Inventor and solar technology innovator Stanford R. Ovshinsky died Wednesday evening at the age of 89.
Ovshinsky lived long enough to see the commercial establishment of a technology revolution that he helped launch in his Detroit laboratory more than a half-century ago.
Dale Buss writes in The Detroit News that Ovshinsky died peacefully at home in Bloomfield Hills after ailing from prostate cancer.
His son, well-known video producer Harvey Ovshinsky, said a private burial wil be held in Akron, Ohio, where Ovshinsky was born.
Best known nationally as a hero of the electric-car movement, Ovshinsky also is credited with discovering in the late 1960s what became known as the "Ovshinsky effect" — the principle that described how glass can be engineered to conduct electricity.
He predicted then that the effect could be harnessed to produce smaller desktop computers, cheaper electronics and flat, tubeless television sets that could be hung on the wall like a picture — and did lead to personal computers, inexpensive electronics and flat-screen TVs.
A self-educated man, Ovshinsky co-founded Energy Conversion Devices Inc. with his wife, iris, in Detroit in 1960. It later moved to Troy and Rochester Hills.
