The ECD Community: A Social Invention (1965–2007)

This chapter portrays the ways Stan and Iris Ovshinsky made ECD an expression of their progressive social values as well as an advanced R&D organization. A social democratic enclave sustained by capitalism, ECD tried to maintain an egalitarian, supportive culture even as it grew to over a thousand employees. ECD enabled staff members to develop unsuspected talents, with support for continuing education and the appointment of women and minorities to important positions. Its democratic corporate culture also enabled it to develop a flexible research community, where scientists moved among concurrent programs to contribute wherever they were needed. Its research staff was joined by a distinguished group of consultants, which included Nobel laureates like I. I. Rabi, Sir Nevill Mott, and John Bardeen, as well as several talented younger scientists. ECD also reached out into the larger community with its Institute for Amorphous Studies, which sponsored public talks on many subjects.

The Birth of ECD: An Invention Factory (1965–1979)

With new resources gained from licensing Ovshinsky’s discoveries, his company, renamed Energy Conversion Devices (ECD), expanded into an ambitious research and development laboratory. Its growing staff of highly trained scientists pursued both theoretical explanations and practical applications of the Ovshinsky effect, in the process helping to open the vast scientific field of materials research. Their first success was the optical phase-change memory that became the basis of rewritable CDs and DVDs. The new companies that ECD established circa 1970 to commercialize instant imaging and optical memory systems based on Ovshinsky’s new “Ovonic” proprietary materials did not succeed, however, and ECD struggled to survive. Its fortunes dramatically improved a decade later when its new photovoltaic program, aimed at developing and producing thin-film amorphous silicon solar cells in large quantities attracted major funding from the prominent oil corporation Atlantic Richfield (ARCO).

New Beginnings in the Storefront (1960–1964)

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.

Deaths, Survivals, and Revivals

Reckless financing for expansion by its new management led ECD to file for bankruptcy in February 2012. That failure also ended Ovshinsky’s solar power effort. Work on his nickel metal hydride batteries, however, was continued by BASF, which purchased the Ovonic Battery Company. The batteries continue to be used widely, including in hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius. Ovonyx was sold to Micron, and phase-change memory has now been developed by an Intel-Micron collaboration resulting in the recent memory device called 3D Xpoint, poised to become an important addition to information technology. Ovshinsky Innovation ended its work soon after Ovshinsky’s death, but a small new company has revived the name of Ovshinsky Innovation and is continuing some of Ovshinsky’s work.

Conclusion

The conclusion reviews Ovshinsky’s accomplishments and historical significance. Ovshinsky is now gaining mare recognition. In May 2015 he was posthumously inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. During his lifetime he “saw the future” because he envisioned new possibilities and consequences that others were unable to imagine. His innovations, which began with new amorphous and disordered materials, became the basis for new technological systems capable of changing society for the better. Although he made important scientific discoveries, his work was never a part of normal science, and his inventions were aimed not just at incremental technological advances but at transformational social change. Finally, while the conclusion considers how his career spanned, and to some extent helped bring about, the transition from the industrial to the information age, it also notes his continuing ties with the social and economic culture of his youth.

New Love, New Company

Though overwhelmed by Iris’s death, at 84 Ovshinsky was not yet done with life and invention, nor was he ready to stop working towards solving urgent social problems like climate change. He found a new love in the physicist Rosa Young, who had been a colleague for over twenty years. In 2007 they married and began a new life together. Ovshinsky also wanted to resume the research efforts that had been terminated with his ouster from ECD. With Rosa’s encouragement, he devoted his own savings to starting a new company, Ovshinsky Innovation, where he pursued his characteristically ambitious ideas for building a gigawatt machine, a solar panel production plant whose vastly increased capacity would, he believed, at last make solar power “cheaper than coal.”

Passion for Machines (1940–1944)

This chapter begins with Ovshinsky’s early work experiences as a machinist and toolmaker, at Akron Standard Mold while he finished high school and continued afterwards at Goodrich Rubber. There he continued to master his craft, but his involvement in labor union activism made him the target of violent hostility from the Goodrich management, leading to a series of job changes. With the entrance of the U.S. into World War II, Ovshinsky tried to enlist but was rejected for both health and political reasons. After marrying his high school sweetheart, Norma Rifkin, he moved to Arizona, where while working in a Goodyear aircraft plant he became intent on going into business for himself and began planning an innovative lathe, his first major invention.

Introduction

This introduction offers a brief account of Ovshinsky’s career. It outlines his development from machinist and toolmaker to independent inventor and notes how his work on automation, including his study of cybernetics and neurophysiology, led to his most important discovery of the “Ovshinsky effect,” using amorphous thin films. This switching effect was used to create semiconductor devices like his threshold switch and phase-change memory. After sketching Ovshinsky’s later career as the director of his own research and development laboratory, ECD, the introduction considers the source of Ovshinsky’s scientific and technological creativity in the thought processes of his self-educated, intuitive mind, which relied heavily on the use of analogies and visualization. It concludes by briefly considering how Ovshinsky’s work is related to his social-historical context, in particular, how his inventive career spans the transition from the industrial to the information age, making distinctive contributions to both.

Losing Iris, Losing ECD

This chapter recounts two devastating losses that befell Ovshinsky in less than a year’s time (2006-07). The first was the sudden death of his wife and partner Iris, who had played a vital role in his life and work. The second was his loss of control over ECD, the company they had founded and fostered together for forty-seven years. Ovshinsky’s position in ECD had been eroding for some years, but the main cause of his forced “retirement” was the Sarbanes-Oxley Bill, which required replacing many of his supporters on the Board of Directors. The new board not only pushed Ovshinsky out of ECD but also eliminated most of the company’s research programs, including those devoted to hydrogen-powered cars and the cognitive computer, keeping only the profitable United Solar and Ovonic Battery divisions.

Hydrogen and Batteries: The Genie and the Bottle (1980–2007)

With part of the ARCO funding, Ovshinsky established a sizeable research program to investigate hydrogen as an alternative energy source. The researchers collaboratively discovered that by forming hydrides the multi-element disordered materials used in researching hydrogen storage could be successfully used in a rechargeable battery, called the nickel metal hydride (NiMH) battery. Produced by the Ovonic Battery Company, ECD’s new battery became one of its most successful commercial products. An automotive version powered General Motors’ electric car, the EV1, and it is still used in hybrids like the Toyota Prius. Ovshinsky also worked on the automotive use of hydrogen both in fuel cells and in an internal combustion engine, which was successfully tested in prototype hydrogen cars. Ultimately, however, ECD failed to attract the support needed to develop its hydrogen-fueled car commercially.