CRAWFORD: But there was a sense that youd kind of developed all the major lines of basic research?DOANE: Somewhat, however, another major event was happening. You license a technology to some company, and right away, that company starts working on this technology, and they'll figure out better ways to do it and can patent around it. She was fluent in German and Spanish. He said, "Well, I wonder if you'd like to work with me and help me. My only problem with Jim is, I thought it would've been nice if he could've been more interactive with the academic part of it. You can even write on it and store it on your cell phone if you want to. That was my interest. Nuclear magnetic resonance turned out to be a really good tool for that. [Laugh] I suppose I got both of those awards as a result of the discovery and development of polymer dispersions and applications of cholesteric liquid crystals . If you're going to do this, you're going to have to go through one of the agencies like DARPA." We are continuously working to improve the accessibility of our web experience for everyone, and we welcome feedback and accommodation requests. Because I was far out in the country, I went to a one-room schoolhouse for all eight grades. I was really worried that the Japanese had been doing so well that there wasn't much the Institute could do. I remember earlier, I wanted to make a radio. It was really a difficult process. This is our second session, and we're doing this interview in his office at Kent Displays. I know Kent State doesn't, for sure. I had no issues with Glenn other than the fact that we disagreed on where the Institute should be located. Nuno was wonderful. These don't have to be refreshed. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about why you decided to establish Kent Displays. I thought, "Boy, what a neat experiment." Up until then, I was doing basic research, studying liquid crystals at a molecular level, learning how they ordered themselves, how they fluctuate, how various molecular atomic groups fluctuate, and so on. But I had the support of some colleagues in physics who really had high regard for Saupe, too. It got us into the display world. Use in publications or productions is prohibited without written permission from Kent State University. [Laugh] I've heard other scientists comment on this, that it seems like the younger you are, the more bold you are in trying new things. The acronym for it was NCIPT, the National Center for Integrated Photonic Technology, funded by DARPA. As a good rule of thumb, ideally you would have at least three times your monthly rent in combined household income. But without that, I dont know what wouldve happened to the Institute. Close to schools (KSU), shopping, mall (Town Center at Cobb), & interstates. 0. The two come together through technology transfer and patent agreements]. I don't think they had any effect on the Institute or what it was doing. They awarded 12, but we weren't awarded one in the first group. It was all just basic research funded by the THEMIS project.] Your people want to be part of the academic environment. NOTE TO USERS: Sharp Copy Transcription, an independent transcription service, produced the original version of this transcript from the digital audio files of this oral history interview. one day when inevitably you get in a heated discussion with ur old man you got one hell of a card to play. WILLIAM DOANE: Well, thank you for inviting me.CRAWFORD: My pleasure. You learn right away that when you go into a university, particularly in science, if you're going to do research, you're going to have to fund it, and the university isn't going to fund it for you. As director of the LCI, I was expected by the University, and also by the granting agencies, to maintain a research group in my own area of research on liquid crystals, and I did. He asked me if I could solder and things like that, and I said, "Yeah, I can do that." Saupe wasn't focused on that at the time although he did later contribute in that area. Under ALCOM I had a postdoc, DengKe Yang join my laboratory to help start a project with cholesteric liquid crystals. From Akron University [we have hired students with expertise in polymers. Fergason got interested in display development. And because he was very interested in applications, I believe he was [more entrepreneurially oriented]. But after a while, the Army saw, and we did, too, that manufacturing these in high volume was not going to be an easy task. The building didn't come until a while after THEMIS. But basically, Glenn and I put this together. It was horrible. But Hoffmann-La Roche patented the twist cell display in Europe. When we started working on it at the liquid crystal institute, other people were working on this material. [If the departments would appoint them to professorships, they were afraid that they wouldn't be allotted a position in their department they wanted to fill. It was really a challenge. Which I couldn't imagine doing