Oral History Interview with J. William Doane by Matthew Crawford

August 9, 2021
August 10, 2021
August 16, 2021
Location of Interview: Kent Displays in Kent, Ohio.

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

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. In this case, the interviewee, upon review of the original transcript, substantially revised and enhanced their responses to the interviewer's questions. If this interview is important to you, you are advised to consult the original digital audio files and any additional files related to the interview in the Kent State University Special Collections and University Archives.

[Start Part 1]

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm an Associate Professor and Historian of Science at Kent State University. I'm interviewing Dr. J. William Doane, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Emeritus Director of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, as well as Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at Kent Displays. Today is August 9th, 2021. We are doing this interview at Kent Displays in Kent, Ohio. Dr. Doane, thank you for agreeing to speak with me today.

J. WILLIAM DOANE: Well, thank you for inviting me.

CRAWFORD: My pleasure. I wanted to start off just asking some background questions. I wonder if you could tell us when and where you were born and what your early childhood was like.

DOANE: Sure. I was born in the sandhills of Western Nebraska, out in the country in a sod house, built by my father. My father was a farmer, however my mother was from the East and very well-educated. She had a master's degree from Boston University, and I think graduated magna cum laude, majoring in languages. She was fluent in German and Spanish. She had come out [West] to teach school after her college work, which is where she met my father and how she wound up in the sod house. [Laughs]

CRAWFORD: She was teaching in Nebraska?

DOANE: Yes. She came out on a train around 1915, I think. It was quite an experience for her. Because I was far out in the country, I went to a one-room schoolhouse for all eight grades. 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. I didn't see them very often, only in the summertime. And of course, after they graduated from high school, they went to college, and I didn't see them then, either. [Laughs] I was pretty much an only child. Those were kind of my early years. My father, in order to afford to send them to high school and college, started a little filling station that developed into a country store. Our property was not on a highway, but he managed to purchase a few acres on a highway and built this filling station, again, out of sod. Being at a small grade school, I really was not exposed to that much science. My father was very interested in astronomy, and he would point out things to me about the Milky Way, the various stars, and so on. But that was really my only relation to science. When I got to high school, my father sold all that property in Nebraska and moved to Southern Missouri. He wanted to be where there were some trees. There were few trees in Western Nebraska. [Laugh] I went to high school in Southwest Missouri. With regards to science, in high school, I got involved with amateur radio. Again, we lived out in the country, and I went to a small town for high school. I had a friend, and we got interested in ham radio, so I built my own transmitter, learned Morse code. [Laugh] Strung my antennas and so on. That was my first inclination that I liked this kind of thing. My parents were very supportive of that and helped me with it. Those were pretty much my early years in a nutshell.

CRAWFORD: What was it that attracted you to radio?

DOANE: I'm not really sure. I remember earlier, I wanted to make a radio. I wanted to learn Morse code, and I needed to make a little oscillator that would make tones and got a [telegraph] key, so I could [practice and] learn Morse code. I had virtually nothing to work with, so I had to get [a vacuum] tube, and then I didn’t know how to mount this tube. I didn’t know anything about tube sockets. So I got a board, drilled holes to put the tube in, ran wires down it to put in the holes [and got the oscillator to work]. My father, early on, had bought me a crystal radio set. I played around with that, though I never could get it to work very well. But I would say that was kind of how I got started in it. I did have a high school teacher, [Harley Rutledge], who was right out of college and had a degree in physics. I was very lucky to have such a guy in this little town. And he was very helpful and supportive of this sort of thing. He even formed a little radio club. I would say that was how I got into it. I just happened to see the right people at the right time. I always wanted to go to college because my mom really encouraged that. I think she guided me a lot in this direction. I thought I wanted to go into electrical engineering.

CRAWFORD: Was it the problem-solving, working with your hands that attracted you to engineering?

DOANE: I think so. I liked working with my hands, and I liked building things. I just thought engineering was the place to be for what I seemed to like. I got a scholarship from high school to the University of Missouri. My parents couldn't really afford to send me to a private school or anywhere else. The University of Missouri was where I could go because I had support. I went there, and I wasn't in engineering very long. In engineering, you need to take some basic courses in chemistry, physics, and so on. I was taking this physics course, and one day, while in the physics laboratory I wanted to take a break from what I was doing. I walked down the hall, looking in doors, seeing what this physics department looked like. [Laugh] I happened to wander by this one room, and I looked in there, and it was just full of electronics. I was really impressed. I stopped and looked at it. I was standing there, and the professor happened to be in there, and he saw me. He started a conversation with me. I just said, "Oh, I was an amateur radio operator and was impressed by all these electronics." He said, "These are the electronics for a cosmic-ray telescope." He asked me if I could solder and things like that, and I said, "Yeah, I can do that." He said, "Well, I wonder if you'd like to work with me and help me. I need somebody to help build these electronics." Well, that was marvelous. [Laugh] At the time, for extra money, I was working in the cafeteria at $0.35 an hour, and he offered me a job at more than that. I was really excited about that. I could do what I wanted to do. That event, right there, guided my life. That was the main event that really told me where I wanted to go. It wasn't long after that, I changed to physics. That's really how I got into physics.

CRAWFORD: Did you end up working with that professor?

DOANE: Here's how all of that went. [Laugh] I worked with him as an undergraduate, building his electronics, and I became very familiar with the kind of stuff he was doing. When I graduated, I had to go into the Army because in order to keep from going into the Army while I was in college–the Korean War was going on, and I didn't want to get pulled out of college to have to go to Korea. I joined the ROTC and then, of course, after I graduated, I needed to serve a couple years. At that particular point, I married my wife, Shirley, right after I graduated.

CRAWFORD: This would've been 1950?

DOANE: 1958. Shirley went with me. I was an officer, so she could come, and we could live off-base. I was in artillery school at Fort Sill Oklahoma. After I finished that, the Army discovered that I and one other guy in this class were physicists, and they said they needed communications officers. They sent the two of us to communications school. [Laugh] But after that, I got assigned to an artillery battalion as a communications officer up in [Tacoma], Washington [near Seattle]. My wife and I went to [Tacoma]. But when I married Shirley, she knew from the very beginning I wanted to go back to graduate school. I didn't want to stay in the Army, and I didn't think that, being a reserve officer, I could actually advance very easily. I didn't think I wanted to stay in the Army. Shirley knew I wanted to go back to graduate school and was quite supportive of that, even though she wanted to start a family. And that was fine, I did, too. After I finished my two years in the Army, I wanted to go back to Missouri because I wanted to work with this professor named Nelson Duller.

CRAWFORD: Was that the professor who hired you?

DOANE: Yes, that was the professor who hired me. I did consider staying there. We loved the state of Washington. It was a beautiful country. I had considered staying and working at the University of Washington, but I really wanted to work with Nelson Duller. We drove back to Columbia, Missouri for graduate school.

CRAWFORD: Why was it you wanted to work with Professor Duller?

DOANE: He had one experiment in mind that I thought was really, really neat. Many properties of these cosmic rays were unknown at the time. He had this telescope that could pick them up when they came in at any particular angle. One experiment he wanted to do was to look at cosmic rays that came in on the horizon and passed through the Rocky Mountains, to see how they were absorbed in the Rocky Mountains. I thought, "Boy, what a neat experiment." And there were other experiments he had in mind where I thought it would be a really fun field to be in. At that time, I didn't think too much about job opportunities in cosmic-ray physics, although I should've been. [Laugh] Shirley and I went back to Columbia, she got a job to help support us, and I had a teaching assistantship. But the first two years of graduate school, I really couldn't do too much research. I worked with him and helped with stuff, we went down in limestone mines, looking at cosmic rays. But I didn't really do too much because it's primarily coursework. Then, you have to pass graduate exams and so on. I really hadn't intended at first to get a PhD. I thought maybe a master's degree would be good. But after two years, passing all these candidacy exams, all this coursework, I talked to Shirley, and we thought maybe it would be the thing to do. She was wanting to start a family, and we thought we could do that, even while I was in graduate school. However, after two years, Nelson Duller's wife didn't like it in Missouri and wanted to go back to Texas, where she was from. He got an appointment at Texas A&M. Well, I talked to Shirley, and we didn't know that we could really afford to move down there. I thought maybe if I did, I'd have to take these candidacy exams over again, and I didn't want to do that. 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. Also, it involved radio frequencies, something I was really familiar with. He needed a graduate student, so we decided I'd stay and work with him.

CRAWFORD: What was his name?

DOANE: His name was Roland Hultsch. Good German name. That turned out to be a wise, wise decision because the job opportunities in that field are far higher. It's a much broader area of physics. You can do lots of things with that [experimental technique].

CRAWFORD: Was that a consideration for you in making the decision, the job opportunities?

DOANE: I don't remember. But it was a hot new field, and I thought it was a better way to go. But I probably did consider the job opportunities because my wife and I tried to have children, and we were told by a doctor that our chances of conceiving were not very high. So we adopted a child who was only eight days old. Then, within a year, my wife got pregnant, and we had another child. I'm sure I had considered this because I really had to look at an area of physics in which I could support our family.

CRAWFORD: But it also sounds like it was in line with your interests.

DOANE: Oh, yes, it was very much in line with my interests. Anyway, that's how I got into nuclear magnetic resonance.

CRAWFORD: Did you have a sense of the state of the field? What kind of work were you planning on doing with NMR?

