Stanford Ovshinsky, 'Edison of our age,' dies at 89
Stanford R. Ovshinsky, a self-taught scientist who invented the nickel-metal hybrid battery and a new class of semiconductors, died Wednesday at age 89.
The cause of death was prostate cancer, according to his son, Harvey Ovshinsky.
Hailed in 2006 by Economist magazine as "the Edison of our age," Ovshinsky held more than 200 patents on a wide variety of pioneering products, from thin-film solar cells to hydrogen fuel cells. In the 1950s, Ovshinsky upset conventional thinking by rejecting the notion that only well-ordered crystals had useful electronic properties and suggested that so-called amorphous, or disordered, materials could be … Read more
