Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [93]
Nowhere is the Catalan anarchy more apparent than in the ethos of its pride and joy. FC Barcelona has one of the best football teams in the world, and is owned and operated entirely by its supporters, who seek to be a force for good. Its shirts, for example, carry the logo of the United Nations Children’s Fund, UNICEF – and it pays for the privilege. Every year, the club donates 0.7 per cent of its income to UNICEF. This is no arbitrary figure: it is the proportion of gross domestic product that the UN wants to see rich countries contributing to international aid. The anarchy of science can be similarly world-enhancing, even as it flies in the face of capitalism and bureaucracy. Just ask Stanford Ovshinsky, a man who has been hailed as America’s greatest inventor since Thomas Edison.
In November 1968, one of Ovshinsky’s inventions, known as the threshold switch, made the front page of the New York Times. It would, the Times said, lead to ‘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’. But no one would invest. Why? Because Ovshinsky wasn’t a bona fide scientist – he didn’t even have a college degree. No one in American science trusted this outsider.
Ovshinsky’s parents were immigrants from Eastern Europe and raised their son in a backwater in Ohio, where Ovshinsky Senior made a living by going through the streets collecting scrap in a cart. After high school, the young Stanford Ovshinsky became a trainee machinist in a local factory. But he didn’t abandon his education: each week he took home an armful of books from the Akron Public Library. While he was at work he thought about ways to improve the efficiency of the factory’s machines – and he then built a prototype lathe which, he claimed, would do just that. Everybody laughed until he turned it on and showed how well it worked.
Shortly afterwards, he set up his own machine tools company, then sold it to the New Britain Machine Company. A few years later, Ovshinsky’s lathe was saving the lives of US soldiers in Korea. The army had run out of artillery shells; only by employing Ovshinsky’s high-efficiency lathe could it meet demand and keep the North Koreans at bay. Ovshinsky, meanwhile, had moved on.
At the time, all focus in electronics research was on the rigid, crystalline properties of semiconductor materials such as silicon. Semiconductors, the basis of transistors, are largely crystalline: their atoms are arranged with rigid, military precision. Metals are even more ordered, which is what allows them to be such efficient conductors of heat and electricity. Electrons can move with ease through the regular, crystalline atomic lattice that forms the structure of metals; they are not continually banging up against some unexpected atom. The semiconductor revolution took off only when researchers at Bell Labs learned to grow large enough crystals of the ‘semi-metal’ germanium, free enough of electron-impeding defects for the crystals to flip between conducting and insulating behaviour at the flick of a switch. In the 1960s, silicon technology, and the transistor in particular, was turning America into an electronic superpower. Ovshinsky watched this development with interest, and then, characteristically, turned it on its head.
Perhaps it was when he used to watch the scrap metal dealers melting down his father’s rigid metal finds into liquid, or the time he spent in the factories, machining metal bars, cutting away at the metal’s crystalline structure. Maybe it was simply the frequency with which the metal blades on his lathes became blunt. Whatever