Stanford R. Ovshinsky

Stanford Robert Ovshinsky was an American inventor, born November 24, 1922 in Akron, Ohio and died October 17, 2012 in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan, self-taught without formal college or graduate training, who became one of the most prolific inventors in energy storage and solar technology. After working as a machinist and toolmaker and founding his own machine tool business, he and his wife Iris Miroy Dibner founded the Energy Conversion Laboratory in 1960, renamed Energy Conversion Devices in 1964, to commercialize his research into amorphous and disordered materials. Across more than 400 patents he developed the nickel-metal hydride battery later used in laptops, digital cameras, phones and hybrid and electric vehicles, amorphous silicon thin-film solar panels that made photovoltaic manufacturing far cheaper than crystalline silicon, and hydrogen storage materials for fuel cell and battery applications, alongside unrelated work such as phase-change memory for rewritable optical discs. He founded Ovshinsky Innovation LLC in 2007 after retiring from Energy Conversion Devices, continuing solar and hydrogen research until his death.