DOANE: We started out on a number of different topics. Roland was interested in using nuclear magnetic resonance to study molecular diffusion. It turned out you could do that very well with magnetic resonance. Then, there was another project he was very excited about, and I thought it was interesting, too, because it was more electronics-oriented. It was called nuclear spin pumping. Usually, in magnetic resonance, your radio signals are absorbed by the nuclear spins, but you could get them so they could emit. You could pump it at one frequency and look at another frequency at an enhanced signal. Nobody had done this before. I thought it was sort of like a double resonance. I was operating at two different radio frequencies at the same time. It was really a challenge. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: What made it challenging?

DOANE: Doing two different radio frequencies on a nucleus at the same time. I think that was the difficulty. Because one radio frequency would interfere with the other. It was not easy to do. Both of us saw it as a challenge, and I was willing to try to take it on as a dissertation, and he was pleased with that because we thought it would be fun to do. That's what I did. There was one goal we knew we couldn't achieve when we started it, though. Theoretically, you could make what was called a raser. At the time, lasers had just come out. A laser emits a very bright beam of light, and then there was a maser, where you could do the same thing with microwaves. Here, there was the idea that you might be able to do this with just radio waves. Theoretically, you could, but practically, there were lots of problems in doing that. We didn't think we could ever make a raser. But we could see what the challenges were in doing that sort of thing, and it was kind of fun to do that. Anyway, that was my dissertation.

Then, when it came time to graduate, I had to start looking at places to go and things to do. At that particular time, I was very fortunate because that was a time when universities all around the country were hiring scientists to build their programs because there was lots of money available through the National Science Foundation and various places for research, and universities were taking advantage of that. They could really build some science programs. I started applying at various places, and there was this one school looking for people. There were a couple professors I kept running across in the literature. Jim McGrath and Anthony Silvidi were their names. I asked my advisor who these guys were, and he said, "They worked with Professor Purcell up at Harvard. They're up in a little town, Kent, Ohio." [Laugh] They wanted to fill a position at Kent, and I was looking at other schools, too. University of Oklahoma at Stillwater, various places. Then, I would say another event that directed my life and that of my wife was, after I'd written my dissertation, I had an oral presentation to give at the American Physical Society on my dissertation work. It turned out, the annual national meeting that year was in Kansas City. McGrath and Silvidi would be there. I got ready to go to that meeting, and one of our children got sick. I didn't know whether I could go or not. But my wife was very good at handling things by herself. We decided I should go, so I went. While I was there, I ran into an old friend I had known years ago who lived across the hall from me in a dormitory at the University of Missouri when I was freshman. His name was Jim Fergason. I said, "Oh, Jim, I haven't seen you in a long time. What are you doing here?" He was a couple years ahead of me in school, and he said after he'd graduated, he went to work for Westinghouse. There, he got involved with temperature sensors and stuff. Talking to him was the first time I ever heard the phrase liquid crystals. He was going to give a paper on liquid crystals as temperature sensors.

CRAWFORD: This was the year you finished your PhD?

DOANE: Yes, either '64 or '65. I think it was a March meeting, so I think it was '65. Typically, they have those meetings in March. I also met McGrath, and they invited me to visit Kent. They said they wanted to fill a position, and they invited me to Kent to give a talk on my research. Basically, it was a job interview. 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. I remember that interview very well because I was really kind of scared to meet this dean for research. I knew he was going to really quiz me about my research because he would want to know how I was going to fund it and that stuff. I really prepared for that. I walked into his office, and he invited me in, I sat down, and the first question he asked was, "Are you a Methodist?" While I was trying to think of a polite way to say no, he said, "Only reason I ask is that I'm in a Methodist church, and I've been organizing a softball team. I need a softball player." [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Did he ask you if you played softball? [Laugh]

DOANE: [Laugh] Well, this was typical Glenn, it turns out. He was very good at setting people at ease. And, boy, that did it right there because I completely forgot about my worries. Then, liquid crystals came up again. At that time, he had written a review paper on liquid crystals. He thought it was a fascinating field. I think he may have written it when he was at the University of Cincinnati.

CRAWFORD: I believe that paper came out in 1957.

DOANE: And he said the response from it was just so good that he decided to pursue the field. From that review paper, he learned a lot about who was doing what and where, so he organized the first International Liquid Crystal Conference.

CRAWFORD: I just wanted to ask you quickly, I know you weren't involved in liquid crystals at this time, but now having had a career in liquid crystals and having met lots of people, part of the sort of historical narrative about liquid crystals, from what I understand at this point, is that they were discovered in the late 19th century, 1888 or thereabouts. And there's this kind of story that until Dr. Brown's review essay in 1957, there wasn't that much going on with it.

DOANE: No, there wasn't. After they were discovered in 1888 or so, in the 1930s, there was some very good work done in Germany by several people. But the political turmoil in the 30s in Germany was horrible. It was the rise of Hitler and that sort of stuff. And [the liquid crystal work] just died out. In '65, when I was interviewing for the positions, there was already some work going on here and there around the country. At that time, a group at Xerox had started looking at it. There was Fergason's work at Westinghouse. Then, in RCA, there was a group. I'm not quite sure when that started, but around that time, they were focused on display-related work. Then, around the world, in India and Russia, there were groups fiddling around with these things, but not much was known about it. Even at that time, there was some discussion of, "What really are these things? How do they function on a molecular level?" And there was some work in England, too. A guy in England named George Gray, who Glenn had worked with. George helped Glenn very much in forming this first liquid crystal conference. Anyway, at that time, Glenn was working to form this conference, and he was also considering starting the Liquid Crystal Institute. He was just getting into it.

CRAWFORD: At this meeting, was he just mentioning this as… [inaudible]

DOANE: I don't recall all the details of that meeting but I am sure he must have because that's where it hit me that this seemed to be a neat field. I wouldn't say, though, that it was one of the reasons I signed on at Kent. The primary reason I did was Jim McGrath and Tony Silvidi.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned you'd seen their names in the literature. What was it about their work or them as individuals that attracted you to Kent?

DOANE: They were dealing with a nuclear property that comes up in the jargon of nuclear magnetic resonance, spin-lattice relaxation. That is, how these nuclear spins interact with the lattice of molecules in a solid material and exchange energy. This group was studying that sort of thing in various solids. It really didn't have a lot to do with my nuclear spin pumping and my double resonance experiments [other than we were both working with solid crystals]. Well, it did in the sense that it influenced what I was doing and had an effect on it through this property of spin-lattice relaxation in the surrounding crystalline lattice. At that time, both of our work was focused on solid crystalline materials. And after I met Jim McGrath, I just liked the guy. He looked like a real good guy to work with. That was the reason I came to Kent. I didn't come here because of liquid crystals, but right after I got here, I went into it, hook, line, and sinker. [Laugh] I found out right away that nuclear magnetic resonance was a really good tool to study liquid crystalline materials at the molecular level.

CRAWFORD: What was it that made you think to apply it to liquid crystals?

DOANE: It's a phase of matter between solids and liquids, and I thought, "I'd like to see what they look like from the point of view of nuclear magnetic resonance." Between the time I interviewed and when I came here, Glenn had already started putting together the Liquid Crystal Institute. To do this, he had to have a lot of support from the University. He could not have done it if it hadn't been for the president, Robert White. I think the University gave him a lot of support to start this program. As I recall, he started it basically by bringing in three new people, one of whom was a chemist named Sardari Arora, a synthetic chemist who synthesized liquid crystals. As soon as I met Sardari, I talked him into synthesizing a liquid crystal I could use with magnetic resonance. [Laugh] And he did. He did a beautiful job, and made me a nice compound. Sure enough, it was a great compound because I learned right away–I hadn't done but one experiment on this, and already I could see that these really were [unique]. They had properties like solid crystals, yet they were like liquids. Right away, I could tell this was really something different because with the NMR, you could see both features very well [by how the molecules were ordered]. But I was hooked right away. My understanding of the institute at that time was that, he brought in Sardari Arora as a chemist, and a physical chemist Adriaan De Vries, who did X-ray work, [and a postdoc, Bill Bacon]. But he had two other positions he could fill. One, he filled with Jim Fergason. And just after I got here, he had already invited Jim up for an interview. I thought, "Here comes Jim Fergason again!” [Laugh] I thought that was a great hire because the Institute really needed somebody who was doing applied work. It was a bit of an awkward thing for Jim because he didn’t have the PhD. He didn’t fit in well in the University environment.. This turned out to be a big problem, actually.

CRAWFORD: I’d be happy to hear. I wonder if you could say a little bit about the nature of the problem, that he didn’t have a PhD. Was it a problem for him or for the University?

DOANE: I think it was a problem for him [as he was not interested in academia]. At one time, I thought maybe I could somehow get him involved in the graduate program or something, but he didn't want to do that. And because he was very interested in applications, I believe he was [more entrepreneurially oriented]. Eventually, he and Glenn Brown, after he was here for a short while, began to disagree on the direction of the Institute. It really got very bad. They were not even speaking with one another after a short while.

CRAWFORD: What was the nature of the disagreement between Brown and Fergason, a cleavage between applied and [basic research]?

DOANE: I think it was a variety of things. If I get into this now, it'll take us into the separate issues, the flat panel display field.

CRAWFORD: Maybe one way to approach this would be, what was your sense of Dr. Brown's vision for the Institute?

DOANE: His vision of the Institute, as I understood it, he wanted it to be an academic institute, but he didn't want it on the research campus where other Kent State science research was going on. He wanted it to be apart from the research campus, but for the research to be very basic. Looking back on it, I'm not sure why he hired Fergason in the first place. Fergason, on the other hand, wanted to use liquid crystals to make things. When he first came here, Fergason had a very nice program. He got involved with a guy in the biology department to use liquid crystals to detect cancer. Basically, cancerous tissue has a different temperature than normal tissue, and they could detect it by very sensitive temperature measurements using liquid crystals. I thought Jim did a nice job getting this program off the ground. He worked with Robinson Memorial Hospital. He even got written up in Life Magazine. But the program did not last long as better ways to detect cancer evolved.

