Free Radicals - Michael Brooks [95]
When he invented the nickel metal hydride battery, also based on amorphous materials, that too got massive take-up from Japanese manufacturers who ended up dominating the battery market: ‘NiMH’ is now written on the side of billions of batteries sold every year. Ovshinsky’s idea of using a cheap form of amorphous silicon to build a solar panel was also welcomed in Japan – particularly by Sharp, which was selling solar-powered calculators by the container ship-load.
Small wonder that Ovshinsky has been referred to as ‘Japan’s American genius’. But despite the deals he made there, he never became wealthy. Perhaps that is why Forbes magazine has called him ‘the inventor who can create anything but profits’. It’s a fair description. In 2008, for example, Intel teamed up with STMicro-electronics to create a new company called Numonyx. Two years later, Numonyx was sold for $1.3 billion. What made it so valuable? This company manufactures hard disk and flash memory units for cameras, phones and MP3 players. The new technology, widely seen as the successor to flash memory, is properly called ‘ovonic unified memory’. It is based on amorphous silicon. The term ‘ovonic’ is a contraction of Ovshinsky Electronics. After being rejected by the scientific establishment for being an untrained outsider, Stanford Ovshinsky has stamped his name on billion-dollar industries. And yet he has never made money.
Ovshinsky is an old man now. His rare interviews in the press always mention his shock of snow-white hair, sometimes described as a halo. The other thing that is always mentioned is the fact that Ovshinsky thinks like no one else in the business world. When he and his wife Iris set up Energy Conversion Devices in 1960, their aim was to use ‘creative science to solve societal problems’. For nearly fifty years they did just that, developing solar cells that were cheap and easy to produce, innovating for the hydrogen economy, where cars run on hydrogen derived from water, and generally attempting to make the world a better place. Making money, it seems, was never on their agenda. In 2000, the Institute for Policy Studies analysed executive pay and found that CEOs were getting, on average, 500 times the salary of their average worker. Ovshinsky, on the other hand, was taking just five times the wage of those on the shop floor of his company. He was also still a member of their union.
The character trait behind this secret anarchy is the same one that earned Nevill Mott his 1977 Nobel Prize in Physics. He received the award for working out the electronic properties of certain crystals, but Mott felt he couldn’t take the credit for the original idea: that was due to Stan Ovshinsky. ‘A lot of my best ideas came from Stan,’ Mott once told a friend. ‘He just gave them away to me.’ Mott was not the only beneficiary of Ovshinsky’s generous nature. ‘All of us in the field have had that experience,’ says Stanford University’s Arthur Bienenstock. Ovshinsky was not bitter about being left out of the Nobel Prize citation; on the contrary, he sent Mott the biggest bottle of champagne Mott had ever seen. ‘I’ll have to throw a party for fifty people,’ Mott told a reporter from New Scientist. It was typical of Ovshinsky’s generous, anarchic nature.
Not that everyone appreciates it. In the summer of 2007, the board of directors of Energy Conversion Devices and its investors decided that they’d had enough of not turning a profit and kicked Ovshinsky out. The tactic worked: the company’s stock suddenly went through the roof. Less than a year later, ECD – now free to exploit Ovshinsky’s insights without a social agenda – reported a profit for the first time in years. The truly astonishing thing is that Ovshinsky didn’t even complain. He simply set himself up a new workplace right next to his Michigan home. His office at the Institute for Amorphous Studies is a replica