What made Mr. Ovshinsky's work particularly remarkable was that he had little connection to mainstream physics. His education stopped after high school, and Mr. Ovshinsky credited the one-room public library in Akron, Ohio, with providing him the materials for scientific literacy.
Mr. Ovshinsky moved to Detroit where he worked on power steering at the Hupp Corp. In his spare time he studied computers and neurophysiology.In 1960, Mr. Ovshinsky with his wife, Iris, founded Energy Conversion Laboratory, where he worked on what became known as the "Ovshinsky effect" that underlay his later advances in electronics.
Mr. Ovshinsky, who died at age 89, was an industrialist and self-taught scientific prodigy who helped found a new field of physics that studies the electronics of amorphous materials resembling glass. There were few immediate applications but the discovery had big implications for physicists who previously believed that only well-ordered crystals had useful electronic properties. The new materials—dubbed ovonics—were switches like transistors but worked better for many applications. Companies around the world license his patents.
"It was like discovering a new continent, like discovering America," said Hellmut Fritzsche, former chairman of physics department at the University of Chicago who worked with Mr. Ovshinsky. "Nobody in the past 50-60 years has created such a revolution in science."
Mr. Ovshinsky used the same basic insight decades later to produce flexible photovoltaic materials, printing them on film on a machine the length of a football field. The company was a world leader in the technology but recently declared bankruptcy amid down times in the U.S. photovoltaic industry.
Mr. Ovshinsky used his discovery to fund a publicly traded research laboratory that teamed up with companies such as 3M Co., Atlantic Richfield Oil Corp. and General Motors for which he developed the battery that powered the EV1, GM's electric car.
When I first visited Stanford Ovshinsky at his Energy Conversion Laboratory in the early 1980s, he told me that his life's work was centered around creating energy with machines that had no moving parts.
His statement interested me as I was then an officer of Stirling Power Systems Corporation (SPS), a technology-based development company founded in 1977 with the goal of commercializing a "single-acting" external combustion kinematic Stirling engine (with moving parts). The two-cylinder V-type Stirling engine operating in a derated mode at 1800 RPM produced 10 kW of electrical output power (and 28 kW of usable heat in co-generation) using diesel, gasoline, kerosene, alcohol, LPG, gaseous fuels, biomass converters, industrial waste heat and solar energy (at the focal point of a solar reflector to convert the concentrated solar energy into electricity). In February 1986, SPS was purchased by McDonnell Douglas Energy Systems, Inc., a McDonnell Douglas subsidary that coordinated the corporation's commerical energy development programs.
A self-proclaimed socialist, Ovshinsky said his work was inspired by a vision of humanity freed of resource wars and climate change. His company at one point rigged a Toyota Prius to run on pure hydrogen, a longtime dream.
He won many awards and was credited by one Nobel Prize winner, Nevill Mott, with helping originate the study of amorphous materials.
Source: The Wall Street Journal, October 19, 2012