There was another candidate for one of Glenn’s positions, Professor Alfred Saupe who was on the faculty at Freiburg University in Germany. Glenn learned that he wanted to immigrate, and Glenn wanted to see if he could get him. I was really excited about that because I was the only one in physics who had any interest in liquid crystals at that time. I thought that having him there would really be great. I wanted to get him a position in physics. I talked to the physics department to see if I could get an appointment for him in physics, but they didn’t want to do it. The reason was, Glenn wanted to have him under his control. He wanted to have him salaried in the Institute. But I had the support of some colleagues in physics who really had high regard for Saupe, too. I was finally able to get the University, at least the physics department, to come up with a professorial title for him. 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. But that was the way Glenn wanted it. He got somebody, a private individual, to support building it off campus quite apart from the research campus where the science departments, physics, chemistry and biology were located . It’s behind Papa John’s Pizza.

CRAWFORD: On Lincoln Street?

DOANE: Yeah. They got a private individual to build and support that building, and that's where he housed the Institute.

CRAWFORD: I know it may be difficult for you to speak to Dr. Brown's thought process, but why was it so important to have it off campus? Oftentimes, people talk about academic research, especially at this time, as being more independent because there weren't private interests, they weren't working for a company's lab. At the time, academic research was seen as sort of enabling a freedom to researchers. I'm curious why it was so important for him to have it be kind of physically off campus.

DOANE: I'm not sure I can answer that. I'm stepping ahead a little bit, but after a few years when Glenn appointed me as associate director or whatever the title was, the first thing I did was go to the dean of arts and sciences and say, "I'd like to build a building on the research campus for liquid crystal research." Glenn was opposed to that but he did not stop me from pursuing the issue . However, at that time, he was not very well. He was developing Parkinson's, and I could see that things were not going well. But we were able to get Saupe here.

Now, we can get back to Fergason before I became associate director. I think it was my second year I’d been here, probably around '67 or so. Glenn called me into his office and wanted to talk about Jim Fergason. By that time, Jim had formed another company up in Cleveland. He wasn't spending time at the Institute, the two weren't speaking to one another, and Glenn wanted to ask me if I would support him firing Fergason. I thought it probably was the best thing to do because I didn't see anything going anywhere. Jim seemed to be going off on his own. And by then, things weren't working out well with Saupe, either. Saupe, being in the Institute off campus, away from the physics department, was never around in physics. Nobody knew who he was because he was never there. Furthermore, Saupe wasn't doing physics, he was doing work on the structure of small molecules, so really, chemistry. It actually was at that point that I began to think about seeing if I could get a building on the research campus [to make a closer tie between liquid crystal research on campus and that of the institute].

CRAWFORD: Were you hoping to provoke more interaction between Institute researchers and the physics and chemistry departments?

DOANE: Yes. Also around that time–around '67, a lot of things happened. In the summer of '67, my wife and I took our summer vacation, and we went back home to visit our parents. Mine were in Missouri, and by that time, hers were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. We drove out, and we hadn't been there one day when I got a call from Glenn. He said he got a call from a guy in the Air Force he knew, and they wanted to explore liquid crystals. They had this program, but they needed a proposal in just a few weeks. [Laugh] I left my wife and family in Tulsa, and with the dog, I drove back 800 miles to Kent in one day and put together this proposal. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Why did it seem so important or crucial to do this grant?

DOANE: I thought it was marvelous. It was focused on basic research, and it was a lot of money. I thought it was a great opportunity to really get other people in physics besides myself involved in this. Because I was working on it, and other people in the physics department began to notice. One of the first things I did when I got back was to go to people like Dave Johnson in physics, Wilbur Franklin, Dave Uhrich, Edward Gelerenter and others. I convinced them to contribute to this. I got each one to sit down and write up what they could do with their experimental technique to study these liquid crystals. I talked to a few people in the chemistry department, although I didn't have to do too much there because Glenn was a chemist. We put together this massive proposal. [Laugh] I had to try to tie all of these programs together to show how they could blend together. It was really a difficult process. Basically, Glenn and I did the best we could to put this together. I had help from Dave Uhrich in Physics, who was great in editing things for us. But basically, Glenn and I put this together. I didn't think we had a chance in hell of getting this thing because it was thrown together so fast.

CRAWFORD: This was Project THEMIS?

DOANE: Yes. This is what got Kent off the ground. [It developed into a huge research effort involving the institute and the physics and chemistry departments; however after several years, I began to see the real problem of the institute being located apart from the research campus.] It is what really gave me encouragement, a few years later, to go to the dean of arts and science to get a building on the research campus. I wanted to tie these things together. I was able to convince the dean of arts and science to support a building that went between chemistry and physics. There was enough space between there that we could sandwich a small building and put together a number of research labs.

CRAWFORD: I've heard about this building, and I can appreciate the practicality of being between physics and chemistry, but also the metaphorical meaning of it of liquid crystals as kind of a substance in the space between physics and chemistry. Was that part of the thinking? Or was it just purely, "This is where we have space"?

DOANE: Chemistry and physics being two independent units didn't bother me at all. I just wanted to tie the faculty together. I thought of it as a way that physicists could work with chemists, and vice versa, and still be in their own department. I didn't view it as a building necessarily with its own administrative structure, rather as a building to support research. When I came to Kent in 1965, physics had just started its graduate program. Chemistry hadn't had its graduate program very long before that. [Graduate research programs were in their early stages.]

CRAWFORD: Were they relatively small departments?

DOANE: Physics was smaller than chemistry, but both of them were relatively small. I thought it was a way to build the graduate programs. In my view, if Kent was going to really build graduate programs, it needed to focus somehow. It needed to focus its research. I thought liquid crystals were really a great thing to focus on. I just thought it was really good for the University to have this sort of thing, and I was able to convince Rudy Butler, the dean of arts and sciences at that time, to do this. Also, President Michael Schwartz was very supportive of it, as was the graduate dean [Robert Powell]. 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.

DOANE: Building the research graduate programs, yes. That was my interest. And to give the University some visibility, and give the faculty visibility so they could get grants and stuff. If you're going to have a graduate program, you have to have faculty who can bring in money, at least in sciences. I don't know how it is these days, but back in those days, if you were going to have a graduate program, the faculty had to bring in the money to do it. The only ways to do that were visibility and having something really pertaining to the needs of the country. To me, it was a good way to focus.

CRAWFORD: And you saw liquid crystals as something that had broader utility.

DOANE: Yeah. Have a facility there based on what Glenn had started. By that time, Sardari Arora had left. He went with Fergason, actually, when he left to start his company. Then, we hired [another very capable organic synthesis chemist], Mary Neubert. With her in such a facility, for example, a physicist, chemist or some other scientist could walk down the hall and say, "Mary, I need to have this or that material" and she would synthesize it, an extremely valuable asset for liquid crystal research. [In general, such a facility could inspire more interactions between researchers in physics and chemistry.]

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. For example, without that, I probably couldn't even have convinced Rudy Butler to build this building and centralize the effort on the research campus. The building didn't come until a while after THEMIS. But without that, I don’t know what would’ve happened to the Institute. This is because, after THEMIS, the Institute [lost its group funding and] started going downhill. Things were not working out well at all for Glenn. Fergason got interested in display development. Occasionally, when I'd see him in the Institute, he'd talk about displays, but I really didn't know how he got into it.

To hear Martin Schadt’s side of it – I’m just giving you his side of it now – they were working on this particular type of display cell at Hoffman-La Roche in Switzerland, and it was showing promise for a type of display. As it turns out, there are a number different ways you can make a display with a liquid crystal. A display researcher, Wolfgang Helfrich, when he was at RCA worked with a group that explored many of these ways to make liquid crystal displays. Helfrich eventually went to Hoffman-La Roche located in Basel Switzerland, where he worked with Martin Schadt. They focused on one type of liquid crystal display, LCD, referred to as a twist cell. They saw that it had opportunity, so they patented it in Europe. Working with them at that time, was one of [Alfred] Saupe's former students when he was at the University of Freiburg in Freiburg Germany. After Saupe had been at Kent for a while, he convinced that student to leave Hoffman-La Roche and come work with him at Kent. It turns out that Jim Feragson was also developing the twist cell display technology at Kent and was likely aware of the LCD interest at Hoffmann-La Roche. [I mention this as later these two parallel developments came in conflict].

CRAWFORD: Do you recall the student's name?

DOANE: No, but I could dig it up. He was a nice guy [and a very capable researcher].