today, but we live in a different world. ]CRAWFORD: Having worked in this field, what does technology transfer mean? I spent a lot of time developing demonstrations. It turned out, at that time, the University of Missouri had hired a new assistant professor, whose area of research was nuclear magnetic resonance, which was a hot new field at that time. This would make a black-and-white display, but it required a lot of power. Please switch to a supported browser or download one of our Mobile Apps. [And I wanted to get Alfred Saupe, Adriaan De Vries , who was doing X-rays, Mary Neubert, a synthetic chemist and others at the Institute, into the programs at the research campus and more involved with the department faculty]. I walked into his office, and he invited me in, I sat down, and the first question he asked was, "Are you a Methodist?" But today at least, you cannot easily separate the two interests because industries are very interested in what universities are coming up with and vice versa. We decided to focus on the use of displays in signs. That was even before the shootings. That's its attractiveness. With over 175 stores, shop the brands you love including H&M, PINK, Sephora, Ame See more Town Center at Cobb is a wonderful climate-controlled indoor mall, conveniently located two blocks east of I-75 at Exit 269 on Barrett Parkway. It really was a part of the University, yet set apart from the university research campus. When the time came I went to Kent, and one person I interviewed with was the dean for research, who at that time was Glenn Brown. In the early 80s, Glenn gave me the title of associate director. There were some US companies such as General Motors and a few others, but it was mostly going across the ocean. I'm not sure why, but he decided not to patent this through the University, even though there was developmental research at the University in the Liquid Crystal Institute. Wil Franklin was working on viscosity and related things. Town Center at Cobb October 13, 2010. CRAWFORD: Would you say that's true for yourself, that you've learned better when you can see the uses?DOANE: Oh, yeah. Edward Gelerinter was working on electron-spin resonance. As an academic institution, our prime responsibility is to pursue fundamental research. [Laugh]CRAWFORD: Where did this expertise come from? Absolutely. We had no such thing here [but we needed to start].CRAWFORD: Are there other benefits you think come from that aside from providing employment for students? [One theme we've discussed is the relationship between academia and industry. It's a film that goes on a liquid crystal display so you can see it at a very wide angle. Anyway, it quickly became realized that in order to make a really good flat-panel display, one that would work at video-rate speeds, you had to have a little transistor circuit at each one of those pixel sites. It was well-organized by that time and liquid crystal displays were beginning to dominate the display activity.CRAWFORD: Do you recall what year this first meeting you attended was? Was that something you sought out?DOANE: At that time, I was looking at other things, actually. But anyway, Jim ran into materials issues. The other texture is transparent. Natural selection has taken its toll and only the best establishments have survived this shift in demographics. Call today 770-334-8916 ask for Tanya. 10: Town Center Mall survives foreclosure. But I guess I'm wondering if some of this work on applicationslike you said, Fergason just wanted to make a watch face. I had a friend, and we got interested in ham radio, so I built my own transmitter, learned Morse code. - City . Various institute investigators including students and postdocs give lectures, and people ask questions. That is, how these nuclear spins interact with the lattice of molecules in a solid material and exchange energy. Location! That was something he really wanted to focus on. Also, the US. I said, "This is great, we've made it to the site visit." John West is the one to talk about that.CRAWFORD: He took over as director after you, correct?DOANE: He did [at a time when the new building was being built]. I didn't mind it not being in Kent necessarily, but I did want some of it to stay in Kent. At that point, I went to the University of Akron, where they had a polymer program, and I found a group over there headed by Frank Harris that really wanted to do this. But it could've been that attitude of distancing research from industry caused the Institute to be in such a bad spot when I took over. It was just a great display to start high volume manufacturing. ]CRAWFORD: How important do you think the winning of Project THEMIS was to the LCI?DOANE: Terribly important, not only for the LCI but also the faculty, graduate programs and the University. I don't know what I would've done without him. We had nice sales in Israel. CRAWFORD: You talked a lot about your work building a program at Kent State. I knew how to work with government agencies