Tonight on NOVA. Millions of people tinker in their basements. Once in a long while one
succeeds. This is Stanford Obschinsky. He was right once before and the world was wrong.
Now he has a new idea. Producer Marianne Merzinski spent a year watching Obschinsky try to turn
his dream into reality. What will happen this time to Japan's American genius?
Major funding for NOVA is provided by this station and other public television stations
nationwide. Additional funding was provided by the Johnson & Johnson family of companies
supplying health care products worldwide. And by Allied Signal, a technology leader
in aerospace, electronics, automotive products, and engineered materials.
In the suburbs of Detroit lives a man whose life revolves around two words in the dictionary.
The first is amorphous, meaning shapeless, unorganized, unstructured, and in solid state
physics lacking a crystalline form. The second of onyx he created by combining the word electronic
with his name Obschinsky. This man is a scientist, an inventor, and a high stakes businessman.
His quest is to solve the world's energy problem. 20 years ago, Stanford Obschinsky, a one time
high school dropout and former machinist, made a discovery that shook the world of physics.
In amorphous materials like glass, scorned by the founders of modern electronics, he
found a world of atoms that led to uncharted technologies. His admirers see him as the
greatest inventor since the transistor revolution of the late 40s.
I grew up as a kid during the depression thinking about basic problems of nature, being very
excited by that. I grew up in a rich cultural environment in terms of thinking and speaking
and reading, but it was also clear that I wasn't going to go to college. And so I chose
a trade, and I chose a trade of machinists, of a tool maker, because to me, I still love
it. To me, the making of things, the manufacturing of something, to take something that wasn't
there and to make it new in different ways is a very exciting thing. I still love the
smell of oil and the machine and the tools and the chips, but I was also part of, in
terms of my mind, I wanted to understand. I felt that I was going to be an inventor
from a very early age, because I felt something in me that said not only to understand all
that one could, but then to change, to change, to make something where something wasn't there
before.
Ovchinsky grew up in a world of exciting inventions, among them the vacuum tube, which made radio
and television possible. Then, in the 1940s, a new electronics revolution began. The tiny
transistor paved the way for today's high-speed computers and all of modern telecommunications.
The world of possibilities was opening to probing minds.
I was inquisitive. I was curious. I wanted to understand. I wanted to participate. I
wanted to help change the world and shape it.
The new electronics industry depended completely on crystalline materials like silicon with
their regular atomic structure. When a small impurity is introduced, it greatly enhances
the ability of the crystal to conduct electricity. But crystals must be grown and the process
is expensive. Ovchinsky had the revolutionary idea that non-crystalline materials like glass
with a disordered atomic structure would work just as well. But these amorphous materials
had long been disdained by physicists who considered them poor conductors of electricity
and hard to analyze mathematically because of their random nature.
Stanford Ovchinsky was challenging the dogma of modern physics. What brought him to this
was an interest in biology and a strong intuition. He saw similarities between amorphous materials
and the nerve cells of the brain.
So I became, I was always interested in biology, but I became interested in what is the nerve
cell? How does it store information? How does it switch information? How does it transfer
information? And there was no theories there. The field of transistors and crystalline materials
which were rising so steeply had no answers for that.
Now to be able to take materials, to take atoms now and to put them in new and different
ways relating to each other. This, you can't do that when you have a crystal, what we call
lattice. It's a tyranny. You must have, if you, here's a lattice, crystal lattice. This
is a crystal, germanium crystal. Everything is very regular. You can't distort that or
change it much. You have limitations. So if you want to create new materials, you have
to be able to synthesize. You have to be able to take from the mind instead of from the
minds. And then you must use your, because it's an uncharted area in organic materials.
You must be able to have a vision of what those atoms, how they can go together. You
can't violate the laws of chemistry and the laws of physics. What you have instead is
a new world of chemistry and physics where if you can determine in your own mind what
the atoms would naturally do.
Ovchinsky took him years of experiments in his home basement until he came up with this
tiny device made up of amorphous glass and capable of switching electricity off and on
at the amazing speed of a trillionth of a second. It's impossible. It cannot work,
scientists scoffed at him. Ovchinsky took his invention to Helmut Fricke, chairman of
physics at the University of Chicago, who at first couldn't believe what he saw.