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that at the time, Schadt and Helfrich were working on display cells and so forth, and that there were a number of different options for making displays. And they decided to go with a twist cell. 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. One type of liquid crystal cell the group worked on RCA was called dynamic scattering. This would make a black-and-white display, but it required a lot of power. It could make a nice flat screen display but was a big drain on the battery. Another kind he was working on was called a guest host display, where you dissolve a dye material in a liquid crystal, the liquid crystal orders this dye material, and by changing the orientation of the liquid crystals with an electric field, you can change how colorful it is. That had some issues, too. While it could show color, there were contrast and stability issues. The twist cell turned out to be the best approach but had its own drawbacks. It required polarizers. This fundamentally means you're only using half the light. You couldn't make it very bright. But the power drain was very low. I think that was primarily the attractiveness of it. Another problem at that time, which isn't an issue anymore, was having the right kind of liquid crystal material to use it with. It required a liquid crystal, in scientific jargon, with a positive dielectric anisotropy. [Laugh] While liquid crystals could get that feature, it had a very short temperature range. The liquid crystals just weren't very good with that at that time. But Hoffmann-La Roche patented the twist cell display in Europe. Fergason got involved with the twist cell technology over here and patented the twist cell in the US. 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. 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. You have to give it to Jim, he really understood the value of this twist cell technology. He decided to form a company up in Cleveland to manufacture liquid crystal twist cell displays . It's really too bad that he and Glenn did not get along because it would've been wonderful if this issue had been resolved another way. But anyway, Jim ran into materials issues. At that time, the liquid crystals were unstable and would decompose over time. Jim had a contract with the Gruen Watch Company to make these things. But that didn't work out. The company ultimately failed.

CRAWFORD: I know you said there were tensions between Fergason and Brown. Did you and Fergason remain friends?

DOANE: Yes, I didn't have any problem with Jim. 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. But I had no issues with him. I had no issues with Glenn other than the fact that we disagreed on where the Institute should be located.

CRAWFORD: I've been reading Brown's papers and looking at the early annual reports from what it sounds like, from what he was writing and putting in the reports at the time, he really saw the primary focus of the Institute as studying the structure of liquid crystals. There's some discussion of applications, especially in the early years, the late 60s, focused on understanding perhaps the role of liquid crystals in living systems. If you look at early articles in the Kent Stater, the campus newspaper, there's a lot of discussion…

DOANE: He loved that concept. He often spoke about that, living systems.

CRAWFORD: When he did talk about applications, it was mostly in cancer detection work with breast cancer and so forth, and less about the work on displays and stuff.

DOANE: Yeah. I never heard him talk much about displays. But he did like the concept of working with liquid crystals in living systems, what their role was. That was something he really wanted to focus on. But I don't think he would've hired Saupe if he wanted to only focus on that. Saupe wasn't focused on that at the time although he did later contribute in that area.

CRAWFORD: It sounded more like kind of an aspiration. "Maybe someday in the future, we'll understand this." In the early 70s, when Schadt and Helfrich were working at Hoffmann-La Roche, what kind of display were they thinking of making? When we think about displays now, we think about computers and very dynamic displays. Right now, I can watch my computer recording our conversation. There are a lot of moving parts. Is that what people were thinking at the time?

DOANE: No, I think back then, the idea of displays for something like TV had probably crossed their mind at some point, but they were really focused on a wristwatch that displayed numbers. Because that was something they could really do, what's called a seven-segment display. They knew how to do that very well. That was their focus. They may have been beginning to think, "How are we going to do a big flat panel consisting of a matrix of many pixels?" But that came a little later. Not much later.

CRAWFORD: This would've been part of the reason why a low-power display system, like the twist cell, would've been of interest.

DOANE: Yeah, I think their idea back then was really the wristwatch. They wanted something you could wear, could see very clearly, and not have to change the battery. Of course, after they could do that, they began to think about how to make pixels. That's another big story. There's another issue about Fergason I'd like you to be aware of. When he submitted his patent and formed his company, Hoffmann-La Roche was beginning to see the value in all of this and had the European patent for it. They didn't want to make displays, but they wanted to license it worldwide. But they couldn't do this with Jim Fergason's patent. This put them in an awkward position. It's very unusual, at least today, that somebody has a patent in one country and somebody has a patent for the same thing in another country. That's very, very rare. I think this is the only example I know of where this has happened, where two different countries have a different patent ownership. When Jim's company began to fail, Hoffmann-La Roche wanted to buy the patent from him. Whether they saw that as an opportunity to get it from him, I'm not sure. But they did. That would've been fine, except when Jim was at Kent State, when he was writing the patent for this twist cell, he got some development money from Timex, a US wristwatch company. He convinced Timex that he could make wristwatch faces with this technology, and they gave him a grant to do that through Kent State University. As soon as Timex found out about this deal with Hoffmann-La Roche, they, of course, were upset. They sued Kent State University. Then, lawsuits began to fly all over the place. I don't know who all sued who, but there was a preliminary hearing in Cleveland, and a number of attorneys from different places showed up to this thing. Kent was in a predicament at that stage. At that time, the University attorney to handle this was from the firm Watts, Hoffman, Fisher, and Heinke. Heinke was the attorney involved in this lawsuit. I talked to Heinke once about this. At that particular time, the dean for research here wanted me to get involved in this lawsuit. I wasn't so inclined to do that because I didn't want to get in the middle of something between Glenn Brown and Fergason. I didn't know enough about it to get involved. I just knew Jim was working on this stuff. But I got to know Lowell Heinke well in later years, and he was telling me that it was a very difficult lawsuit. To defend Kent State University was very hard because he couldn't get Al Saupe to be a witness. Saupe would've been the type of witness that worked against you.

CRAWFORD: Right, hostile.

DOANE: Right, a hostile witness. Al didn't want to get involved in the lawsuit probably because his former student working with him had worked for Hoffmann-La Roche. Evidently, he could not get Glenn Brown to participate either.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like, on the one hand, Fergason files these patents claiming he did the work separate from the university, but now Timex is coming back with this lawsuit against Kent State. Kent State was in the awkward position of, in one instance, wanting to claim Fergason’s work as patentable under the University, but in another instance, maybe wanting to distance themselves.

DOANE: Yeah, they wanted to distance themselves from it. I didn't know what I could contribute. I was never actually called upon by Heinke to be a witness. I just told the dean I didn't know what I could do. Anyway, the suit was settled out of court. The University got a little bit of royalty stream from it, a tiny amount. They should've had a lot more. Fergason got some money out of it, and Hoffmann-La Roche got the license. As I understand it, Timex got a royalty-free license to use the technology.

CRAWFORD: This has so many elements of the challenges of patenting in the university context, which is difficult.

DOANE: Yes, except that back then, it was even more difficult because I think this was prior to the time of the Bayh-Dole Act that gave universities more freedom in the patent business.

CRAWFORD: Yes, 1980. University patenting was difficult for different reason, but from what I understand, I think around '65, '67, there was an individual in the federal government who was trying to make it easier for federal universities to patent research. Because part of the issue is that you're getting federal funding, so the research is supposed to be a public good, so how could you make it private? Then, there's also the question of whether the research was done on campus, licensing, and so forth. Having witnessed this, at the time, or later when you reflected on it, what did you learn? Were there lessons you took away from it?

DOANE: The big lesson I learned about patenting was not so much from this patent as it was from operating on my own, later on, under the Bayh-Dole Act. I can give you a lot of stories about that. I have learned a lot about this business of academic and industrial interactions. I was dismayed that Glenn and Fergason didn't really work together to take advantage of this for Kent State University. 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. But neither one of them wanted to do that. I think that's what I learned from it. The University had put so much into the Institute, had supported it with all of these positions, and here was a marvelous opportunity for the University to get something from it. But they did not, just a small amount of royalties. And the city of Kent got nothing from it. In the end, the United States didn't get anything from it. The technology and economic benefit wound up in Japan [and ultimately Korea and China].

CRAWFORD: It was a real lost opportunity.

DOANE: Oh, big-time. Everybody in the US lost on this issue. It wasn't just because of this that it wound up in Japan, Kent was only a small part of the problem. The attitude in industry for commercializing the technology ultimately was just not there. It was an opportunity for the US, and it did not happen. It needed a champion to get industry deeply involved. Jim Fergason and Glenn Brown together could have helped in that issue. But the champion ended up being Japan. This is what inspired me when I got into patenting myself. I wanted to do just the opposite of what these guys did. I wanted the technology we were developing to wind up in the community. I didn't mind it not being in Kent necessarily, but I did want some of it to stay in Kent. I wanted Kent to benefit from this. Also, the US. I never did like the idea of the technology going to Asia when it was really developed here in the US and in Europe. That never sat well with me. I think from the point of view of guiding me later, this did it. I didn't like the way this ended up.

CRAWFORD: Just to play devil's advocate, would it be fair to say that this was a product of maybe the decision to have the LCI off-campus? In other words, it was sort of outside of the realm of the University, not as closely controlled.

DOANE: But it was really part of the University because Fergason's salary came through the University, so did Alfred Saupe’s. The Timex contract was with the University. It really was a part of the University, yet set apart from the university research campus.

CRAWFORD: I could see advantages of it being a little bit outside of the university structure, but is this maybe a cautionary tale, that the flip side of having that freedom is that it can be taken advantage of?

DOANE: I can see that point of view, absolutely. But back then, for that situation at that time, me being in academia, in the physics department, and there being a big desire to understand the fundamental properties of liquid crystals, it was important to collect liquid crystal research on the research campus at KSU to help the faculty involved. It was a golden opportunity for faculty at Kent State to take advantage of. At that time, I wasn't interested in doing applications or patenting. That wasn't in my interest at all. I just looked at it from the point of view of fundamentally understanding the liquid crystal material states of matter. I was supportive of the applications. I thought it was nice to have Fergason doing these things. I thought it was great. I just wanted to get it involved in the graduate programs. That was my focus at that time. My focus changed later toward applications of liquid crystals, but that was it at that time.

CRAWFORD: Was there a sense at that time in the late ‘60s and the ‘70s, was there a sense that academic science was a different world than industrial science?

DOANE: Yes. More so then than now.

CRAWFORD: What was the nature of that difference?

