon a voice answered and said, “This is John Bardeen.” Ovshinsky began, “You don’t know me at all, but I know of course who you are.” He explained that he had called to talk about “something that has to be seen to be really believed. It’s new and there’s nothing like it in semiconductors.” Bardeen started to explain that he didn’t do that kind of consulting, but when he heard that the device was non-rectifying he knew it was based on new physics. “Are you telling me,” Ovshinsky recalled Bardeen asking, “that there is no PN junction, that it’s not a rectifying junction?” “Yes, absolutely,” he replied. “That’s very interesting,” Bardeen said. Ovshinsky could hear him flip through his date book. “I can make it in December,” he said. At that, Ovshinsky blurted out, “Professor Bardeen, we’ll be broke by then.” Bardeen then suggested two physicists who might be able to come out sooner, either Hellmut Fritzsche, a young professor at the University of Chicago, or Nick Holonyak, who had been Bardeen’s first graduate student at the University of Illinois. Ovshinsky chose Fritzsche because he had read a paper by him on tellurium in Science magazine.46 He thought Fritzsche would be interested. As Ovshinsky recalled, Bardeen said, “Well, Hellmut is a fine physicist. You’ll really enjoy him. And he’s going to be tough.”47
Fritzsche was indeed an excellent choice. He was already working with the disordered systems created by embedding impurities in crystals. Trained by the great Karl Lark-Horovitz, the head of the physics department at Purdue University, he had been studying the tunneling conduction observed at low temperatures in germanium with high concentrations of randomly distributed impurities, such as arsenic or antimony. Studying conduction in amorphous materials sounded to Fritzsche like a relatively small step, and he felt fully prepared. “All my instruments in Chicago were ready to be turned on to the electrical properties of Stan’s materials.”
Before arranging the visit, Fritzsche had to consult his wife Sybille, then expecting the third of their four children. Her due date was three weeks away, but she agreed to let him visit Detroit for one day. The visit, which probably occurred on Friday, August 30, 1963, “profoundly changed my life,” Fritzsche recalled almost forty years later. It was “the beginning of a most fruitful and exciting collaboration and a deeply enriching friendship that includes all our family members.”48
Fritzsche remembered Max Powell meeting him at the airport.49 As they drove in, he eyed all the big buildings they passed and looked for a prominent sign that said Energy Conversion Laboratory. He saw none. They eventually parked on a nondescript street in front of an unimpressive storefront without any sign. Ovshinsky greeted his visitor and led him into his office, where Fritzsche particularly recalled being impressed by Ovshinsky’s many books.
Ovshinsky took Fritzsche back into the storefront’s laboratory space and showed him the threshold switch with its crossed wires coated at their point of contact with a virtually invisible layer of amorphous and disordered material. When Fritzsche saw the symmetrical cross pattern on the oscilloscope, he realized he was dealing with something new. “I saw that the material was highly resistive, but at a certain voltage level it switched to a very, very conducting state. And then it switched back to the insulating state. That was completely miraculous.”50 He asked what was in the thin film coating the wires; germanium, tellurium, silicon, and arsenic, Ovshinsky told him. Fritzsche had worked extensively with germanium and tellurium and felt he knew their behaviors. “But a mixture of all of these would not form a crystal,” he said. Ovshinsky explained that the material was not a crystal, and that, unlike a crystalline material, “the exact composition is not that important.” This contrasted sharply with the extreme sensitivity of crystals to their exact composition, and Fritzsche was also amazed by how insensitive the amorphous film was to rough handling. The electrical characteristic did not change when Ovshinsky wiped the wire, or even when he stepped on it. It also made no difference whether or not the surface was dirty. “So after studying crystalline semiconductors where the surface is of extreme importance and the material composition is very delicately chosen,” Fritzsche recalled, “I realized that this was a completely new phenomenon and a completely new material. And, of course, my interest was at a high point.”