So we had to understand what gives rise to the memory state.
But the evidence was undeniable, and Fricke became a convert.
That was a forbidden subject in the early days of semiconductors. Structurally sensitive.
In crystals, this does not happen.
You don't want it to happen. It's a failure mechanism.
When the results were published, Ovchinsky made history, and his invention became known
as the Ovchinsky effect. Glassy electronic device may surpass transistor, the headline
said.
The structural state between an amorphous state and partially crystalline state and
back to an amorphous state.
And the optical memory that came from it and all the photography.
Initiated by electrical pulses, but any kind of energy.
A self-taught inventor had embarrassed the world of science, opening a new field of material
studies.
Humans create the disciplines. Nature did not.
But it is a combination of physics and chemistry and what we now call material science.
When you do that, you have an effect upon the way we live.
Look at how the transistor affected the way we live.
The electron tube affected the way we lived in the old days.
And how we listened, we had radio, and how society lived was changed by the radio, just
like how society lived was changed by the automobile.
Obviously the society is changing now because of the computer and because of the transistor.
Now with amorphous materials and you're able to do so many different things in so many
different ways by thinking in terms of amorphous materials, then there's going to be another
impact of how we live.
And I hope and I look forward to that impact being a very favorable one.
Obviously the visionaries don't succeed, don't keep their sanity, don't keep their judgment
and so on.
Dr. Isaac Rabi, Nobel Prize winner and the ground man of American physics, has been watching
Govchinsky for 25 years.
Some succeed and some don't.
So much depends upon the times.
So much depends upon accident.
So much depends on whom you meet, what impression you make.
That's the whole gamble of life.
You can't lay down the rule.
Twenty three years after his stormy admittance to the world of science, Stan Govchinsky still
lacks a formal education.
He went the Edison way and decided to hand deliver his invention to the world.
Three hundred people, seventy of them with doctorates, work for his Edison-like company
called Energy Conversion Devices.
Over those years he spent two hundred million dollars on research to develop new amorphous
materials.
If this were a university lab exploring new frontiers of science, nobody would criticize
him for not generating profit in any of those years.
But since he's on the stock market, many do.
Can a great scientist be a great businessman, they ask him.
For Govchinsky, who wants to change the world, the answer is, I have no choice.
Dr. Stephen Hadgins is ECD vice president and Stan Govchinsky is chief scientist.
The remarkable things about working at ECD is the freedom to work across boundaries,
conventional understanding.
For instance, there are aspects of chemistry, engineering, physics, all of which are involved
in every aspect of things that we work with.
Let me show you how our research and development is organized at ECD.
Basically, our company is divided into product divisions, photovoltaics, batteries, thermoelectric,
imager and display, study materials.
Research and development has a responsibility for developing the new materials that are
used in each of these products, as well as helping to solve production problems related
with producing the products, and in some cases inventing device configurations that use these
new materials to allow new products to be developed.
Basically, this is the alphabet from which we construct materials.
The periodic table of the elements is the ECD scientist's Bible.
They study atoms inside the elements and, like modern alchemists, create new amorphous
structures.
We know a lot about the transition metals also for coatings.
For instance, somebody said one time, silicon and carbon are the same, except carbon gives
you biology and silicon gives you sand.
The way the atoms go together make all the difference.
If the Ovshinsky lab is the atom's kitchen, this is the atom's oven.
They are cooked by applying radio frequency or microwave energy to gases made of various
elements like germanium, tellurium, arsenic and others.
This causes them to light up by knocking electrons off the gas molecules and creating ions and
free electrons.
These together comprise a charged gas called plasma.
Some call it the fourth state of matter.
Plasma seals the atoms and spreads them like butter on a substrate.
The atoms leave the oven and are served to scientists as a thin film.
The recipe is now a secret.
When the patent is issued, it will become a potential moneymaker for Ovshinsky's company.
How to write a patent is a science in itself.
The strategy is to be general enough so that others cannot create their own inventions,
but to reveal just enough so that they must rely on yours.
Obtaining and then selling patents are this company's assets.
300 already issued in the US, 1500 abroad, 180 applied for.
This is the current score of Ovshinsky's science for sale.
