This is the first full-length biography of the prolific inventor Stanford R. Ovshinsky (1922-2012). Ovshinsky’s discoveries led to the creation of many important information and energy technologies, from phase-change electronic memories and rewritable CDs and DVDs to nickel metal hydride batteries, thin-film solar panels, and flat panel displays. In the process, his work helped open a new scientific research area centered on amorphous and disordered materials. A brilliant, self-educated pioneer of materials science, Ovshinsky began his career as a machinist and toolmaker before becoming an ind ... More

This is the first full-length biography of the prolific inventor Stanford R. Ovshinsky (1922-2012). Ovshinsky’s discoveries led to the creation of many important information and energy technologies, from phase-change electronic memories and rewritable CDs and DVDs to nickel metal hydride batteries, thin-film solar panels, and flat panel displays. In the process, his work helped open a new scientific research area centered on amorphous and disordered materials. A brilliant, self-educated pioneer of materials science, Ovshinsky began his career as a machinist and toolmaker before becoming an independent inventor and later the charismatic director of his own substantial research and development laboratory, Energy Conversion Devices (ECD). Guided by the social democratic values of his youth, he worked for nearly half a century with his partner and second wife Iris, eventually with hundreds of collaborators, to address important social problems like climate change. At the same time, their progressive values shaped the culture of the ECD community as a model egalitarian organization. Ovshinsky’s important contributions include his alternative energy technologies, with which he aimed to reduce and eventually eliminate dependence on fossil fuels. Increasingly important are the semiconductor devices based on his discovery of the Ovshinsky switching effect, which are becoming the basis of new information technologies.