Stanford Ovshinsky, the inventor of the nickel-hydride (NiMH) battery that is widely used in many non-plug-in hybrid-electric vehicles, among other amazing things, died October 17 at the age of 89 from complications due to cancer.
Ovshinsky, who didn’t go to college, had hundreds of patents to his credit, and a 2006 Financial Express article went so far as to compare Ovshinsky to Thomas Edison. It wasn’t the only outlet to do that. Ovshinsky’s discoveries, which date back to the late 1950s, helped further the development of such widely used products such as flat-panel displays, solar panels and rewritable compact discs. In 1960, he founded ECD Ovonics (first called Energy Conversion Devices), which was named a top 20 green company by Plenty magazine in 2007. An extensive obituary can be found in the New York Times here.