Those who buy it make products out of it.
Plasma is a remarkable way of making materials because the energies involved are so much
higher than we can achieve in normal thermodynamically equilibrium processes.
An extremely durable amorphous drum for copy machines is one example.
The everyday life at the lab is still the struggle for what they call material optimization.
From his initial discovery, Ovshinsky's science has flown to new heights.
Today it's not just amorphous materials, but a combination of both crystalline and amorphous
structures in one material.
This new technology has already generated a computer optical disk with a 400 million
byte memory capable of storing an entire 50 volume encyclopedia.
You can go up to 40, 50 probably, right?
I think then let's give the next experiment 50 watts.
We keep the same recipe and maybe you'd like to reduce the time.
This was two and a half minutes?
Correct.
Let's go down to two minutes.
Scientists from 16 countries found their haven at the Ovshinsky lab.
Some of them fled the rigidity of corporate structures, others couldn't stand academic
bureaucracy or the limitations of the third world.
Dr. Shabandu Guha from Bombay Stata Institute is director of photovoltaic research here.
He has over 70 publications in solid state physics.
But with Ovshinsky the stakes are higher than publish or perish.
They are here to win or lose a technological war and to make big bucks along the way.
Today they try to improve the composition of an amorphous material for solar cells.
The reflection from the regular ITO, which looks something like that, is the AR coating.
Dr. Wali Chupati, PhD in electrical engineering.
But supposing you have 95% of the total light getting through, in addition you'll be losing
three or four percent here.
So this is the first thing that we are trying to do.
How about the match you get?
Dr. Adam Pawlikiewicz came from Poland.
Silicone nitride and silicon, amorphous silicon here.
Don't you think that you may lose some kind of collection because of the fact that perhaps
microcrystalline is wider band gap?
That's a good question.
But as you know that even the microcrystalline P plus that we are using today without nitrogen,
that has a band gap of about two electron volt.
You cannot talk about hydrides.
Of all of Shinsky's scientific goals, the application of new materials to solar technology
is closest to his heart.
Here in the Institute of Amorphous Studies, he built in the back of his 10-acre yard,
scientists holding the highest academic titles in physics and chemistry come to listen to
him.
His message is that the key to solving the world's energy problems lies in his solar
cells.
His mission is to convince the world that he is right.
His newly developed amorphous solar panel is so light and flexible you can almost wear
it as a shirt.
The ovonic switch brought Stanford of Shinsky scientific fame.
Six layers of amorphous thin film will be deposited from the plasma onto a sheet of
thin steel.
Photons from the rays of the sun will excite the electrons in the amorphous solar cell,
and this now free electrons will create electricity.
To do that, they have to be channeled into a silkscreened grid pattern, a kind of thin
film wire made of silver paint.
The machine is called the continuous-web roll-to-roll photovoltaic processor.
With a speed of 10 inches per minute, the machine makes solar cells one foot wide and
up to 2,000 feet long.
In 10 years' time, 30,000 of these machines could produce enough cells to cover 5% of
Arizona and provide enough electricity for the entire United States.
Of Shinsky's critics and competitors call this machine a white elephant.
They call him an impatient inventor who put the cart before the horse, spending millions
of dollars on a machine before establishing a market.
It is a third-generation machine born out of not-quite-happy marriages.
The first one was financed by the money ECD made on a solar contract with ARCO.
The second was a $20 million Japanese baby, fathered by Sharp Corporation, to produce
minuscule solar cells for packet calculators.
When the market became oversaturated, the machine had no more use.
The present machine comes from a joint venture with Standard Oil of Ohio, which ended in
divorce after Ohio spent $86 million on it.
ECD was able to acquire the machine in a friendly settlement and decided to go on its own.
Now the pressure is on Of Shinsky to make the machine pay for itself.
The solar game is one of technology and money.
When NASA needed solar cells for its space program, money was no object.
The first crystal cells, built by hand, produce electricity at $200 per watt.
Now the Of Shinsky machine, and its amorphous technology, is capable of delivering a watt
of electricity for under $5.
But even with that, the machine usually sits idle.
Unlike other avionic devices, Stan Of Shinsky's photovoltaics do not sell yet.
When the world was ready for solar energy in the midst of its oil crisis, the technology
wasn't.
