Stanford R. Ovshinsky

Ovshinsky was born and grew up in the industrial town of Akron, Ohio, then at the center of the American rubber industry. The elder son of working-class Lithuanian Jewish immigrant parents who left Eastern Europe around 1905—Benjamin Ovshinsky from Lithuania and Bertha Munitz from what is now Belarus—Ovshinsky became active in social activities at an early age during the Great Depression. His lifelong concern to better the lives of workers and minorities, as well as to advance culture and the interests of industry, derive largely from his father, who was a generous, liberal, and highly cultured activist. With his horse and wagon, and later his truck, Ben Ovshinsky made his living collecting scrap metal from factories and foundries. ==Work through the 1950s==

Work as a machinist and the Benjamin Center Drive Before graduating from high school in June 1941, Ovshinsky worked as a teacher, tool maker and machinist in various local shops affiliated with the rubber industry. During the Second World War, he and his bride, Norma Rifkin, moved to Arizona, where Ovshinsky worked for a time in the tool room of a Goodyear plant in Litchfield, not far from Phoenix. Returning to Akron shortly before the end of the war, Ovshinsky eventually established his own machine company, Stanford Roberts, initially in a barn. There he developed and patented his first invention, the Benjamin Center Drive, named after his father. This unique automatic high-speed center drive lathe had many important uses. After Ovshinsky sold his company to the New Britain Machine Company in Connecticut, it was used to help solve the national crisis of making artillery shells in large enough volume for wartime needs during the Korean War. Meanwhile, Ovshinsky continued to develop his growing interest in human and machine intelligence, avidly studying the research literature on neurophysiology, neurological disease, and cybernetics, corresponding briefly with Norbert Wiener. Intelligent machines In 1951, Ovshinsky accepted an offer to move to Detroit and work in the automotive industry as the director of research at the Hupp Motor Company. Continuing his work on intelligent machines, he invented electric power steering, but Hupp's president was opposed to completing the arrangements with General Motors to utilize the product. Not long after that, Stan and his younger brother Herb Ovshinsky, a talented mechanical engineer, established a small company called General Automation in a Detroit storefront. There, Stan continued his study of intelligent machines and embarked on early research and development of various energy and information technologies. At the same time, he began studying neurophysiology and neurological diseases. On the basis of his early writings about nerve impulses and the nature of intelligence, he was invited by Wayne Medical School in June 1955 to participate in pioneering experimental research on the mammalian cerebellum. ==The Ovitron==

By the late 1950s, working at General Automation, Ovshinsky brought together these disparate studies in an invention. Crossing scientific disciplines that academics traditionally hold separate, including neurophysiology and cybernetics, Stan invented, and Herb Ovshinsky helped build, a mechanical model of a nerve cell – an amorphous thin-film switch they called the Ovitron. Stan patented the device and the brothers disclosed it publicly in 1959 in New York City. In an attempt to model the learning ability of nerve cells, which Stan recognized as deriving from the plasticity of the cell's membrane, he drew on his knowledge of surfaces and materials to fashion very thin layers of amorphous material, thus pioneering the use of nanostructures. He created these layers by combining elements, especially from the Group 16 elements under oxygen, known as chalcogenides, including sulphur, selenium, and tellurium. He would continue to work with chalcogenides in his inventions for decades to come. ==Work from 1960==