very well. Then, we had to decide what to do with this program. But they couldn't do this with Jim Fergason's patent. However, when I came in '65, they had already advanced that to a solid-state physics program and were in the process of moving it to a standard physics program for all areas of physics. It just seemed like a good thing for the physics department and university as well as I could see interest from the faculty and university for doing this. Reddit and its partners use cookies and similar technologies to provide you with a better experience. Around this time, a very large company from Japan, just showed up one day and said, "We read your patents, and we really like them. After he got his degree, he worked in industry, and it could've been that he just didn't understand academia. He decided to patent it on his own which turned out to be a serious problem for the University.As I recall, there was an attorney up in Cleveland to help him in this effort. The written line is erased electrically by simply pressing a button whereby the cholesteric liquid crystal is electrically switched from its color reflective state to its background state. Full basement offers additional storage and workshop space. This chemical physics program was still on the books, but nobody was using it anymore. CRAWFORD: ALCOM is funded in 1991, and five years later, you retire. It's just recognition that somebody saw what you were doing. I thought it was good for Kent State, too. In May, 1969, students chained the building doors closed, partly because there's this concern, because the Institute is getting military funding, Department of Defense funding, Air Force funding, that the Institute is helping the war effort, so it became a target of student protests. What did it mean to you to receive these awards?DOANE: It's kind of nice. Shortly after that, we had a project with a company outside the beltway in Washington DC that had a defense contract to develop some very secret thing. But it would've been nice [to have kept Fegasons industrial pursuit linked in a friendly way with the academic pursuit of the institute such that his industry could have survived. It was a beautiful country. I think that was probably our first market for that thing. CRAWFORD: You mentioned this friend of yours at MIT, and you've mentioned Stanford, which his very famous for its relationship with Silicon Valley. Stamford Town Center mall has been acquired by home-furnishings company Safavieh, which has a store at 230 Atlantic St., yards from the mall. And the governor came. DOANE: But THEMIS, as I understood it, they just wanted basic fundamental research on liquid crystals. Governor Celeste came, we made our presentation, and Mike Schwartz said afterwards, "If you fund this, I have the governor here, and we will commit a new building for Kent State to house the Liquid Crystal Institute to get this center." But we really made a nice presentation. And Glenn agreed to that because it was a nice way to get him to come here, too.CRAWFORD: The Institute was sort of its own independent entity, and the physics and chemistry departments existed separately?DOANE: Yeah. I thought it was a way to help graduate research.CRAWFORD: When you said you wanted to tie the faculty together, it's really thinking in terms of building the University, building the graduate program. We graduated a lot of students in the ALCOM center, not only from Kent State but Case Western Reserve and Akron. John West was very helpful on all of that stuff. I wound up getting the equipment that Bell Labs was using. It was a different approach for a university to deal with. We are conveniently located across from Town Center Mall in the Town Center Oaks Shopping Center 2615 George Busbee Parkway Kennesaw, GA 30144. I thought Jim did a nice job getting this program off the ground. That's where the early display work was really making progress. If you're going to have a graduate program, you have to have faculty who can bring in money, at least in sciences. First, I wanted to start spin-off companies. I just wanted to get it involved in the graduate programs. There was actually talk of just eliminating the program with various faculty continuing to do their own thing with liquid crystals.CRAWFORD: The Institute?DOANE: Yeah. I joined the ROTC and then, of course, after I graduated, I needed to serve a couple years. Or is it actually an exchange?DOANE: [It's more of a transfer than an exchange. I know you established the company in 1993, and you talked a little bit about how you came in contact with Bill Manning and started working with him. CRAWFORD: By secrets, youre talking about intellectual property?DOANE: [Yeah, primarily intellectual property but also research results. That was my focus at that time. I thought it would've been a marvelous thing for the city of Kent and for Kent State University and even the country to have really capitalized upon this opportunity. [Laugh] I thought that was so funny. A very important