This is a guest post from Judy Endelman, Director of the Benson Ford Research Center.

On April 29, 2009, The Henry Ford’s “Collecting Innovation Today” team interviewed the octogenarian inventor Stan Ovshinksy at the United Solar Ovonics plant in Auburn Hills and at the Institute for Amorphous Studies in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.

Stan Ovshinsky has a mission.  He wants to save the planet and solve the world’s problems through science and technology.  He wants to replace fossil fuels with non-carbon-based renewable energy sources, such as solar and hydrogen power.  Stan Ovshinsky is self-taught. Before he graduated from high school, he was working as a tool-maker and machinist. He invented a new lathe when he was barely out of his teens.  Most of his research has been to develop sources of energy that don’t harm the planet and that can be readily available to all peoples.  Possibly because Japan has never had a domestic oil industry, the Japanese were early adopters of Ovshinsky’s inventions and saw the importance of what he was trying to do.  The Japanese were one of the first to acquire his machinery to manufacture solar panels and Toyota put his nickel-metal-hydride battery in its Prius hybrid.  He was an enthusiastic supporter of GM’s first foray into electric cars—the EV-1—which also used his battery.  But GM killed the project and crushed all of the remaining cars, something he is quite bitter about.  Now he’s modified a Prius to run on hydrogen which he prefers to the conventional hybrid (because it uses no petroleum products for fuel).

Stan Ovshinsky’s work isn’t done.  And even though his late wife thought his work had made the world a better place for all humanity, he still has lots more he wants to do.

We conducted the interview at the Institute for Amorphous Studies in Bloomfield Hills, Michigan.  Stan has been interested in the study of amorphous and disordered materials since he was a teen-ager in Akron, Ohio.

Stan pointed out some of the features in the hydrogen Prius.  Then we took a drive in it.

Every room at the Institute has at least one framed periodic table on the wall.  This one is in Stan’s office.