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Stanford Ovshinsky, Hybrid Car Battery Inventor, Has Died
another random user writes "Stanford Ovshinsky, a self-taught American physicist who designed the battery now used in hybrid cars, has died aged 89 from prostate cancer .
The electronics field of ovonics was named after Mr Ovshinsky, who owned over 200 patents and has been described as a '[Thomas] Edison of our age.'
He introduced the idea of 'glass transistors' in 1968, which paved the way for modern flat-screen monitors."
One of the great inventors. "Ovonics", amorphous-siliicon solar cells, batteries...
...my dad was a physicist at ECD (when Ovshinsky owned it) in Troy, MI back in ca. '70 and I was about 8 years old at the time. We used to go to his house for dinner and BBQs a lot and he would stock my favorite pop (strawberry Faygo) for me at his house. He was a very nice guy.
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Mr. Ovshinsky is man much greater than Edison could ever dream.
News stories like these remind me that I've wasted my life.
Rest in peace, Mr. Ovshinsky.
Electric car is looking gloomier and gloomier :/
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
Stanford R. Ovshinsky, "Reversible Electrical Switching Phenomena in Disordered Structures," Physical Review Letters, vol. 21, no. 20 (1968), pp. 1450-1453.
Just to be pedantic, he invented Nickel-Metal Hydride batteries which happen to be used in most hybrids, but of course are used in a million other places as well.
RIP.
Not dead ... just permanently discharged.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Doctors live 5 years less than the general population, on average. Except for dermatologists, for some reason. So no, studying medicine would not help and in fact would hinder :)
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
I worked for ECD for 3 years just before and just after Stan "left" (corporate code for "was forced out"). It was one incredible place and he was a pretty incredible guy. So many interesting inventions that unfortunately never really got off the ground. That was partly because Stan tried to treat each of his inventions as a thing to be nurtured, even when it was clear that they were either un-economical or ahead of their time and partly because he partnered with a lot of big companies that stole the stuff they wanted and buried the stuff they wanted buried. (Who Killed the Electric Car? (2006) www.imdb.com/title/tt0489037/synopsis) Stan also had a knack for trusting that his employees had his back when they didn't and often went off on their own tangents. And the business was never what it was about for Stan. The money was just a way to keep inventing. Still, Amorphous Silicon for both sunlight to electricity AND electricity to light, dozens of CD/DVD patents (that Sony tied up so tight they could never be monetized), Nickle Metal Hydride batteries (that Chevron locked up), Phase Change Memory that nobody seemed to be able to make money at. Multi-State Phase Change Logic which was late in his career and maybe never got the attention it should have, a way to make buckets of hydrogen from almost anything organic and a way to safely store it in an auto fuel tank as a hydride. (ECD had company cars that were retrofitted Priuses running on pure hydrogen stored a s hydride). Stan was convinced that the Hydrogen economy was just around the corner. That is just scratching the surface. Brilliant, irascible, fun loving, generous, bull headed, curious, a know it all, in short a real human being. RIP Stan.
And all the professional physicists and engineers denied that amorphous semiconductors were possible for many years, even when confronted with evidence... See for example:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9621164/Stanford-Ovshinsky.html
"In 1960, with his second wife Iris, a biochemist, he founded Energy Conversion Laboratories (later renamed Energy Conversion Devices, or ECD) at Rochester Hills, Michigan, to develop his ideas, and in 1968 held a press conference at which he announced that he had succeeded in making a "glass transistor" that relied on a principle which (with understandable immodesty) he called Ovonics. This breakthrough, he predicted, would eventually lead to desktop computers and television sets "hanging like portraits on the wall". The announcement made the front pages and ECDâ(TM)s stock (the company went public in 1967) soared. Within days, however, semiconductor engineers dismissed the idea and ECDâ(TM)s stock price collapsed. Most scientists had never heard of amorphous materials, and some rubbished Ovshinsky as a high school dropout and former machinist with no university qualifications. He was branded a crank. Eventually, though, Ovshinskyâ(TM)s theories proved correct, ushering in a whole new field of solid-state physics."
I can wonder if we'll see the same with so-called "cold fusion" (LENR)? Example:
http://pesn.com/2012/10/18/9602209_LENR-to-Market_Weekly_October18/
See also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disciplined_Minds
"Disciplined Minds is a book by physicist Jeff Schmidt,[1] published in 2000. The book describes how professionals are made; the methods of professional and graduate schools that turn eager entering students into disciplined managerial and intellectual workers that correctly perceive and apply the employer's doctrine and outlook. Schmidt uses the examples of law, medicine, and physics, and describes methods that students and professional workers can use to preserve their personalities and independent thought."
I've always found the story of Stanford Ovshinsky inspirational. He was like a more-well-grounded Bucky Fuller. Too bad about prostrate cancer; here is some advice on reducing the risk for those of us (males) who carry on:
http://www.diseaseproof.com/archives/prostate-cancer-dr-fuhrmans-diet-advice-for-prostate-health.html
A 21st century issue: the irony of technologies of abundance in the hands of those still thinking in terms of scarcity.
I heard it took TheOatmeal all of 5 minutes to post a 47-screen-long comic cutting this guy to shreds because someone compared him to Edison.