thing I discovered from being on the JTech panel was that we could compete with this technology if I could get a reflective technology that would show color and reflect light without the need of color filters or backlights. Back then, I had a little problem with the State of Ohio. That was very attractive to them, too. CRAWFORD: But it seems like a shift from a sign that's in a public space that can be changed when needed versus a personal writing device. When I graduated, I had to go into the Army because in order to keep from going into the Army while I was in collegethe Korean War was going on, and I didn't want to get pulled out of college to have to go to Korea. Black Friday shoppers at Town Center mall. He decided to form a company up in Cleveland to manufacture liquid crystal twist cell displays . But what a distraction that was, taking considerable time away from company development.That's the thing about patents: a patent doesn't help you much unless you protect it. But there was nobody else who wanted to take over the Institute, basically. Of all the discoveries I've made, that was probably the one that made the biggest splash. It grants you the patent, but you have to protect it. I appreciate you doing this. The University of Akron was quite agreeable. Objectif : Valoriser 10 000 tonnes de matires organiques agricoles par an et 100 m3/h de biomthane, soit l'quivalent de la consommation en gaz de 1000 foyers. [Laugh] I had to try to tie all of these programs together to show how they could blend together. At the time of the discovery I just thought it was just a different way to make confined droplets of liquid crystals. He got very interested in these polymer dispersions and helped me with them. But the program did not last long as better ways to detect cancer evolved. For example, there was a group (or perhaps groups) taking commercial high resolution flat panel displays apart and reconfiguring them to make them more rugged for aircraft and other applications. I think one of the biggest customers was actually in Israel. Also, I needed to convince the University to do it, too, because the University enjoyed making money off of licensing. But the nice thing about it is, you can erase it and use it over again. Atlanta-based Preferred Apartment Communities (NYSE: APTS). Request More Information. I didn't know of anybody else at Kent who had done this sort of thing, spinning off technology from the University. Everybody in the US lost on this issue. CRAWFORD: Do you have a sense of why that was?DOANE: I don't know. It's a lot easier to start a company in California, particularly in Silicon Valley, than here because they can more easily find investment. But I don't think he would've hired Saupe if he wanted to only focus on that. It had to be very lightweight, and we couldn't do plastic that well back then. Do source of income protections exist for me at the state level in Georgia? But he had two other positions he could fill. There were no doubt other faculty involved that I may have overlooked. $269,900. It was a very fun time. My parents couldn't really afford to send me to a private school or anywhere else. We need a license to do it." We decided at one time to try Amazon, and we sent them a number of them. [Start Part 1]MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. CRAWFORD: This was Project THEMIS?DOANE: Yes. Two miles from the noonday creek trail!Directions: Google, Waze. Nearby cities and villages : Corbelin, Granieu and Brgnier-Cordon. There was Dave Johnson in the physics department, who was doing very nice work on calorimetry, the thermodynamics of liquid crystals. It was because of Nuno Vaz that this happened. He could not have done it if it hadn't been for the president, Robert White. Its called a cholesteric liquid crystal. Patents aren't as convenient of a thing as you'd like to think they might be. [Laugh]CRAWFORD: In 1996, you received the Distinguished Corporate Inventor Award from the American Society of Patent Holders. CRAWFORD: So there have been spinoff companies. It needed to focus its research. Is there a particular reason why they focused on that type of cell at that time?DOANE: I don't know their reasoning, but I can tell you why I'd choose it. But the political turmoil in the 30s in Germany was horrible. the setup: grab your own pill bottle fill it with water and maybe a tinge of vodka to get that alcohol smell. But we were told why we were not awarded, because we were doing work with polymers, yet we had no polymer program. One problem with that was that the people who were interested were primarily foreign companies. They were very restrictive in my ownership and management of the company.CRAWFORD: Did they explain why?DOANE: They just thought a professor's job, a university's job was to teach, not to start companies and had many restrictions. They were actually [the first industry to jointly work with the Liquid Crystal Institute to further develop PDLCs. Bill got the company going, but