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Energy Conversion Devices:
an interview with Stan Ovshinsky article by Bill Bruzy RECOGNIZED AS A “Hero for the Planet” by Time magazine in 1999, Stan Ovshinsky paradoxically doesn’t mind being called an industrialist. That’s because he has a very practical idealism. Doing hard manual labor, gathering scrap with his dad during the depth of the Depression he realized he wanted to make the world a better place. And so he has, in his own way. With a love of science, technology, and people along with precocious intelligence not only for the abstractions of science but for the relational and political realities of life, Ovshinsky pioneered whole new areas of thought and action. I spoke with Mr. Ovshinsky who is co-founder, along with his wife Iris, of a company named Energy Conversion Devices-Ovonics in the Detroit area. Stan is a self-taught scientist of world renown, and he’s created a body of work that brings us real hope for the planet. The science of amorphous and disordered materials may not sound like deliverance. But practical solar power, hydrogen-powered cars, a new energy economy based on hydrogen, better batteries for clean transportation, those things, among many others, come from the work at ECD Ovonics. Not only does Ovshinsky invent new areas of science and technology, he invents culture, as is witnessed by the successful multicultural experiment of his company. Building better batteries and ways to store hydrogen may sound exotic, or boring, depending on your interests, and far removed from your everyday experience. Yet, if you’ve ever played a DVD, used a rewritable CD in your computer, or had an NiMH battery in your cell phone or laptop, you’ve worked with Stan’s inventions. If you’ve ever wanted to live in a harmonious society, wanted a better work environment where your creativity can come to play, have a clean world with abundant energy, then you’ve worked with his ideals. The company, founded in 1960 in a small storefront down Six Mile Road not to far from neighborhoods where the unlikely combination of the creativity of Eminem and Wayne Dyer emerged, Ovshinsky, along with his wife Iris, went on to develop well over 200 patents for energy- and information-related inventions. Stan said to me, “All I want is a better world.” He’s done that in many ways, including building a machine (the size of a football field) that puts out miles of lightweight, highly efficient, thin-film photovoltaic material (solar cells), and by creating the means to run vehicles on hydrogen, the most abundant element in the Unierse. The wars we fight for oil, the environmental degradation, stress, and pollution, cyclical boom-and-bust economics in industry are old habits that die hard. But we can literally change them with the commonest of things: sunshine and hydrogen. That is Stan’s gift to us. To understand the importance of his work let me explain a little. If you’ve forgotten your chemistry, hydrogen is the first element on the periodic table. It has one proton and one electron. Everything else is way more complicated, and way less abundant — like oil or uranium. The Universe must like simplicity because over 90 percent of the mass of the Universe is simple hydrogen. It was the first atom to come around in the Big Bang. So energy isn’t the problem, the Universe is literally made of it. Converting it from some natural resource is the problem. Clean energy conversion is the issue. |
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