Fritzsche was also taken by the forty-year-old Ovshinsky’s “immense intellect, exuberance, and personal warmth.” As the two sat and spoke about the switch and amorphous materials, he realized that Ovshinsky had read extensively in the scientific literature on semiconductors and tellurium and had done a thorough literature search. Ovshinsky showed him his cabinets filled with scientific papers, and pointed to the files that covered all the surfaces.51 Fritzsche noticed that he had even read “some of the Russian literature and some of the books on glasses. He knew much more than I knew at that time.”
Ovshinsky meanwhile was forming his impressions of the thirty-six-year-old Fritzsche. The professor from Chicago seemed “very young” yet sure of himself as a scientist. It seemed to Ovshinsky that Fritzsche initially “thought that I knew nothing about the subject that I was working with.” As he recalled, Fritzsche walked into his lab and said, “Mr. Ovshinsky, I am a detective. Just let me in the laboratory to see it, to work with it, and I will explain it to you at the end of the day. I will solve your problem.” Ovshinsky was not so sure about that and decided just to leave him alone. “At the end of the day,” he recalled, Fritzsche “was a very chastened human being,” uttering expressions such as “I don’t understand it. I can’t explain it. All I know is it may be more important than the transistor.” He finally asked, “What can I do to help?” Ovshinsky replied, “Just become our consultant.” Fritzsche agreed.
As ECL’s first physics consultant, Fritzsche visited often, helping on several fronts as friend, interpreter, collaborator, and when necessary a firewall between Ovshinsky and the scientific community. To begin, he devoted much time to translating Ovshinsky’s accounts into language that scientists, engineers, and patent attorneys could understand. To help build a strong patent position Fritzsche worked with the Chicago-based patent attorney Charles (Chuck) Spangenberg, who began working with ECL at about the same time he did, and the two traveled widely in Europe to file applications.
Patents would become increasingly important as the company grew, and Ovshinsky focused increasing attention on his patent department. Much of his legacy would rest on his ability to protect his intellectual property through strong and broad controlling patents, as well as a policy of developing the next generation technology before others could. While in future years, many companies would attempt to use ECD’s technologies without paying for them, Ovshinsky’s patent coverage typically resulted either in their paying hefty fines or becoming an ECD partner or licensee—sometimes both.
Fritzsche also responded to commercial inquiries and met potential patrons. He helped draft nondisclosure agreements, which, at $10,000 each, kept ECL going for a while. By November 1963, he recalled, “I was already engaged in conferences and negotiations with West Bend, DuPont, Crystallite Division in Toledo, the National Cash Register Company in Dayton, Eriksson of Sweden, the North American Phillips Laboratories, and the North American Aviation Science Center.”52Some companies had novel uses in mind for the switches. One Illinois manufacturer wanted to use them as sensors in coffee pots to turn off the power when the water boiled.
By October 1963, Ovshinsky had submitted his foundational patent application for the threshold switch, “Symmetrical Current Controlling Device,” and was publishing data on his chalcogenide switches based on tellurium alloys (with arsenic, silicon, and germanium).53 There were articles on the Quantrol in Electronics and Control Engineering. The one in the April 1964 issue of Control Engineering seems to be the first that received much attention. Ads for the new switch later featured a stunning photograph demonstrating the novelty and simplicity of the device: two crossed wires with the active film at their point of contact.54
Figure 5.8 Ovonic threshold switch ad (designed by Ed Watkins).