Energy Conversion Laboratory On January 1, 1960, Ovshinsky and Iris Miroy Dibner, whom he married soon after his divorce from Norma Rifkin, founded Energy Conversion Laboratory to develop his inventions in the interest of solving societal problems, especially those they identified in the areas of information and energy (e.g. pollution and wars over oil). Iris had a BA in zoology from Swarthmore College, an MS in biology from the University of Michigan, and a PhD in biochemistry from Boston University. Continuing to work on his atomically designed chalcogenide materials, which Ovshinsky realized offer unique electronic physical mechanisms, he utilized chain structures, cross links, polymeric concepts, and divalent structural bonding with a huge number of unbonded lone pairs to achieve what is now referred to as the Ovshinsky Effect – "an effect that turns special types of glassy, thin films into semiconductors upon application of low voltage." Applying this effect, he built new types of electronic and optical switches, including his Ovonic Phase Change Memory and his Threshold Switch. The former would become the basis of his subsequent inventions of rewritable CDs and DVDs and other new computer technologies including his cognitive computer. While others working in the crystalline field were building devices based on bulk materials, Ovshinsky's work in the 1960s and later continued to be based on thin films and nanostructures. Some joined as consultants or as members of the Board of Directors. Meanwhile, the ECL community developed a uniquely productive, non-hierarchical, multicultural, international environment, reflecting Stan and Iris' social values. In 1964, Stan and Iris changed the laboratory's name to Energy Conversion Devices and moved the company to larger quarters in Troy, Michigan. The company continued to develop electronic memory, batteries, and solar cells, reinvesting almost every penny of profit into the scientific study of a wide variety of problems, much of which later became the basis of lucrative industries, e.g., flat screen liquid crystal displays. In time, license fees to ECD began to grow, especially when amorphous silicon was used to make solar cells "by the mile," with an approach that originated from Ovshinsky's non-silver photographic film work. A year later, Ovshinsky retired from ECD and launched a new company with Rosa Young, whom he later married. At Ovshinsky Innovation LLC, he continued his work on information and energy science, in strong relationships with colleagues and with industrial partners (for example, Ovonyx, which is developing phase-change semiconductor memory). Ovshinsky Innovation is currently focusing on a new kind of photovoltaic plant based on a new concept promising to lower the cost of photovoltaic energy sources below that of coal. Because of his independent and radical contributions to science, he has been compared with Albert Einstein. Because of his many inventions in digital memory, solar energy, battery technology, optical media, and solid hydrogen storage, and his hundreds of basic scientific patents, he has often been compared with Thomas Edison. General Motors and the US Auto Battery Consortium In an interview in the 2006 documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, Ovshinsky stated that in the early 1990s, the auto industry created the US Auto Battery Consortium (USABC) to stifle the development of electric vehicle technology by preventing the dissemination of knowledge about Ovshinsky's battery-related patents to the public through the California Air Resources Board (CARB). According to Ovshinsky, the auto industry falsely suggested that NiMH technology was not yet ready for widespread use in road cars. Members of the USABC, including General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler, threatened to take legal action against Ovshinsky if he continued to promote NiMH's potential for use in BEVs, and if he continued to lend test batteries to Solectria, a start-up electric vehicle maker that was not part of the USABC. Critics argue that the Big Three were more interested in convincing CARB members that electric vehicles were not technologically and commercially viable. In 1994, General Motors acquired a controlling interest in Ovonics's battery development and manufacture, including patents controlling the manufacture of large NiMH batteries. The original intent of the equity alliance was to develop NiMH batteries for GM's EV1 BEV. Sales of GM-Ovonics batteries were later taken over by GM manager and critic of CARB John Williams, leading Ovshinsky to wonder whether his decision to sell to GM had been naive. The EV1 program was shut down by GM before the new NiMH battery could be commercialized, despite field tests that indicated the Ovonics battery extended the EV1's range to over 150 miles. ==Death==

His last public appearance was at Louis Riel School in Calgary, Alberta, Canada. Ovshinsky died of prostate cancer on October 17, 2012, aged 89 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan. ==Honors and awards==

With more than 300 publications on his curriculum vitae, Ovshinsky has won many prizes for his contributions to science and innovation. • Honorary Doctorate of Science degree from University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan (May 1, 2010) • Honorary Doctorate in Science from Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan (May 7, 2009) • Honorary Doctorate of Engineering from Illinois Institute of Technology, Chicago, Illinois (May 16, 2009) • Honorary Doctorate from Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania (June 30, 2009) • Honorary Doctorate of Science from New York Institute of Technology, Old Westbury, New York (May 18, 2008). • Honorary Doctorate of Science from Kean University, Union, New Jersey (May 8, 2007) • In 2015, Ovshinsky was inducted into the National Inventors Hall of Fame. ==In popular culture==

Ovshinsky appeared in the documentary Who Killed the Electric Car?, as well as in parts 1 and 3 of the episode "Hydrogen Hopes" of Alan Alda's television series Scientific American Frontiers. The website of Scientific American Frontiers makes "Hydrogen Hopes" available for viewing at no charge, as well as the text of an interview with Stan and Iris Ovshinsky. Ovshinsky was profiled as "Japan's American Genius" in the PBS series NOVA (October 1987). ==See also==