Today Of Shinsky's technology waits for the world.
But countries with money do not seem to care about solar energy, and the third world countries
that need it most have no money to buy it.
Stanford Of Shinsky places his hopes in Japan.
This is his 80th trip to Japan.
Iris, his wife, and PhD in biochemistry is vice president of their company.
She is his inseparable companion.
I immediately recognized that there was something happening in Japan in 64.
When I came back and talked to my American colleagues about it, they didn't seem to think
so.
People looked down upon Japan.
They thought that the Japanese would produce inferior products.
President of one big automotive company told me that they would never learn how to build
an automobile.
But I saw something else.
I saw a determination, a vitality, and an intelligence, and thought this would be of
interest to us.
The feeling that I have as any country that survived a war with the destruction that accompanied
the war and was able to rebuild itself is admirable.
The feeling that there is industry and power and pulsating vitality in terms of building
new kinds of products, that's all to the good.
That's what America should be and what it used to be.
What we have to offer is what they would like to use to build their industrial base to make
new products.
Crystal technology has been pushed to the fundamental limits of nature, and Silicon
Valley will soon become Death Valley.
Amorphous is the way to go for modern Japan, he tells them, pointing to his new solar application.
We have to free ourselves from conventional fuels.
That's one problem.
The next problem is to provide new materials for the information field because these two
fields will be the largest.
And the third point will be to provide new synthetic materials that have desired characteristics
that allow us to build new industries.
New materials, materials from the mind and not from the minds, materials that we can
synthesize, that we can take elements in three-dimensional space and put them together in arrangements
that are simply not possible and are limited by the lattice, by the crystalline lattice,
what I call the tyranny of the crystalline lattice.
So it's been a dream, a utopian dream, to use photovoltaics.
But if you have a roll now, and that roll is thin and flexible, 20 years ago, when few
of his own countrymen took him seriously, Japan christened him a genius.
Now he wants the Japanese to wave his solar flag as well.
You have now a way of making rolls in Japan or in the United States or in China and shipping
those rolls anywhere in the world and having the low-tech and making them into modules.
How do you start doing business with Japan when you hold 300 patents in the materials
you know Japan is interested in?
You go to the trade show, look under amorphous and quickly figure out who is infringing on
your patent.
Then you kindly invite the big corporation to buy the license from you and after they
decline you threaten to sue them.
That shocks the Japanese who are used to solving problems by friendly negotiations.
And that was exactly the beginning of Ovshinsky's romance with Japanese industry, a tough start
with a happy end.
Today Ovshinsky's company conducts business with Japan's giants, Matsushita Electric,
Sony, Hitachi, Canon, Sharp and Nippon Steel are on the list.
At Canon personal copiers are being produced with amorphous drums developed by ECD.
The revenue from licenses like copier drums, optical discs, memory systems, scientific
mirrors and coating for machine tools supported his company for 23 years.
If it wasn't for the Japanese the prolific inventor entrepreneur who is spending the
bulk of his revenue on solar technology could have been out of business.
It was though a different Japan that opened its arms to him a decade ago when a bonanza
was on the horizon.
Today overproduction and trade friction force the Japanese to make more cautious economic
decisions.
ECD Japan is his subsidiary.
From here he sells his patents to Japanese industry.
Mike Iwakata is in charge of marketing.
One of the biggest Japanese venture capitalists, Jyutalo Hasegawa of Mitsubishi Chemical has
just returned from China.
Anticipating a manufacturing crisis at home he looks to Asia for new labor and consumer
markets and that is exactly where Ovshinsky hopes to sell his photovoltaics.
In terms of this is these are some of the photovoltaic paddocks.
See how flexible.
Bricks now in crystal form is heavy and glass and it breaks easy and it hasn't got well
look here.
You're losing at least 80 percent of your light through the window it's dark and yet
there's enough light to run radio or whatever and this is not only for radios but of course
for to do work.
To be able to bring energy to people who are without it is going to change their life so
much the ability to have medicines and to have jobs when you have without the electricity
you can't have anything.
I have to be not only an inventor I have to be an entrepreneur and I have to have a strategy
of how to introduce a new product a new invention that can have so much potential impact as
photovoltaics.
