In the world's laboratories, which are increasingly tightly budgeted and directed, are there still places for the solitary geniuses who have historically made great contributions to technology progress?
Technology invention can be a heroic business involving a single person engaged in the lonely pursuit of a vision which others don’t understand.
Dr Larry Hornbeck, the inventor of Texas Instruments’ digital light processing (DLP) technology based on tiny mirrors, is heroic in that he worked on developing the technology for 19 years before any product went into production.
DLP technology nowadays has 50 per cent of the worldwide front projection market, and Hornbeck is still working at TI developing DLP technology.
“It’s a fascinating technology. Everyone who comes to work in DLP sees that. It has a cult following in TI”, says John Reder who heads up DLP business strategy at TI, “who would have thought it would work?”
Another such hero is Minoru Ono, who developed the MOS transistor at Hitachi in 1962. Ono was regarded as eccentric in his pursuit of MOS, when the world was bipolar, to the extent that colleagues felt resentful of him.
It was only when a visiting delegation from RCA, later on the inventors of CMOS, asked about Ono’s work, and became extremely enthusiastic when Ono explained what he was doing, that Hitachi management realized Ono had developed something which was extremely important and valuable.
One wonders if, in these days of tightly focussed R&D budgets and closely defined R&D targets, there is a place for the likes of Hornbeck and Ono to go off at a tangent and do something eccentric and wonderful.
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