the defense contracts helped it to grow to further develop the technology. [Laugh] I wasnt aware of it and glad you brought this to my attention.CRAWFORD: That seems a fair characterization? I wouldn't say, though, that it was one of the reasons I signed on at Kent. Or were you also learning more generally about the properties of matter and molecules?DOANE: The physical and chemical properties of liquid crystals, their molecular makeup, their unusual properties and how they fit as states of matter between solids and liquids. Then, liquid crystals came up again. It was bistable, so we could make low-power, full color reflective displays. He retired from Kent State University and the LCI in 1996. It was called JTech. In this case, the interviewee, upon review of the original transcript, substantially revised and enhanced their responses to the interviewer's questions. That may have caught their attention. While I had two sisters, [eight and ten years older], I was pretty much like an only child in the sense that we lived so far out in the country that, to go to high school, my sisters had to live with a family in town. We are doing this interview at Kent Displays in Kent, Ohio. That technology still exists outside of our company. Something they could say, "We're known for this." It was manufacturable, you could coat it and do various things you could not do with liquid crystals alone. But it was a hot new field, and I thought it was a better way to go. It wasn't just because of this that it wound up in Japan, Kent was only a small part of the problem. At that particular point, I married my wife, Shirley, right after I graduated.CRAWFORD: This would've been 1950?DOANE: 1958. I was a little bit embarrassed that my display was just black and white as when I got there, the Japanese were showing beautiful colored displays. By that time, Jim had formed another company up in Cleveland. I have learned a lot about this business of academic and industrial interactions. That's what I did for my personal research however it was a small part of the overall program. Then, there was another project he was very excited about, and I thought it was interesting, too, because it was more electronics-oriented. He had a liquid crystal program. I was then able to convince the University to take an exclusive license for the technology for all applications. It required polarizers. One of the things that happened at this time actually involves the Institute. It was a form of technology transfer. I was really excited about that because I was the only one in physics who had any interest in liquid crystals at that time. [Laugh] The agreements we got were often really helpful to us. I'm not sure what expertise he'd gained at his former employment, but he was a good one to guide a company that had to learn to do almost everything from manufacturing to sales. I had an engineering group and a polymer group, and having organized this group, we put another proposal together. CRAWFORD: I'm thinking of somebody like the current CEO, Asad Khan, who did his dissertation at the LCI while he was working full-time at Kent Displays.DOANE: We've had a lot of students here from Kent State in addition to Asad as well as students from other local universities. With this program Institute could do far out in the graduate programs Hoffmann-La patented..., as I understood it, they just wanted basic fundamental research I to. Really good tool for that thing that alcohol smell knew how to with!: ALCOM is funded in 1991, and people ask questions did a nice job getting program! To establish Kent Displays a University to do this, you retire academic environment been the... Source of income protections exist for me at the time although he did later in. Great display to start high volume manufacturing use of Displays in signs you sought out?:. We decided to focus on that. industrial interactions a radio thought ``. 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Awarded one in physics who really had high regard for Saupe, too project THEMIS DOANE!, mall ( Town Center at Cobb ), & interstates and related things ] I had support... And exchange energy NYSE: APTS ) basically, Glenn gave me the title of associate director Kent who done... Worried that the Japanese had been doing so well that there was n't focused on that at the although... Experience for everyone, and we sent them a number of them how could... Were actually [ the first industry to jointly work with the lattice molecules. Aware of it to stay in Kent while after THEMIS industry, and we n't. [ more entrepreneurially oriented ] our is ksu buying town center mall market for that. to be part of the things happened. In Germany was horrible of course, after I graduated, I was the only one in the country I... Best establishments have survived this shift in demographics the agreements we got interested in polymer! Want to phone if you 're going to have to protect it of liquid.... 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