You could carry under your arm 40 kilowatts of electricity something you could not do
with nuclear energy obviously.
We put holes through it actually shot bullet holes through it and it doesn't destroy.
So what it's a new technology thin film on flexible substrate and it allows you to do
things that simply were unrealistic utopian before in terms of solar energy.
For the first time it makes sunlight a practical form of energy conversion.
The fact that the climate can get so much hotter from the pollution really is what it amounts
to from burning fossil fuels.
So in any sane society the burning of fossil fuels which could cause such a horrible catastrophe
would be banned but nobody can ban coal or oil and oil is dangerous.
I know he's a big oil man and Japan went to war when its oil got cut off.
Right now the war in the in the Persian Gulf is over who controls oil a diligent student
in Japanese manners Stan of Shinsky made unusual inroads in the world we call Japan Inc.
It is a world of family connection university ties and government influence in which an
American businessman often behaves like a bull in a china shop.
The daughter of Dr. Tadashi Sasaki is getting married.
Her father a former sharp executive vice president is Stan's dear friend of 20 years.
Dr. Sasaki was the one who first called of Shinsky the American genius and who still
spread the word.
Today Sasaki is one of the most trusted advisors to Japanese industries and government.
Your capability if you have if you have a basic and fundamental new approach and a new
idea then it's really it isn't the general acceptance that you're after what you're
after is are those people who can understand because what I want to do is not is very ambitious.
I wanted to and we are doing with your help your vision we're transforming the way the
world thinks about materials and how it works and therefore if an idea is so basically new
and different and it's immediately accepted there is something to be wrong.
I have found that in Japan the transition between what I was saying and its acceptance
was a very short time historically much longer in the United States.
Japan and C secrets and B is a professor Sasaki gives grades in science and technology for
creativity Europe gets an a United States a B Japan a C in future technologies a to
US B to Europe C to Japan Americans get a in high technology Japanese get B C for Europeans
when it comes to product development improvement and production Japan is the notorious top
of the class and that's how international trade friction developed the world of science
and technology according to Sasaki is a matter of water and fish the fish is the product
the river is a national market and the ocean stands for the international marketplace Americans
and Europeans invent and engineer a fish put in the river and when it grows fat and reaches
the ocean the Japanese bring their big fishing boats and catch it to get rid of the economic
friction creativity should fly freely across the oceans and the fishing should be shared
help each other by a connection of a canal Japanese assistant USA like you see what Japan
is so good at is not only application and improvement and production but acceptance
so I would I don't know I would just put on acceptance here that the to accept a new idea
is very is part of creativity it's a new it's a new part of creativity but very important
part of creativity that is what Japan has made been able to do all this because it understands
creativity and is able then to apply it where in Europe as you know the acceptance of creativity
is very low and the United States despite the fact that it claims to accept creativity
has many structural in structural institutional inhibitions to it in Japan there is an ability
to in big bureaucracy and structure because look you are such a creative guy and yet the
Japanese government uses you as a wise man so the Japanese government even though it's
big and bureaucratic is creative in that it uses creative people consumer and industrial
in the Sasaki prescription for harmonious world science and technology the partners
would teach each other what they know best it's a deceptively simple ideal but of Shinsky
questions the Americans ability or desire to deliver no country can be great or have
the environment for creativity without an industrial base and it seems to me that the
industrial base of the United States is eroding like taken taken Japan the declining industries
steel shipbuilding they're making a desperate attempt not just to buy each other up and
to take each other over like in the United States but they're making a desperate attempt
to get into new technology and technology is the answer new products are the answer
I don't see that in the United States it's hard to be a prophet in your own land of Shinsky
seems to imply and elsewhere what are his real chances Momoko Ito the president of ECD
Japan her mentor professor Edwin Reischauer former US ambassador to Japan and one of ECD
directors and his wife Haru who writes books on Japanese American history speculate on
whether of Shinsky's big dreams will play in Japan and when Japanese always have this
hungry feeling or sense for crisis maybe it's partly because of the experience of the war
that the Japanese lost or the real realistic fact that we don't have natural resource so
Japanese are always searching for something new they're much more sensitive about what's
going on the rest of the world and Americans for the same reason so of Shinsky was in a
way much well known among Japanese probably Americans for the same reason because Japanese
are always looking for something new most popular word in Japan today is internationalization
