October 17: do something good
The 17th of October 2013 will mark the first anniversary of the passing of Stanford Ovshinsky, the greatest scientist you’ve never heard of. It’s time to remedy that.
Ovshinsky is widely unknown because fame and fortune never interested him. Nonetheless, he created a hatful of world-changing innovations. You probably own a flat screen: that was one of Ovshinsky’s. In 1968, the New York Times featured one of his inventions, declaring that this new electronic switch would lead to a future where we would all have ‘small, general-purpose desktop computers for use in homes, schools and offices’, and ‘a flat, tubeless television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture’. It seemed so unpromising at the time that Ovshinsky ended up selling the license to a few, then-small Japanese companies. You might know the names: Sharp, Canon, Sony, Matsushita... No wonder Ovshinsky was later hailed as “Japan’s American genius”.
Phase change memory, now a standard data storage technique, was his brainchild - he was awarded that patent in the 1960s. In 1970, he was granted a patent for the key technology behind rewritable CDs and DVDs. He designed some of the first commercially successful solar panels, used on the first generations of batteryless calculators. Later inventions created some of our most efficient modern photovoltaic films and surfaces. Then there’s his invention of the rechargeable NiMH battery. Basically, if you drive a Toyota Prius, talk on a Samsung mobile phone, work on a laptop computer or back your data up on a re-writable disc or memory stick, you’re in debt to Ovshinsky’s creativity.
Ovshinsky’s achievements are all the more remarkable because he had no formal qualifications beyond a high school diploma. Once he had begun his factory-based worklife he spent his evenings studying from books borrowed from the public library in Akron, Ohio. Nonetheless, by the end of his life he had established an entire field of materials science, the study of “amorphous” materials, messy solids that have no regular atomic structure. He published around 300 academic papers and gained more than 350 patents. It’s amazing what can kick off in a public library.
Luckily for us all, Ovshinsky was hopelessly altruistic. That's no doubt why Forbes called him 'the inventor who can create anything but profits'. Sir Nevill Mott, on receiving his Nobel Prize for physics in 1977, admitted that he got some of his best ideas from Ovshinsky. ‘He just gave them away to me,' Mott said. Ovshinsky and his wife set up their firm, Energy Conversion Devices, to use 'creative science to solve societal problems'. ECD might have been the last bastion of socialism in technology: even as a CEO, Ovshinsky remained a member of the same union as his workers. In 2000, an analysis of executive pay by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the average CEO was drawing 500 times the salary of their average worker. Ovshinsky was taking just five times the wage of those on ECD’s factory floor. As he once said, he considered himself 'with the oppressed everywhere in the world and against the oppressor.' He saw science ending poverty by ensuring everyone had access to the resources necessary for life.
His latter years were spent refining solar power efficiency and working on hydrogen fuel cells; Ovshinsky was one of the first people to spot that fossil fuel burning would lead to global climate change, and much of his research was geared towards steering us away from that future.
Sadly, Ovshinsky didn’t achieve all he hoped. But it’s almost inevitable that you’ll use one of his technologies on the 17th October. When you do, take a moment to reflect the Ovshinsky spirit. Choose to walk, take public transport or cycle rather than burn fossil fuels. Borrow a book from a library. Give something away: an idea, an encouragement, some help. Or just be nice to someone. He'd like that.
Michael Brooks, October 2013
Read more about Stanford Ovshinsky...
Image of Stanford Ovshinsky by Glenn Triest for Style magazine. Used under the the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license
Ovshinsky is widely unknown because fame and fortune never interested him. Nonetheless, he created a hatful of world-changing innovations. You probably own a flat screen: that was one of Ovshinsky’s. In 1968, the New York Times featured one of his inventions, declaring that this new electronic switch would lead to a future where we would all have ‘small, general-purpose desktop computers for use in homes, schools and offices’, and ‘a flat, tubeless television set that can be hung on the wall like a picture’. It seemed so unpromising at the time that Ovshinsky ended up selling the license to a few, then-small Japanese companies. You might know the names: Sharp, Canon, Sony, Matsushita... No wonder Ovshinsky was later hailed as “Japan’s American genius”.
Phase change memory, now a standard data storage technique, was his brainchild - he was awarded that patent in the 1960s. In 1970, he was granted a patent for the key technology behind rewritable CDs and DVDs. He designed some of the first commercially successful solar panels, used on the first generations of batteryless calculators. Later inventions created some of our most efficient modern photovoltaic films and surfaces. Then there’s his invention of the rechargeable NiMH battery. Basically, if you drive a Toyota Prius, talk on a Samsung mobile phone, work on a laptop computer or back your data up on a re-writable disc or memory stick, you’re in debt to Ovshinsky’s creativity.
Ovshinsky’s achievements are all the more remarkable because he had no formal qualifications beyond a high school diploma. Once he had begun his factory-based worklife he spent his evenings studying from books borrowed from the public library in Akron, Ohio. Nonetheless, by the end of his life he had established an entire field of materials science, the study of “amorphous” materials, messy solids that have no regular atomic structure. He published around 300 academic papers and gained more than 350 patents. It’s amazing what can kick off in a public library.
Luckily for us all, Ovshinsky was hopelessly altruistic. That's no doubt why Forbes called him 'the inventor who can create anything but profits'. Sir Nevill Mott, on receiving his Nobel Prize for physics in 1977, admitted that he got some of his best ideas from Ovshinsky. ‘He just gave them away to me,' Mott said. Ovshinsky and his wife set up their firm, Energy Conversion Devices, to use 'creative science to solve societal problems'. ECD might have been the last bastion of socialism in technology: even as a CEO, Ovshinsky remained a member of the same union as his workers. In 2000, an analysis of executive pay by the Institute for Policy Studies found that the average CEO was drawing 500 times the salary of their average worker. Ovshinsky was taking just five times the wage of those on ECD’s factory floor. As he once said, he considered himself 'with the oppressed everywhere in the world and against the oppressor.' He saw science ending poverty by ensuring everyone had access to the resources necessary for life.
His latter years were spent refining solar power efficiency and working on hydrogen fuel cells; Ovshinsky was one of the first people to spot that fossil fuel burning would lead to global climate change, and much of his research was geared towards steering us away from that future.
Sadly, Ovshinsky didn’t achieve all he hoped. But it’s almost inevitable that you’ll use one of his technologies on the 17th October. When you do, take a moment to reflect the Ovshinsky spirit. Choose to walk, take public transport or cycle rather than burn fossil fuels. Borrow a book from a library. Give something away: an idea, an encouragement, some help. Or just be nice to someone. He'd like that.
Michael Brooks, October 2013
Read more about Stanford Ovshinsky...
Image of Stanford Ovshinsky by Glenn Triest for Style magazine. Used under the the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license