Despite his scientific breakthroughs and technological achievements, despite the dozens of national and international honors and awards he received (listed in Appendix II), Ovshinsky would often worry that in the end, he and his life’s work would end up as only a footnote in the chronicles of science and invention. The growing importance of his phase-change memory should give him much more prominence than that, and already he has gained the kind of recognition that eluded him in his lifetime.
In May 2015 an event occurred that Ovshinsky had always hoped for but eventually stopped believing would ever happen. For his more than four hundred patents, for “dramatic improvements in battery technology, electronics and solar power, with special recognition for the invention of the first working nickel-metal hydride battery,” he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. Ovshinsky would have been pleased for many reasons. In the induction ceremony he was described as “a prolific self-taught inventor and physicist whose pioneering work in multiple fields had an impact on many aspects of modern life.” Equally important, the citation added, “Ovshinsky was known for his passion to use science and technology to solve social problems with the goal of bettering the world and the quality of life for humanity.”1 This recognition concisely notes several important features of Ovshinsky’s work. In concluding, we want to enlarge that sketch and propose some further ways of understanding his achievements and distinctive qualities.
We have called Ovshinsky “the man who saw tomorrow” to emphasize the way he recognized possibilities and grasped consequences more quickly and surely than others. This ability is most apparent in his frequently accurate predictions, predictions that initially provoked scornful disbelief, whether he was foreseeing flat screen televisions or telling General Motors engineers that their electric car would go 200 miles on his batteries. But it was already present in his early days of learning to be a machinist, when he saw that grinding his tool bits differently would reduce friction and heat, the beginning of the process that led to his first invention, the Benjamin Lathe.
Once he and Iris had started ECL, his inventive work became firmly linked with his social ideals, and his anticipations of the future joined scientific insight with the vision of a better and more beautiful world. In a small laboratory beaker he could see the possibility not only of a new kind of battery but also of using it in electric cars because he was already seeking ways to replace fossil fuels, just as from tiny experimental solar cells he looked forward to producing them by the mile, part of the effort to make solar energy cheaper than coal that continued to the end of his life. His grandest visions, like the hydrogen economy, have not yet been realized and may never be, but their scope and ambition were typical products of a mind that was always eagerly reaching into the future.
Ovshinsky’s most important scientific achievements also arose from his ability to see possibilities that others could not imagine: the enormous potential of amorphous and disordered materials. Where others had seen only defects in their irregularity, he realized that, unlike rigidly structured crystals, they offered the flexibility of compositional freedom, allowing for what he called “atomic engineering” in the design of materials with the properties he needed, whether for semiconductors or battery terminals. And because amorphous semiconductors can expand to cover large areas, devices like thin-film solar panels or flat panel displays became imaginable and achievable.
Beyond individual inventions and new materials, Ovshinsky always aimed for making connections and creating larger organizations. For him, every technological innovation started with the material and ended as a system, with the manufacture of affordable products that could change the world for the better. He often proudly told visitors to ECD, “We invented the materials. We invented the systems. We invented the manufacturing technologies.”
Pervading all of Ovshinsky’s work, whether as an independent inventor or as the leader of ECD, are his insistence on intellectual freedom and his resistance to arbitrary divisions and constraints. All his insights, and the technological innovations they led to, blend advanced physical science with commercializable technology, blurring the distinction between them. Just as his creation of new materials depended on the freedom to mix many elements, Ovshinsky claimed the freedom to cross or ignore disciplinary boundaries. To his more conventional critics, his way of mingling disciplines and his intuitive approach (not to mention his self-promotion and exaggerated claims) discredited him as a scientist, while many eminent scientists admired and were glad to work with him. Rather than rehearse the controversies that surrounded his work, the recognition or rejection he received, we find it more useful to consider a remark by the physicist Richard Zallen, an expert on amorphous solids and the author of the leading text in the field, The Physics of Amorphous Solids: “What Stan does isn’t science. What Stan does is more interesting than science.”
