Michigan scientist is waiting for the world to catch up
Article published Friday, August 26, 2005
ROCHESTER HILLS, Mich. - A hundred years ago, only a handful of people in Detroit had heard of Henry Ford, a puttering inventor who had started several horseless carriage companies, all but one of which failed.
Today, of course, he is remembered as a major figure in world history. Everybody knows who he was, while virtually no one, including me, could tell you offhand who Michigan's governor or senators were in 1905.
Well, I would bet heavily that a century from now that whoever is living in Michigan - and probably the United States - will see Stan Ovshinsky the same way. Mr. Ovshinsky and his wife, Iris, are almost certainly the two most important people in this state - though you can sometimes go out to lunch with them in the Detroit area, as I did recently, without them being recognized.
Time magazine once named Mr. Ovshinsky a Hero For the Planet. And though Stan, the son of a Lithuanian-born scrap metal dealer from Akron, is a high school dropout, he is undoubtedly Michigan's most important scientist.
Want proof? Do you have a laptop computer? The nickel-metal-hydride battery in it was invented by Stan Ovshinsky. Have anything with a liquid crystal display? Stan and Iris' company, Energy Conversion Devices, Inc., invented that, too. Actually, they invented a whole new branch of electronics. He was the first scientist to discover that amorphous materials, those without a definite crystal structure, make excellent semiconductors.
Conventional scientists ridiculed that at first, as they have just about any breakthrough discovery in history. Now, what he found is accepted as orthodoxy. Today, Stan Ovshinsky is the only man I know whose name is in Webster's Dictionary, under Ovonics, as in, Ovshinsky Electronics.
Back in 1960, he and his wife Iris (who has a PhD in biochemistry) founded Energy Conversion Devices in a storefront on the west side of Detroit. Today, ECD is a publicly traded company with more than 700 employees, based in a sprawling industrial park in Detroit's northern suburbs.
Frankly, the Ovshinskys are far better scientists than businessmen, and if he had more business savvy, he might be richer than Bill Gates today.
In fact, in most years he has lost money, though ECD's economic fortunes started turning around a few years ago when Robert Stempel, former chairman of General Motors, agreed to join the company, first as a board member, then chairman.
That has given Stan Ovshinsky more time to do what he wants to do, which is perfecting new forms of energy, he said. He has more than 200 patents, and ECD is the world leader in everything from fuel cells to photovoltaic solar cell technology.
Yet if he is right, his biggest impact is just over the horizon: The hydrogen-powered car. Or, to be more precise, a hybrid, which, the inventor says, combines the advantages of a NIMH (nickel-metal-hydride) battery with the efficiency of an internal combustion engine.
"Hydrogen is the ultimate fuel," he said. "It was born in the big bang - all the matter in the universe, practically, is made of it." Terrorism is not going to stop and the oil supply is going to run out, he noted.
"We aren't ever going to run out of hydrogen," he said driving me to lunch in a hydrogen-powered hybrid car. I couldn't tell any difference. "Hydrogen is actually safer and easier to handle than gasoline," he said.
Isn't there a risk of fire, I wondered? No, he said, his car uses hydrogen as a powdered metal alloy; eventually, the cost would be competitive, or more so.
The trouble is getting the world, and the major automotive manufacturers, to pay attention. "The automotive companies are run these days by financial people. Their view is to do what they can to impress Wall Street over the next three months. There is no overall understanding of what we are doing, which is building new industries for this country," he sighed.
Stan Ovshinsky has been trying to lead - or mostly, drag, a reluctant country and its core industries into the future for a long time now, since he came to Detroit after World War II. "I come from Akron, Ohio, which was the rubber capital of the world, and today there is no rubber being made there at all.
"Detroit - you just have to drive around Detroit to know you don't have the path. We ought to be thinking about how you build the new automotive industry.
"The Japanese are doing it," he said. Prophets get too little respect at home. He is far better known in Japan, where he was the subject of a major documentary called "Japan's American Genius."
No, of course he isn't about to give up. He is having too much fun, inventing and creating the future, and there is so much left to do, and no time or reason to slow down now. After all, Stanford P. Ovshinsky is barely 83.
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