and you don't know what it means they don't know what to do about it but but they want
to what they have to do is find things like this that will internationalize their contribution
to the world and and if they can hit on things like this where it really makes a difference
to their neighbors in the poor countries well then the Japanese will get a great deal of
satisfaction out of it it'll actually help their economy because help balance the trade
imbalance that goes on right now and it'll have a playback effect on the Japanese economy
itself and as the other countries become more prosperous Japanese have always had the concept
of doing something for something bigger than yourself it's not just your own profit it's
a profit of the company it's a profit of the nation Japanese industry was built up you
know to produce a strong Japan and now Japan's got your place in the world where it has to
do it for the whole world it can't get along by itself if the whole world has to prosper
the poor countries as well as the rich countries and the Japanese see that if they're going
to maintain their present position and play their natural place in the role they've got
to do something for the whole world and so they're looking for something of the same
way and and and Stan and the Japanese therefore just click together on this they both want
to do something that will count in the long run and count for the world and give Japan
the position it should have in the world and us our position of leadership too uniformity
of this material back in Detroit with a maybe from Japan of Shinsuke is looking for bright
people who can create a market for photovoltaics in America dr. John Kelly private consultant
in public policies from Austin Texas is one prospect way that you can make it any technology
it's like it's like the newspaper the newspaper is great who's going to write out and who's
going to buy it now to have a newspaper let's use the same analogy to have the newspaper
you have to have a literate public all right and so that's where you come in the projections
the energy projections for the United States indicate that we're going to have very serious
shortage in base load capacity the ability to generate basic energy supply for domestic
and industrial purposes in the United States unless we do one of several things either
we build more large capacity generating facilities which would either be coal fired or nuclear
fired or some petrochemical base or we move to a different technology to us to afford
solar technology that can provide that base load the perception on the part of most policymakers
and most energy companies is that solar technology cannot fill that gap at this point one of
the ironies of solar is that in the policy area people are now concerned about the environmental
aspects of solar they think that if we if the efficiency stays in the in the teens the
amount of surface area that's going to be required covered with solar cells areas the
size of Arizona would be just covered with solar cells in order to really provide the
kind of power the United States need is that is that an accurate view is that a well it
reminds you know it reminds me the people who felt they ought to design airplanes by flapping
their wings like a bird because a bird flies it is the it just takes the conventional way
you've been doing things and now extrapolates for new technology that that's what you ought
to be doing well I think the day of the tremendous centralization of energy and then the distribution
of energy in the conventional way is one that is going to start is changing and will in
time become very much less important there just as you were talking about baseload there's
two different important points in energy one is generation and the other is transmission
and transmission costs are very large in any country that doesn't have an infrastructure
for example it isn't just the generation that's important they couldn't afford to build the
wires to go across the mountains or the rivers or what have fact is that the problem that
I see now is not one of technology it's not one of science it's not it's a bit of psychology
it's really a public policy because how to get a revolution started is one thing how
to propagate it is another and what's needed now are other kinds of people of the entrepreneurial
bent of the planning bent of the ability to meet the kind of social structure and political
structure problems that are involved in changing the vast field of energy as we we know about
it that's where I think the people like you can be very helpful to people like ourselves
because that's what's going to be required okay as far as a decision a sales meeting
at so bonnie of shinsuke solar energy company a salesman from Arizona is on a conference
call he wants to know what price per watt to quote 395 is incredible nobody comes close
to they struggle to get the volume orders without which any price is below the production
cost on the solar energy market the law of supply and demand is still a hope not a reality
no different than when henry ford started his model t comments Stanford of shinsuke
the only way we can do it I say is to give them a bonanza that if they buy I don't care
but it's a hundred KW say it's 500 KW or something like that and bring your price down to three
dollars and fifty cents a kid well but let me remind you dr. Masatsugu Izu and of shinsuke
style scientists turned businessman runs the company a world-renowned whiskey in photovoltaics
he was a student of the famous Kenichi Fukui Nobel Prize winner in chemistry Arizona New
Mexico Colorado California well Arizona and the New Mexico for sure but you have to get
