In late 1959, Iris was at last able to join Ovshinsky in Detroit, and they began creating a new family with her two young children and his three sons. This was also a new beginning in Ovshinsky’s inventive career, as he and Iris started their novel company, Energy Conversion Laboratory. Here, in a modest storefront, Ovshinsky made his most important discovery: a threshold switch composed of amorphous chalcogenide materials. The threshold switch’s almost instantaneous and reversible action, something previously considered impossible, as well as its capacity to handle large AC currents, distinguished it from crystalline semiconductor devices like the transistor. Such switching, now known as “the Ovshinsky effect,” was a radically new phenomenon that would force a paradigm shift in condensed matter physics. A slightly different material composition yielded the memory switch, the basis of phase-change memory.