Both parts of Zallen’s statement are significant. To say that Ovshinsky’s work isn’t science is clearly not a criticism here but a description: what he did was not confined to the methods and goals of an established discipline (though his scientific publications show that some of his results were recognized as disciplinary contributions). To sense how what he did could seem more interesting than science, we can recall the invention of Ovshinsky’s first amorphous device, the Ovitron. He conceived it as his “nerve cell analogy,” a model for testing his theory of how neurons work, and yet the result was not a neurological discovery but a new kind of switch that led to his later threshold and memory devices. Scientific and technological strands were so closely interwoven in this discovery process that trying to separate them seems pointless. Ovshinsky was deeply engaged in neuroscience, writing papers, giving talks, and doing laboratory experiments, yet that interest had first arisen from his work in automating the Benjamin Lathe. And while the Ovitron did not in fact work quite the way he thought and so did not precisely correspond to his conception of the nerve cell, his focus on the role of the cell membrane came from an intuition that led to his use of thin films in many of his most important technologies. This mix of elements and their unexpected results can indeed make what Ovshinsky did seem more interesting than the disciplined work of normal science.2
Demonstrating the possibilities of amorphous materials itself involved a rejection of what Ovshinsky called “the tyranny of periodic constraints,” the exclusive focus on crystals. The political resonance of his terms indicates the way his inventive work is linked to his social values, not only in its aims but also in its methods. The intellectual freedom he claimed to make all kinds of connections, unconstrained by disciplinary boundaries, was inseparable from political freedom, from resisting social pressures to conform.
Finally, returning to the historical perspective we proposed at the end of the introduction, we consider once more how Ovshinsky’s work was a part of the changing world he lived in, how his career spanned and contributed to the transition from the industrial to the information age. There we noted (and in chapter 5 developed further) the way his path from the shop floor to the research laboratory suggests an alternative genealogy, in which important new information technologies emerge from the old industrial world. Here we want to stress how Ovshinsky’s unchanging social values kept him connected with his industrial roots. Had Ovshinsky moved to Silicon Valley, Joi Ito remarked, he would have been a billionaire. That was not Ovshinsky’s aim: “I never had any intention of becoming a billionaire.” He said he preferred to work “in the belly of the beast. Where else do you struggle? And without struggle we can’t change the world.”
Choosing to remain in Detroit, the declining capital of the industrial age, and struggling to transform it set Ovshinsky somewhat aside from the ascendant information economy. He insisted on energy and information as “the twin pillars of the global economy,” and he felt his energy technologies held the most promise for changing the world—indeed for saving it from the environmental consequences of industrialization. And unlike those who simply celebrate the economic and cultural shift from manufacturing to information work, Ovshinsky stayed true to his industrial roots. He always kept ECD involved in manufacturing and promoted his solar and hydrogen technologies as the means for creating new manufacturing industries.3 While he pioneered those high technologies, Ovshinsky never lost his love for the world of shops and factories that first drew him to become a machinist and toolmaker. “To me,” he said, “manufacturing has always had glamour to it,” and he saw his inventions as a way to help restore the social and economic benefits of that world.
Harley Shaiken summed up the career of his old mentor and comrade by locating him in relation to both the industrial past and the future he envisioned. “He was the last of his kind. Henry Ford transformed the 20th century with a moving assembly line and a car that was suited to mass production. Stan Ovshinsky did what Ford did but he really went beyond him in that he also developed the science that allowed new materials and new approaches that laid the basis for a global transformation in energy and information.”4 Ovshinsky himself had suggested such a comparison when he juxtaposed pictures of ECD’s first roll-to-roll solar machine with ones of Ford’s Model T and assembly line (see chapter 8), proclaiming the hope that his mass production of thin-film solar panels with its economies of scale would have a transformative effect like Ford’s.
Looking back at the comparison, however, we can see not only the parallels but also an important divergence, for Ovshinsky’s whole career was dedicated to aims and values opposed to Fordism, with its standardized mass production that subordinated workers to the demands of technological rationality.5 He advocated automation as an alternative to the repetitive routine of the assembly line, and the community he and Iris created at ECD was dedicated to nurturing individuals and helping them to realize their potential. And of course the alternative energy technologies he developed were aimed at undoing the effects of rising fossil fuel consumption for which Ford’s Model T could also be an emblem. If there is to be the kind of better future he envisioned, his inventions and his example will have helped make it happen.