us a big purchase order midway between Japan and the American mainland is Hawaii of shinsuke
sees it as an important proving ground for his solar technology Dudley Pratt the president
of Hawaiian Electric Company is a potential convert basically all of our generation here
is oil fired and this is where our interest has become so great in trying to find a source
for for an island nations to produce electricity without burning oil because we're at the mercy
of the the world oil situation everybody still thinks of photovoltaics being utopian something
out the future you know 1990s and that that's the 1990s today in terms of product and in
order to get the price down which is what we both want to do in terms of making it suitable
for utilities it's just a matter of now getting enough orders so that you have I am because
we can get down to two dollars of shinsuke sees an opportunity here and looks for a partner
he knows that son abandoned Hawaii pays the highest electric bill in the nation he also
knows the Japanese like to invest here he has a solar agenda for Hawaii he would assemble
his panels in the islands should the Japanese investment come true and later with even more
venture capital he would install a photovoltaic plant export the panels to the Pacific Basin
and assemble them there translated and transferred an idea which appears to be so advanced into
an actual product into a developing country or a country which really doesn't have technology
because that's one thing they can do and right now in America everybody thinks that the business
and they assume and I'm supposed to be a businessman right and I'm being criticized because businessman
has to think in terms of mergers takeovers you know all this sort of paperwork that doesn't
build value and I believe that the real value has to be built is in science and technology
and you cannot lose that base and in production and Japan works with us comes to us for technology
and production technology there's no there's no marvelous that one person can do it and
another person can't it needs a determination in the culture that you're going to build
things and this is something that the Japanese have and others are developing it's an ethic
and it's an ethic that's disappearing in the United States on the southern shore of Honolulu
with Kali Macaulay Arco solar distributor Arco the only other big company competing
for a solar market has installed here a crystal panel for remote power across the water Japanese
investors will pour four billion dollars into building another Waikiki without including
solar power this saddens Kali what an exposure for a solar farm he tells Stan and Iris you
see this is stiff and breakable this is in Kali solar shop of Shinsky compares Arco crystal
cells to his flexible amorphous panels the inventor and the retailer are comparing notes
asking themselves whether solar in America will ever take off according to Kali it all
amounts to dollars and cents electronic gear metal parts wiring power inverters and right
on down to the batteries we had billions of dollars worth of that being made then this
industry which is a which is just an ordinary sort of cottage industry in many ways would
be changed and the economics would have to be start changing on this and as you cut down
on weight and size you at night solar energy gets expensive when storage batteries are
added to the installation cost the price per watt doubles but of Shinsky argues that the
self-contained solar home is not practical in the United States I don't like he wants
your utility company to serve as a battery at least until better storage technology is
available he himself plans to develop an entirely new kind of storage battery based upon his
forays into the hot new field of superconductivity research this he believes will be his next
technological breakthrough so once you started a revolution you cannot fix it in time and
space and say gee that's it and look at the limitations you can now say what does that
what does it need now to really evolve into what it should be photovoltaics can compete
here Stan if we take under consideration the real true cost of where the energy sources
come from and you got to include cleaning up the mess from acid rain the cold dust that's
in the air and the ruining of the aquifers and we have to go clean a whole aquifer out
and see what that costs if they include those costs and put them on the back of the polluting
industries photovoltaics can compete hands down right now we have to really realize that
if logic ran the world there'd be no war there'd be no unemployment or poverty and so what
we have to do is live with this but change it and public awareness is going to take too
long we have to we have to really appeal to the self-interest of the of the groups involved
and if the utilities have been a factor of retardation then we have to to work with the
utilities we have to really when I hate to use the phrase the hearts and minds of others
to do this and the only way we'll do that is by showing them the reality of the situation
that we can we can do this that we can that we have the mechanism for they can make money
and at the same time where we can build new industries new industries in the electrical
industry in the dc industry the things that are holding back technical progress is that
there's no investment the people are investing in in real estate here in the in the hotels
are not investing in technology the governor of hawaii is interested in owsinski's plans
with sugar going down and everything agriculture not being what it should be it seems to me
that uh that here's an opportunity one of the things hawaii has is a tremendous resource