DOANE: [Back when Glenn first formed the institute this gap was larger than today in that universities didn’t see it as their business to perform research of industrial interest. 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. Universities tend to value fundamental or basic research as it is something they can publish. Industry on the other hand values applied research that they often prefer to keep secret. The two come together through technology transfer and patent agreements].

CRAWFORD: What do you think this kind of valuing of certain types of research over the others? Do you think that's useful for science?

DOANE: It happens because universities have a need to be open which is not true for industry. What often cannot be not useful is valuing one specific area of research over another. For the guy who takes on the challenge of the unpopular aspects of science it is often the guy who finds the exciting breakthroughs.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

DOANE: Because usually, that's where the opportunity is. The things people tend to look down upon or push aside usually contain the opportunities. In fact, liquid crystals were looked upon that way, I think. When I first started to work on liquid crystals many scientists didn’t think it was a different state of matter and of little interest. I think some people in the physics department, even Jim McGrath, thought liquid crystals were just unusual liquids unrelated to solid crystals where material research was largely conducted in those days.

CRAWFORD: Because it didn't seem to pose any type of fundamental question?

DOANE: [It wasn’t viewed as relevant to solid state even though it turned out that liquid crystals have some of the same crystalline and other properties of solid state and actually contribute to the understanding of solid materials. Applications did not come until people started working with them.]

CRAWFORD: One of the themes I'm getting from your answers is, you seem to have a very open perspective in the sense of looking for opportunities, building connections, literally connecting the physics and chemistry departments on campus. Where do you think that comes from for you?

DOANE: I don't know. It just seemed to me that if I'm building a program, the more support I have from that program, the more people are involved. I don't know where I get that from. As I said, I was raised pretty much as a loner. I lived out in the country and didn't have many people to play with. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Trying to build a community, then.

DOANE: Yeah. I wanted the physics department and Kent State University to have something they could hang their hats on. Something they could say, "We're known for this." I just wanted to be from a place that people recognized. And we had to build that. Kent State wasn't widely known for anything at that time. That was even before the shootings. Also, Kent had just started its PhD program in solid-state physics, and I just wanted it to grow from solid-state physics to physics in general, which it did. I thought this was an opportunity for the physics department. I didn't necessarily look at it as a way just to help my own research, although I could see that it would help to have other people around doing this. 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.

CRAWFORD: Just thinking about this historical moment, and you mentioned the shootings, which of course happened May 4, 1970, part of this whole moment with the protest against the Vietnam War. One of the things that happened at this time actually involves the Institute. 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. Did those events shape the Institute in any significant way?

DOANE: I don't think so. I don't think they had any effect on the Institute or what it was doing. The only thing it did was shut us down for a while. I couldn't come into my lab, and there was a short time we couldn't do things.

CRAWFORD: But it didn't lead to a sense of, "Maybe we should downplay our support from the military"?

DOANE: No. I didn't view it as that at all. I don't think anybody else did.

CRAWFORD: In a Daily Kent Stater article in 1973, Wilbur Franklin, professor of physics, who actually wrote an op-ed responding to the student protests. It's actually a nice piece because he put his phone number in there and said, "Anyone who has questions, give me a call." Which I couldn't imagine doing today, but we live in a different world. In this other article he was interviewed for, which was talking about the work that was being done on displays with watch faces, calculators, and so forth, Dr. Franklin said, in the context of this article, "Research at the Institute here in Kent is not motivated by entrepreneurship. We are not looking for the development of marketable products. Instead, research is directed toward finding scientific knowledge."

DOANE: He's right.

CRAWFORD: That captures the spirit of the Institute at the time?

DOANE: Oh, yeah. That's perfect. I didn't know Wil could write so well. It's good of Wil Franklin that he did this. [Laugh] I wasn’t aware of it and glad you brought this to my attention.

CRAWFORD: That seems a fair characterization?

DOANE: Yeah. Even Fergason's work was not military-oriented. He just wanted to make a wristwatch face. Of course, the military got into it very significantly later, and a lot of my success in running the Institute was supported by the military.

CRAWFORD: Would you say that individuals in the Institute really saw these kinds of issues, like building a watch face, the work with temperature sensors, or other kinds of–because I think some of that military funding was exploring the utility of liquid crystals as different kinds of detectors and so forth. 

DOANE: But THEMIS, as I understood it, they just wanted basic fundamental research on liquid crystals. They were not interested in any applied aspects. And that's the proposal we gave them and that is what they funded.

CRAWFORD: That's correct, that was the spirit of that program. But I guess I'm wondering if some of this work on applications–like you said, Fergason just wanted to make a watch face. It's just the challenge of doing that, it's not necessarily thinking, "I'm going to be able to sell watches."

DOANE: Jim Fergason was not involved in THEMIS research. He had moved on by then and wanted to develop and ultimately sell liquid crystal displays for watches. He became an entrepreneur and wanted to make an industry and money. But contributing to the war effort had little to do with it. I don't know how Fergason envisioned the Institute, but I do know that it wasn't like Glenn envisioned it. But I had no problems with Jim, other than the fact that he just didn't meld well with the academic environment he was working in. After he got his degree, he worked in industry, and it could've been that he just didn't understand academia.

CRAWFORD: Well, I think we should maybe take a break. We can pick up tomorrow.

[End Part 1]


[Start Part 2]

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm an Associate Professor and Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. I'm here interviewing Dr. J. William Doane, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Emeritus Director of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, and Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at Kent Displays in Kent, Ohio. Today's date is August 10th, 2021. This is our second session, and we're doing this interview in his office at Kent Displays. Good morning, Dr. Doane.

J. WILLIAM DOANE: Good morning.

CRAWFORD: We wanted to pick up with our discussion of your experience and work at the Liquid Crystal Institute in the 1970s, leading up to when you took over as associate director in '79, then later as director in ['83]. What was going on with the Liquid Crystal Institute going into the 70s?
 
DOANE: The early 70s, of course, is when the THEMIS grant was going. At that particular time, my research was focused on nuclear magnetic resonance of liquid crystals. [audio cuts out] [However, that was just a small part of the overall program as at least half of the faculty in the physics department and many in the chemistry department became heavily involved in liquid crystal research involving theory and numerous different experiment techniques. It was all just basic research funded by the THEMIS project.] It was a very fun time, actually. Professor Saupe became more involved [with the departmental faculty at that point too, as did Adriaan De Vries because they got support from THEMIS].
Around '74 or so, after about four or five years of the THEMIS grant, the Air Force decided they didn't want to fund basic research anymore and the National Science Foundation, NSF, decided to take it over. However, NSF took it over on their own grounds, which is to say, at that particular time, NSF only funded individual grants, not group efforts. They wanted to fund the research on a two-year basis, with a renewal every two years. They picked and chose those principal investigators in the THEMIS grant they wanted to fund. Fortunately, I was picked, as well as quite a few others, although not everybody but most. But that allowed us to keep going and keep our programs funded. [Because NSF funded each principal investigator separately, it had the effect of decentralizing the liquid crystal research effort on campus. I began to explore other avenues of funding around that time. I had an NIH grant on biological membranes (that are also liquid crystalline) as well. It was all basic research. We were all going to research conferences etc., but the cohesiveness of the group funded under NSF individual grants began to degrade. The liquid crystal institute as a center for the research began to lose its importance and value. KSU faculty and administration were beginning to realize that if it could not generate funding to support the group as a whole, the university would abandon it.]

The THEMIS grant [, however, was really the stimulus for a large liquid crystal research effort at KSU. Researchers, worldwide, began to regard Kent not just as an organizer of research conferences but as a significant contributor to basic liquid crystal research. As with other faculty in physics and chemistry,] it helped me build up a very nice laboratory with a lot of students involved. It was really good for both chemistry and physics departments and their graduate programs because it funded graduate students and their dissertation research.

Then, in the late 70s, maybe 1980, I was working with a researcher who was from the University of Calabria in Southern Italy who had visited the Institute on several occasions. He had a liquid crystal program. We were working together in the lab, and he wanted to make a liquid crystal display. Well, I told him how to do that, to get two pieces of glass, some liquid crystal, and put it together. He did that, and he said, "How do I seal this liquid crystal between these two pieces of glass?" I said, "I think what I would do is, go down to the store and get some epoxy." He did that, and the experiment was a failure because the liquid crystal mixed with the epoxy. [Laugh] We wound up with a clear liquid mess on the laboratory bench.

We left the mess there. The next day, we came back in, and the clear liquid mess had turned to a beautiful white solid. [This was puzzling to us but after some thought and a magnetic resonance study of the material, we realized that it must have turned white because, after the polymer cured overnight, it encapsulated the liquid crystal in tiny droplets.] That was the discovery of polymer liquid crystal dispersions! [Laugh] That was the start of a major change in my research life. 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. However, now I had a system that looked like I could do applied research. We found that we could switch these things from a white to a beautiful clear with an electric field and make unique optical devices. That happened in the late 70s, early 80s.

CRAWFORD: Do you recall the name of that researcher from the University of Calabria?

DOANE: Yes, his name was Giuseppe Chidichimo, but he called himself Pino.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like your basic research at the molecular level was around understanding the structure and fluctuations of liquid crystals.

