Stanford Ovshinsky was not a household name like Thomas Edison or Albert Einstein, but he was often compared to them, for good reason.
He invented the nickel-metal hydride battery, which has powered high-tech items such as cellphones, laptop computers and hybrid cars.
He created paper-thin solar panels potent enough to work on a cloudy day and cheap enough to be produced in sheets a mile long.
He founded a field of electronics that earned him a mention in dictionaries (see “ovon-ics”) and led to such marvels of modern life as the flat-screen TV.
Ovshinsky, who never went to college yet transformed the alternative-energy, information and automotive industries with his inventions, died of prostate cancer Wednesday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich., according to his son Harvey. He was 89.
The self-taught scientist-inventor pursued audacious ideas throughout his long career, often attracting the scorn of other scientists who said his schemes were foolish, impractical or impossible.
In some respects, they were right. He ran Energy Conversion Devices, a product-development company, for 40 years, few of which were profitable. Although it drew blue-chip investors such as General Motors, 3M and Intel, it performed so poorly from a business standpoint that Forbes magazine once described it as “a high-tech Roach Motel” where “the money goes in but it never comes out.”
But Ovshinsky’s path-breaking discoveries led his admirers to associate him with other brilliant minds such as Edison, the inventor from an earlier era who founded General Electric.
“It’s difficult to compare one genius with another genius,” said University of Chicago physicist Hellmut Fritzsche, who consulted for Ovshinsky and later became a vice president of Energy Conversion Devices, “but I’ve known great people, having been at the University of Chicago for over 40 years, and I consider Stan Ovshinsky the only genius I ever met. … Everything he touches is new, different, wonderful.”
Ovshinsky made a scientific name for himself in 1968, when he went public with research showing that glass could be engineered to conduct electricity. He predicted that glass semiconductors would one day replace crystalline transistors.
To argue, as he did, that cheap noncrystalline materials such as glass could perform as well as more expensive silicon crystals sounded preposterous and was derided by readers of Physical Review Letters, the prestigious American physics journal that published Ovshinsky’s findings.
But his paper eventually became one of the five most cited publications in the journal’s history, and his prediction became prophecy, spawning a new field he called ovonics.