Almost in passing, the last section of the article also mentions a second switch, a memory device that was a serendipitous offshoot of the threshold switch research. Its discovery came from an accident that Ovshinsky’s prepared mind was able to interpret and seize upon. The assistant from the drug store, who was studying the characteristic cross pattern of the threshold switch’s transition from high to low resistance and back, came to him very upset because he could not make the device he was testing switch anymore. Once it had switched, it remained in the low-resistance conducting state, so he threw it away. Ovshinsky retrieved the discarded device from the trash, gave it a strong pulse, and it again became a non-conductor. He immediately realized the importance of what he’d discovered: a bi-stable device based on a slightly different composition of the material used in the threshold switch, which could become the basis of a fast rewritable electrical memory.55Later known as the phase-change memory, this switch would eventually become recognized as one of Ovshinsky’s most important discoveries.56
Leaving Birmingham, the Storefront, and Wayne State
One day in the fall of 1964 the doorbell rang at the Ovshinsky home on Villa. Robin came to the door. A deliveryman had “something for the people who are moving to Squirrel Road” then still a dirt road in Bloomfield Hills. “We’re not moving,” Robin said, but Steven, then in fifth grade, pushed past and said, “Yes, that’s us.” When Robin asked Steven about it, he replied, “I can’t tell you.” He had overheard Stan and Iris talking about the family’s upcoming move to Bloomfield Hills, but Iris had told Steven not to tell anyone because they were trying to keep the news from Norma, in fear she might push for more money and reopen the divorce settlement. Stan and Iris were not actually sure they could afford the new house, but Richard Cummings, the senior vice president of Stan’s bank (and later a director of ECD), had told Stan he was getting a very good price and urged him to buy. “This area will grow,” he explained. “You’re not taking any risks.” When Iris worried that the location was isolated, the banker said, “Buy a dog.” The kids loved Buffy, their huge white Great Pyrenees, but they couldn’t keep the dog because it gave Stan serious asthma attacks.
Again, Iris and Stan furnished their new house to suit their life style, with books and study space everywhere. The ten-acre wooded property around the house, with its small lake where they could swim in the summer, would offer enjoyment to the family and to countless visitors. Later they added an indoor pool so that the swimming could continue year-round. Robin recalled how her friends loved to spend time at her house, with its many books and its Danish modern furniture, in contrast with the chintz and white fireplace décor then popular in the wealthy Detroit suburbs. Her friends enjoyed conversing with Stan and Iris, responding well to their liberal and international perspective, which was typically quite different from their parents’.
The company also moved some months after the family moved to Bloomfield Hills (see chapter 6). It had been clear for some time that the company needed more space, and the neighborhood surrounding the storefront “was getting much too developed,” Iris commented, with “a lot of traffic.” They kept delaying the move because Stan was reluctant to slow his work. He initially dealt with the space problem by adding an annex storefront next door on the same side of the street, plus an extension laboratory two blocks away across McNichols Road.
One summer day in 1964, however, he received a serious electrical shock in the extension laboratory.57Iris wasn’t there and was simply told to come over, that Stan was ready for lunch. “They didn’t want to tell me because 6 Mile is a very big street. They didn’t want me to go running across.” And so she took her time. “I combed my hair, put on my white gloves, walked across the street, and there’s Stan lying on a stretcher.” He was hospitalized for ten days, and there was talk about his dying, because the shock had passed through his heart.58 Iris “kept saying, but you look so good, Stan.” She was incensed when he replied, “I’ll make a handsome corpse.” Although he recovered, it was now completely clear that their working space was not only too small but also unsafe.
Lionel Robbins soon found an empty warehouse suitable for the company’s work, roughly 10 miles north of the storefront at 1675 W. Maple Road in Troy. Energy Conversion Devices, renamed to reflect its increasing commercial orientation, would work in its new Troy space on Maple for four decades.59 Close to the intersection with Crooks Road, the warehouse was just one building away from Berz Airport, used for small propeller planes. A plane had once missed the field and crashed on the other side of the street. “Whenever I heard airplanes going overhead I always worried,” Ovshinsky confessed.
Figure 5.9 The new facilities in Troy, Michigan.
At the time the lab moved to Troy in February 1965, Ovshinsky stopped his neurophysiological research in the wet lab that he had set up in the storefront. The work had been difficult to continue because Morin, now chairman of the Wayne State anatomy department, had been very ill for some time. Shortly after Morin died on November 26, 1964, Ovshinsky was suddenly dropped from the Detroit Physiological Society.60And when he tried to borrow a book from the library at the medical school, a librarian told him that this would now be violating university rules. It was a great disappointment to Ovshinsky, who had considered Wayne State his academic home. He would now create his own intellectual community.