DOANE: [In my own research group we studied how the molecules ordered, moved, wiggled, diffused, and how these features changed from one liquid crystal phase to another. I, with my students and postdocs even discovered some unique phase properties with magnetic resonance that could not be observed any other way; that sort of stuff. It was very fundamental research. We were just trying to understand what the liquid crystal phases looked like on a molecular level.] Nuclear magnetic resonance turned out to be a really good tool for that. That's what I did for my personal research however it was a small part of the overall program. There were other researchers at Kent working on liquid crystals. There was Dave Johnson in the physics department, who was doing very nice work on calorimetry, the thermodynamics of liquid crystals. Wil Franklin was working on viscosity and related things. Edward Gelerinter was working on electron-spin resonance. Dave Uhrich was doing the Mössbauer effect. Over in chemistry, there was Vernon Neff, who was doing infrared dichroic studies, [Bill Bacon on liquid crystal phases. There were no doubt other faculty involved that I may have overlooked. There were in addition several senior research fellows that include Adriaan De Vries doing x ray studies, and Mary Neubert who performed chemical synthesis of liquid crystal materials for all the researchers to work on.] Also in chemistry was Derry Fishel doing synthesis work. There were a variety of people, and we were all working together, actually. It was a very fun time.

CRAWFORD: Was the goal to further understand the properties of liquid crystals? 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. That's what went on in the 70s. In the early 80s, Glenn gave me the title of associate director. I then had a formal role in the Institute. Before, I was just working as a physics faculty member. At that time, I wanted to move the liquid crystal building on to the research campus because that was where most of the research was going on. [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]. In the early 80s, there was a lot of work going on not only at Kent, but all over the world. In France, there was a large group at Orsay near Paris. There was a lot of work going on in Germany. India, Russia, Japan, all over the place. The International Liquid Crystal Conferences initiated by Glenn Brown were now being held in places like Berlin Germany and other foreign countries. After a while, NSF support began to fall off. Faculty and research fellows in the Kent group were finding it more difficult to find support. I kept mine, as did a few others, but faculty were finding it more difficult to get research funding, because [, in part,] the basic research was becoming [better] known. Or at least we thought it was at that time. [As I mentioned earlier, group funding had ended and liquid crystal research on campus was beginning to fall apart.]

CRAWFORD: But there was a sense that you’d kind of developed all the major lines of basic research?

DOANE: Somewhat, however, another major event was happening. The liquid crystal display technology during that period began to take off. The Japanese had really gotten it off the ground. There were a variety of different types of liquid crystal displays being developed at that time with many industrial efforts to develop a full color flat-panel screen. Japan really took the bull by the horns and [, in the end, were the ones to successfully commercialize it.] The American companies, involved in it very early on, saw Japan taking off and just pulled out. In the early 80s, Glenn became very ill with Parkinson's. Around '82 or '83, he decided to retire. He just couldn't do it anymore. He had held a Regents Professorship. Then, we had to decide what to do with this program. Basic research on liquid crystals at Kent was disconnected as the Institute was not on the research campus, there was no applied research whatsoever. More important, there was no centralized funding. 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. The University was putting money into it that had been arranged earlier, and it looked like it wasn't going anywhere as it set by itself apart from the research campus.

CRAWFORD: Did you want to take over as director? Was that something you sought out?

DOANE: At that time, I was looking at other things, actually. I got invited to chair a physics department at a university in Michigan. I followed through with the interview but I just liked it at Kent. I wanted to stay here. But there was nobody else who wanted to take over the Institute, basically. Either I did it, or nobody did it, so I decided to do it. I told President Mike Schwartz, and his [Vice President for Academic Affairs] at the time, [Terry] Roark. I told them I would do it if I could have a few positions with the promise that I would bring in some federal support for the program. And I did. The first person I hired was Elaine Landry because I needed a really good administrator to help me organize things and put these proposals together.

CRAWFORD: How did you find her?

DOANE: I knew her because she was in the physics department, and I saw what a good administrator she was there. Very strong lady administratively who would take the bull by the horns. I hired her, and she was delighted to come. I was concerned at the time as I really didn't know how we would fit into the display world. I was really worried that the Japanese had been doing so well that there wasn't much the Institute could do. But, luckily I had these polymer dispersions that I discovered with my friend Pino and they had shown promise for switchable windows. I even made a display out of them. I took this display to a meeting of the Society for Information Displays, the first time I'd ever been to one of those display meetings. I took my display there, and they let me give a talk on it. 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. [Laugh] But much to my surprise, there was interest in it because it was a reflective and lower power technology, an advantage over what the Japanese firms were showing . Another thing I discovered at this meeting was that I was the only person there from a university. Everybody was from industry. It was an industry-run program.

CRAWFORD: Was it recently established?

DOANE: No, it had been going on for some years based around other types of display technologies. 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?

DOANE: I would say it was '83 maybe, something like that. Early 80s. Then, I saw that maybe this was an opportunity for a university to get involved in display research. I began to see a problem with the liquid crystal field, all of the display work was being done in industry, and all these people were going to these display society meetings, while the liquid crystal materials people doing basic research were going to the International Liquid Crystal Society. The two seemed isolated from each other. I was surprised at this.

CRAWFORD: Do you have a sense of why that was?

DOANE: I don't know. The display world was just sort of developing industrially apart from the academic world somehow.

CRAWFORD: Could it be because the academic world was more focused on basic research?

DOANE: I think so. Basically university research on liquid crystal materials and industrial research on liquid crystal displays were disconnected. I think the people doing display work just wanted to make displays whatever way they could but liquid crystal displays seemed to be winning out. I don't really know the reason. But it was a surprise to me to see the discontinuity between the two.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned when you went to this meeting of the Society for Information Displays, you were the only person from a university.

DOANE: Yeah, I didn't see anybody else there from a university.

CRAWFORD: Was the inverse true, that there were few industry people at the International Liquid Crystal conferences?

DOANE: I looked into that, actually. In the first ones, there were some industrial people there. The very first conference Glenn formed, I pulled out the booklet for that to see who had attended, and there were a few people from industry. As I recall, there was somebody from Xerox. I don't think I saw anybody from RCA. I may be wrong, but I don't recall seeing anyone from RCA interacting very well with the academic world. That's where the early display work was really making progress. RCA wound up not wanting to manufacture it. One of the researchers, Wolfgang Helfrich, went over to Hoffmann-La Roche, who with Martin Schadt developed the twist cell display. After a few years that wound up being licensed in Japan [where it was further developed ultimately into the display technology we have in our TVs, computers, etc., today.]

CRAWFORD: Do you think it would've been better for the field of liquid crystal science if there had been more interaction between industry and academia?

DOANE: It would've been better for Kent, I can tell you that. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

DOANE: If the Institute had had a display program going, it would've been a bonanza. The Institute would've been a larger and more effective organization much earlier. I can only speak from a Kent point of view because that's where I was at the time. But it would've been nice [to have kept Fegason’s industrial pursuit linked in a friendly way with the academic pursuit of the institute such that his industry could have survived. For example, Glenn Brown had a great relationship with George Gray, of the University of Hull, who invented the liquid crystal materials of the type Jim Fergason needed to make his company a success. This of course did not happen. Also researchers at Kent were not developing material for displays, but they could have been.]

Around the early 80s and throughout the 80s, several of the defense agencies became very concerned about all this because they needed these flat-panel displays for fighter planes, tanks, and stuff like that. DARPA primarily, but also the Navy and other agencies, the Army, started funding display research. And that really helped me because then, I had a unique display technology that we could propose to them to develop. The polymer dispersions could be used in night vision, reflective color displays and various kinds of things. We were able to get substantial DARPA support for things. It was the start of that. That was a big help to the Institute. It got us into the display world. And other people in the Institute, in the physics and chemistry departments, then began to do other things with displays, things like retardation layers, alignment films, and various kinds of things it takes to make a display. There was more of an awareness brought on, and I credit that to a lot of the defense agencies. It was a source of funding in an exciting area of research for faculty to get into and apply what they knew to that.

CRAWFORD: Could you explain a little bit about what makes PDLCs distinctive as a type of display technology?

DOANE: Basically, the way it encapsulates the liquid crystals into droplets. I could have a display film that was flexible, the liquid crystal wouldn't flow out of it, it was trapped inside of it. Also, because it was trapped and confined, it had different kinds of properties. It was manufacturable, you could coat it and do various things you could not do with liquid crystals alone. It was another possible way to make a display and other optical devices. Around that time, I got someone from Canada, Peter Palffy, in optics. I knew I needed somebody in optics. We didn't have that technology. I brought Peter in, and he was very helpful. We began to get work using liquid crystals, not just PDLCs, but other kinds, for optical studies. [I believe it was University money I brought him on with. But he came in very early, after John West.]

Anyway, we began to evolve into applied aspects, particularly displays. With that, I got the institute into a program with the University of Southern California. The acronym for it was NCIPT, the National Center for Integrated Photonic Technology, funded by DARPA. At USC, they were doing work on organic light-emitting diodes, and we were doing work on liquid crystal displays. There were three other universities involved. MIT was loosely involved, Columbia University, and UCLA. But primarily USC and Kent State carried the ball in this program.. We met a lot and really worked closely together. The others pretty much went by themselves.

CRAWFORD: How did this collaboration come about?

DOANE: Here's how I recall it started. I think it was the University of Utah, or some school in Utah, had political influence in Congress and was able to get awarded what's called pork-barrel money. They were able to get funding on some bill that was going through. Another senator saw this and said, "That shouldn't be. If you're going to do this, you're going to have to go through one of the agencies like DARPA." [I think it was called ARPA at that time. Instead of just funding Utah, they sent out requests for proposals. USC applied, I applied, and so did these other universities.] ARPA wound up splitting it and making this center NCIPT.

CRAWFORD: And that was because you'd all put in proposals related to optical [inaudible]?