of people knowledge skills and the sun yeah energy potential you know so that they're
all here about television so light yeah what's the what's the backing it's just plastic by
the way it just it just it just shows i have my saying is if you're sleeping on the floor
you can't fall out of bed this is the ultimate the ultimate in low cost it's the ultimate
in what you can do you know the other thing governor is that this kind of technology spawns
other kind of technologies of hawaii to be involved now we have to discuss storage ultimately
he will receive a small order from hawaii to build a 10 kilowatt solar farm it's a small
victory in a long uphill fight for solar that involves japan his longtime ally mainland
united states harder to win over and hawaii a bridge between these two worlds but this
man who thinks only big battles are worth fighting expects a strike there is a quote
on the wall of stanford of shinsky's office champions of new inventions must display persistence
and courage of heroic quality a new idea either finds a champion or dies will hawaii become
his utopia island back home stanford of shinsky puts on his new inventor's hat one that he
calls an old one superconductivity is a phenomenon occurring in certain materials when electric
current is transmitted without power loss until recently this has been achieved only
by cooling materials down to extremely low temperatures with high cost liquid helium
now the race is on to find materials that are superconductive at higher temperatures
the elusive goal is room temperature in japan the fever got out of hand one company alone
sumitomo electric fired over barrage of 700 patent applications of shinsky has his special
reasons for jumping on the bandwagon the reason that i'm able to work in superconductivity
and more and more the rest of the world is now looking at it my way is not the crystal
structure as everyone thinks it is but the defects the disorder the same principles that
i use for amorphicity and for glasses are now being considered not only by me but are
now being addressed by others and in fact you have to make the materials from the liquid
and in some cases from the amorphous state in a paper published in physical review letters
of shinsky reveals his special recipe he's confident that his experience in thin film
technology and knowledge of materials will assure him a strong position in the race for
patents dr david elrod conducts experiments he was up at 4 a.m this morning anxious to
try a sample of a new composition not a thin film this time but a ceramic palette he thinks
he has witnessed something extraordinary and he wants to obtain the same result in front
of the team david will put the sample into a cooling tank filled with liquid nitrogen
while conducting electricity through the sample he will be lowering the temperature of cooling
until the magic zero resistance will appear on the measurement instrument after achieving
zero resistance the temperature reading will indicate the success of their experiment dr
rosa yan is the superconductivity team leader so it's we're down below one million million
well then i think we ought to wait for this one i think we i'm not breaking for lunch
what's this sample look like so this is about 1.3 and we've done 6.7 oh this is really coming
to life this is zero 168 kelvin incredible make sure that you have it all we have a lot
to celebrate today and in the usual ecd fashion we where science has to be fun and this is
certainly fun then everybody get out of the way because workman's compensation i don't
think covers this hey glass glass glass between a prediction of a new superconductivity market
of 20 billion dollars by the year 2000 and a projected annual 50 million dollar royalty
to ecd for optical memory disks the scientist cheers his alter ego the capitalist but for
all this his company is still running in the red so he recently restructured the company
laid off 100 of his staff cut his and his wife's salary in half and asked a big headhunter
to find him a chief operating officer back home life for iris and stanofshinsky is as
amorphous as the materials they develop in their basement the ofshinsky switch has been
switching on and off continuously for 23 years proving everybody else was wrong about amorphous
materials stan and iris are two people on a mission with their joys and sorrows having
no boundaries between home and work energy conversion devices their mom and dad company
is a two-minute drive away the company stock roller coasters up when they invent things
and down when they cannot sell them right away anybody who believes that they're a true
revolutionary that wants a rant from the soapbox is not going to change society society is
changed by hard work and dedication and sticking with it you're not in there for an overnight
victory you're there to build on general principles he's not an edison he's enough shinsky he's
of this age and he's didn't have this formal education he has a lot of education and he's
working with things which have been discovered recently and he's mastered and he's understood
it he has some of the edison thing that he plays around this way in that way i think
he's more of a you know a brilliant mind finding his way through the intricacies of modern
technology and science one of a special breed stanford ofshinsky was once right when the
world of science was wrong now his scientific reputation is unquestioned it is the business
world he is up against today and the business world seems to be dragging its feet will japan's
american genius ever become a prophet with honor in his own land
for a transcript
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