Smart Smart People

A few weeks ago I ranted about dumb vs. smart people. I found one of the smart people. I’m willing to bet the guy on the left is someone you’ve never heard of. I hadn’t until last night. His name is Sanford Ovshinsky, and he’s one of the smartest smart people.

The Economist calls him the Edison of our age, which is a pretty safe statement. It’s not simply his brain power that makes him remarkable, it’s his sheer chutzpa. He founded a company called Energy Conversion Devices (ECD). One of the main focuses of ECD is bringing hydrogen power sources into the mainstream. Here’s the sticky part: He founded the company in 1960.

Stanford wasn’t singularly obsessed with hydrogen though. Over the years he has invented and holds patents on a few items you may have heard of; rewriteable optical disks, flat panel displays, non-volatile memory, thin-film solar cells, and the nickel-metal-hydride (NiMH) battery. Oh yea, did I mention he never went to college? He had to drop out of school during the Depression to help support his family. He credits his learning to public libraries.

ECD has actually lost money for most of its existence. Not that Stanford gave a rip about that, because he was always looking out at the horizon and not at the bank account. At 84 years old he’s just now standing on the edge of what will truly change the world. He’s engineered how to make solar cells without silicon, no small deal, as the price of solar cells has risen 50% in recent years because of a crunch in industrial silicon. He has also transformed solar cells into thin, flexible, self-adhesives that can be rolled onto just about anything. According to The Economist, he has worked out how to manufacture it at over 200 feet per minute. But the truly huge promise of his work is that he believes he’s figured out a way to scale up his hydrogen storage system to the megawatt level. This holds enormous potential, as it could move us away from being at the direct mercy of the power grid.

I think I missed something big in my dissection of smart people. I think the biggest ingredient is that you have to really want it. You have to be willing to ride hard towards your objective, even if you’re not sure what the objective will look like. The toughest part is probably that you have to be willing to stay your course when common consensus is that you’re full of s***. Einstein didn’t know the mechanics of it, but just knew there had to be a better explanation. He took a ton of crap from everyone around him and got academically blackballed, but he kept swinging away and eventually came up with E-mc2. Michael Faraday had almost no formal education, got scoffed at for most of his career, and was ostracized by the Royal Society…..until they finally realized he was on to something. The more I look at it the more I think that drive counts as much as intellectual capacity.

Ares