DOANE: Related to [optics], yes. [At Kent, we were the liquid crystal optics component of the center; however, there were other optical materials such as light emitting diodes at USC.] I found that interesting because we were involved with universities studying other kinds of optical materials. I don't know whether I'm responsible for this, but I think the center got Steve Forrest at USC focused on using light-emitting diodes for displays. [Laugh] That program was very helpful in building up our program and getting more involved in display research.

CRAWFORD: You had mentioned that the Defense Department, DARPA, the Navy, and so forth became interested in funding display research for their own uses. Is it the case that they had seen what the Japanese were doing with displays and came to the American scientific community asking them to develop something like that for them? Obviously, they weren't going to go to Japan because they wanted their own technologies.

DOANE: Yeah, and not only funding us but several industries as well. I recall one at IBM with Malcolm Thompson and another group in Troy, Michigan, Optical Imaging Systems, for developing and manufacturing high resolution flat-panel screens. The reason they focused on these three companies was that they could make a flat-panel screen made up of thousands of tiny pixels, where each pixel operated independently. 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. The Japanese could do this. [There were other companies that could make a high-resolution display without transistors but they were not suitable for the military. Ultimately, however, full-color flat panel screens ended up being manufactured in Japan then Korea and other Asian countries.]

You had to really make a little circuit at each pixel site to really make these things switch well. It's called the active matrix. It was not a simple problem because back then transistors were laid down in little chips. Here, you had to put these transistors on large surfaces for TV and other display screens. Samsung in Korea does it today on 60-inch and larger screens. [Laugh] The Japanese were able to [develop this at the high volume manufacturing level.] In the US there were some other smaller groups working on displays and active matrix technology. 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. There was stuff going on like that.

CRAWFORD: Was this Hughes Laboratory?

DOANE: No, it was not Hughes. One such group was run by a developer named Larry Tannas. I don’t know what he called his company, but I think he made good business out of that. Anyway, during this time, I got to know people working in this field and got to become acquainted with some of these researchers and find out what they were doing and so on. But in the end, I don't know how the military gets their displays today. I wound up getting the equipment that Bell Labs was using. They gave it to me to put in the Institute so we could make displays in the Institute. [Laugh] But there's no manufacturing in the U.S. that I'm aware of.

CRAWFORD: Would it be fair to say that the work being done in industry, especially in Japan, really played a significant role in reorienting liquid crystal work toward displays?

DOANE: Yes. It did play a huge role.

CRAWFORD: Around this time there was a student, Nuno Vaz, who graduated from the LCI and went to General Motors.

DOANE: He was one of my students. After he got his degree, while he was looking for [an industrial position], I had him as a postdoctoral fellow for a short while in my lab. He got very interested in these polymer dispersions and helped me with them. His name is on a couple patents. But he wound up going to General Motors. Not long after he started, he began telling them about these polymer dispersions, and General Motors got very interested in these things for automobile applications. They were actually [the first industry to jointly work with the Liquid Crystal Institute to further develop PDLCs. They further provided substantial funding to Kent State for PDLC research. They were further instrumental in involving other industries such as 3M.] That was a very nice program.

While all of this was going on, we found that many industries not only in the US but also Japan and Europe wanted to license Kent State's patents on PDLCs. The University had no program for licensing. There was just nothing. The dean for research then was a professor named Eugene Wenninger. It was his job to do this and extremely helpful to me. I don't know what I would've done without him. Together, we went to many US and foreign companies and found ourselves negotiating license agreements. [Laugh] The agreements we got were often really helpful to us. Some agreed to put large sums of money directly into the Institute for further development of polymer dispersions. It was wonderful. It was the first money I got where I could build a clean room and do the things I needed to do. John West had come aboard by then and was involved, too, because John was getting very involved in the development of these dispersions. I hired John to help me with these dispersions, and he made great contributions. John was marvelous at moving these materials forward. He's got a lot of patents and publications of his own. But our initial work with General Motors really set the stage for becoming a display-oriented group because we then had a clean room and other facilities needed for this. You need extremely clean environments to do display research as well as switchable windows and other things. You can't have any dust particles around.

It was because of Nuno Vaz that this happened. He carried the technology to General Motors and got them involved. Nuno was wonderful. Then, Hughes Research in Malibu California got involved because at that time, Hughes was owned by General Motors. We had a nice program that went on for years with a group at Hughes Research, [headed by David Margerum], developing displays and various kinds of things. 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. Incidentally, we've already started a company, we already know how to make windows. We need a license to do it." It was incredible. [Laugh] [Polymer dispersions, PDLCs, were becoming well known all over the world, particularly as a new technology for switchable windows.]

CRAWFORD: We talked yesterday about some of the difficulties around Fergason's patenting ventures, and you had said that throughout the 70s, you were doing primarily basic research and weren't really working on applications. We've talked a little bit about how the academic and industrial worlds were in some ways separate universes. Why did you decide to pursue a patent on these things?

DOANE: I could see that they had value. And it was very different, a new way of making droplets and liquid crystals, a very simple way to do it. I thought it should be patented. My colleague, Pino, who was named on the patent, wanted to publish all this stuff. He was upset with me because I didn't want to publish, I wanted to patent it. And if you publish it, you can't further develop it in order to patent it. If it becomes public information, you can't patent it anymore. I didn't know much about writing patents. It was the first patent I ever wrote. To my knowledge, it was the first patent that Kent State ever had, at least following the Bayh-Dole Act. The University certainly had the authority now to own a patent, and Gene Wenninger and I had to figure out how to manage all that.

CRAWFORD: In the scientific world, especially in academia, publication is very important. Nowadays, we have software that keeps track of publications, and you can get a score based on the quantity you have. This choice to take some research and move it into patents, take it out of publication, was that a concern at all, that you'd be taking away from your academic achievement?

DOANE: It wasn't a concern for me because I really wanted to get into applied research. I wanted to get the Institute to an area where we could fund it, and the only way I could see funding at that time was to get some applied activity going on. I had no problem with patents. I had so many publications, I didn't need to worry about publications for a tenure promotion or anything.

CRAWFORD: I think you were already professor.

DOANE: I was already a professor then, anyway. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Did you see patenting as a way of kind of signaling that the Institute was moving into applied research?

DOANE: No, I didn't see it from that point of view. I saw it from the point of view of just having something that we can hang our hat on that we were in the display business. Even then, when I wrote the patent, I knew nothing about licensing. I just thought it was important to patent to establish it as your discovery or development with Kent State ownership.

CRAWFORD: It just seemed like the right thing to do.

DOANE: It just seemed like the thing to do! [Laugh] I certainly didn't know anything about licensing of patents [and I did not intend, at that time, to start a company to make products.]

CRAWFORD: When you took over as director, obviously you were moving in this applied direction, but did you also want to develop the LCI's relationship with companies?

DOANE: Oh, yes, I did. Particularly, with General Motors and 3M. I saw a big opportunity to do that. I wanted to establish a nice relationship with industry, learn what they were doing and how we could interact with them.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned GM giving money for a clean room and that kind of thing. Were there other types of interactions, people moving back and forth?

DOANE: Oh, yes. We had meetings and all sorts of interactions, particularly through the Hughes Research group. Hughes really jumped on that. We had regular meetings all the time. They'd come here, we'd go there, we'd meet in various places, help one another with various projects. It was a nice program. The guy at Hughes who headed all of this was Dave Margerum. I was delighted that we could do something with industry. Somehow, I just thought it was important for our program to do that. Turns out, it was extremely important because later on, when we came to the ALCOM [Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials] Center, that was extremely valuable.

CRAWFORD: Why was that?

DOANE: At that time NSF started a new program for Science and Technology Centers, and it was a new direction for NSF. A year earlier, they had awarded 12 of these. NSF was supporting a lot of basic research, but there was no indication of how it was actually going into technology. They wanted to show that there was economic benefit to all of this. In order to apply for one of these things, you were encouraged to show how you could create technology and get it into the US economy. I guess towards the late 80s, these programs became available. The first time they came out, we submitted an application, but just did it with the people in the Institute and institute facilities. We put together a massive proposal from our group to NSF. They awarded 12, but we weren't awarded one in the first group. But we were told why we were not awarded, because we were doing work with polymers, yet we had no polymer program. We needed to be working with another university on polymers. They wanted a program that involved multiple universities, not just one. 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.

The University of Akron was quite agreeable. And I found another polymer group at Case Western Reserve, headed by Jack Koenig, in the chemical engineering department. I had an engineering group and a polymer group, and having organized this group, we put another proposal together. [Laugh] That was a huge effort, the first time I ever worked with other universities, and I learned the issues with that. [Laugh] We put this together, and we got up to the point where NSF said they wanted to make a site visit. I said, "This is great, we've made it to the site visit." NSF sent out a bunch of people to Kent State, and I really had good support from Mike Schwartz, our president, who really helped us. He said, "Let's get the governor here." And the governor came. 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." That was very attractive to them, too. Another company that was very involved with liquid crystal display work was Tektronix in Oregon. They gave materials for a presentation, and they were really helpful. They sent displays to put on show. It was really nice. I had good industrial and other support for this site visit.

CRAWFORD: Did GM or Hughes send people as well?

DOANE: We had demonstrations from Hughes and other companies, but I don't remember exactly the demos they provided. I do remember Tektronix because I was surprised they did that. But we really made a nice presentation. I had such good support from industry and Kent State administration. And we won it, we got it. That really got us going.

CRAWFORD: And this is the ALCOM Center. Could you tell us what that stands for?

DOANE: Yes. It stands for Advanced Liquid Crystal Optical Materials.

CRAWFORD: Was this started in 1991?

DOANE: I think it was awarded in 1991.

CRAWFORD: When were you working on the application?

DOANE: Probably 1989 or so.

CRAWFORD: I want to circle back to the late 80s. You mentioned GM and Tektronix. Were there other companies the LCI was developing relationships with at this time?

DOANE: [Those were among the first ones but I think by then, 3M and Polytronix were working with us in some way. After ALCOM got under way we had an Industrial Partnership Program involving some 20 US companies. They were not necessarily licensees but we either had research interactions with them or they just wanted to be involved to keep abreast of the field.]

CRAWFORD: Were they asking for advice on technical problems? Were they asking the LCI to solve problems for them?

DOANE: [They primarily wanted just to be current with the technology as it applied to their company’s interest. It was a form of technology transfer. There were some research agreements with them but, no doubt the details were confidential at the time. These agreements are now well over 30 years ago and probably now terminated and some could be made public.]

CRAWFORD: Having worked in this field, what does technology transfer mean?

DOANE: It can mean several things. One, you can have meetings, exchange ideas and give lectures back and forth. It usually involves lectures and breakout sessions. Various institute investigators including students and postdocs give lectures, and people ask questions. Of course, it can involve development agreements and also licensing. If you have a joint development, you determine who owns it and who doesn’t, this kind of thing. An agreement can be kind of complicated [and confidential].

CRAWFORD: But it sounds like part of it is a sharing of ideas.

DOANE: It's a sharing of ideas, yes.

CRAWFORD: I think the popular idea of technology transfer is that a place like the LCI has these ideas, then they're moving them into these companies. Is that a fair characterization? Or is it actually an exchange?

DOANE: [It's more of a transfer than an exchange. Universities transfer their research results to industry where products are developed and manufactured. Universities, by nature, like to be open and publish their research.] Industry is the opposite in the sense that they don't want other people to know the product they are developing. They don't want to establish competitors [before they have the product on the market]. They have a lot of secrets. The universities, back then [– particularly before Bayh-Dole –] didn’t have ways to manage secrets or patents necessarily, but universities can these days which ends up being transferred in some way to industry.

CRAWFORD: By secrets, you’re talking about intellectual property?

DOANE: [Yeah, primarily intellectual property but also research results. There can be non-disclosure agreements with an industry in which confidential information is transferred. Generally universities want to publish their research results. In the case of student dissertations, it is necessary to publish. But the university can have ownership of patents that industry needs.]

CRAWFORD: Right, because the university becomes kind of a competitor to the companies.

DOANE: [Not necessarily a competitor because they're not in the same kind of business]. My experience with this is that universities typically don't want to get too involved in licensing and business relationships. But the professors themselves often are the ones [who often want to keep hold of that technology. They or their students often like to establish a company and make use of it themselves. In this case, the university licenses the patents generated by faculty and students back to them to start a company. In this case the university will make little or no up-front money from the license but it has value otherwise in creating local industry that benefits the university in a variety of ways, creating jobs for students, attracting new students, endowments, PR etc.] I think one of the best ways a university capitalizes on patents is through PR. It's great PR for the university to develop new technology. Spinning off a company is what I eventually wound up doing myself, which is to use technology to spin off companies instead of trying to make money for the university by licensing the technology to various places around the world. Licensing, in general, I found not to be a very good business for a university. You license a technology, and within a short while, sometimes within a year, the company you've licensed it to has already further developed technology and written patents around it, then they're back knocking on the door, negotiating for reduced payments. I didn't find it a great business for Kent State University. Kent State made money on licensing, [but they didn’t make a lot in view of work and the trouble it can cause, particularly if the patent is challenged and there is a court battle. I think there may be exceptions, but I think those are unusual situations, where a university makes a bundle of money from licensing.]

CRAWFORD: When you say licensing's not good business, you mean financially?

DOANE: Personally, I didn't think it was a great business, [financially, for Kent State University but they did make some money at it.]

CRAWFORD: Yeah. But it sounds like it was, in some ways, good for the LCI because [inaudible].

DOANE: It was very good for the LCI [and also for Kent State in other ways]. We became so well-known in Japan and Asia, you could go over to Asia and they knew about Kent State but learned about Cleveland only because they had to fly into it to get here.

CRAWFORD: And that was because of the shift to displays?

DOANE: Yeah, because of the overall liquid crystal program. When they'd come here, they'd ask where to fly into, and we'd say Cleveland, and they'd say, "Where is that?" [Laugh] I thought that was so funny. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: But it really says something about how important the LCI had become. The ALCOM Center gets started in 1991. What impact did that have on the LCI?

DOANE: First of all, we got a new building out of it. We could put more people together. It just made for a nice, cohesive research program. And it was nice working with the folks at Case and Akron, too. Akron contributed really nicely to the display technology because with polymers, they could make things like retardation films, and Akron really got involved. It's a film that goes on a liquid crystal display so you can see it at a very wide angle. If it didn't have that film on it, you could only see it if you were looking directly at it. The viewing angle was a big issue on displays. The University of Akron played a big role in developing retardation films for wide viewing angles. Also, there were a lot of students involved. With ALCOM, we had at least 100 people back then, including the students, post-docs, faculty, and so on. It was a huge group. I think our annual expenditures were around $6 or $7 million. It was a big effort for that time.

CRAWFORD: Did that include what Akron and Case were doing?

DOANE: These were our expenditures in Kent. You'd have to ask Elaine Landry about the financial details of ALCOM. She'd recall these numbers easily as she was a superb manager.

CRAWFORD: What did this mean in terms of the research agenda, either for your group or the Institute as a whole? Were you working on these kinds of questions about how to improve displays?

DOANE: Oh, yes. Not only displays, we had work going on with steering laser beams, night vision, and other optical devices. There were all sorts of projects going on. One thing I did, in order to keep faculty focused when someone would give a talk, was to make them bring a demonstration. [Laugh] When we had our meetings and discussions, I always wanted to see something, not just a bunch of words and slides. I think that really helped because it forced them to think, "What can I really make with this stuff?"

CRAWFORD: What was the reaction to that?

DOANE: They picked up on it, but they didn't always do it as well as I would have liked. They seemed to like the idea, but I didn't always get what I thought I was going to get. But it did force them to really think about, "Is what I'm doing really relevant?"

CRAWFORD: It really seems to force the question of application.

DOANE: Yes, it forces the question of applications. ALCOM was to combine science and technology where applications are important. A researcher can think he has something really great until he has to make something out of it. [Laugh] He can find out that it's either great or not a great approach to a technology.

CRAWFORD: Were there any demonstrations that stood out or led to anything significant?

DOANE: Actually, there were quite a number. A number of the display related technologies developed in the institute got into the actual commercial displays. There are a lot of components to a display. There are alignment layers, retardation films, liquid crystal materials where significant contributions are made. There were also new types of liquid crystal display technologies created that were commercialized. There were also different kinds of optical devices created. With regard to displays, there was one thing we did not have a program in was the active matrix.

CRAWFORD: Was there any particular reason why?

DOANE: You had to have an electrical engineering department. We had a big handicap here at Kent State because there was no electrical engineering department at Kent at that time. Further electrical engineers at Akron or Case did not have that expertise or interest. If we had such an electrical engineering department, we probably could've done it, but we didn't have one. I had to hire electrical engineers [or use the electrical expertise we had in-house to create drive electronics for a new technology].

CRAWFORD: It sounds like part of the impact of ALCOM, in addition to growing the LCI, was orienting the Institute more towards displays, and it sounds like you were doing a lot more than just liquid crystals.

DOANE: Yeah. [There's a faculty member at Kent, Phil Bos that I'd like for you to interview.] I think one of the biggest impacts we had on display technology is on cell phones that came from our students. We graduated a lot of students in the ALCOM center, not only from Kent State but Case Western Reserve and Akron. These students went into industry in places like Microsoft, Apple, Google etc. Phil Bos knows what those students did when they went out there. There were a lot of them to populate those places. As I understand Phil, this display technology you're looking at right there on your cell phone is from one of our students.

CRAWFORD: For the audio, you're showing me an Apple iPhone.

DOANE: Yeah. Please interview Phil Bos, he'll clue you in on all of that stuff. I think one of the biggest contributions ALCOM made was its students. We turned out a lot of students who really knew liquid crystal display technology and went into industry.

CRAWFORD: Phil Bos is a professor?

DOANE: He's a physics professor working at the liquid crystal institute. Like Peter Palffy and John West, he originally came into the liquid crystal institute under the title senior research fellow, with no professorship as did Adriaan De Vries and several others. I think Professor Saupe was the only one in the early stages who really had a professorship.

CRAWFORD: What was the thinking in hiring them as senior research fellows?

DOANE: In order to give them professorial titles, at that time, I would've had to go through the departments, get them appointments in the departments, and often departments didn't want to do that because they wanted to hire their own people. [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 sort of a political thing.]

CRAWFORD: The departments have their own hiring plans and needs.

DOANE: Departments have their own agenda and plans. After Senior Research Fellows served in that position for a while, they found themselves directing graduate students and doing almost the same things as university professors do. Some were even teaching classes. I was worried about losing them, so I had to create a graduate program in the Liquid Crystal Institute to have tenure-track professor positions for them.

CRAWFORD: You saw moving towards getting them into professorships as a way to retain people like West and Palffy.

DOANE: Yeah. If I had something like you proposed the other day, where the institute was off campus, apart from the University, it would've been something I might've been able to deal with a lot more easily. But when it's on campus, that's an issue you have. Your people want to be part of the academic environment.

CRAWFORD: When was the graduate program established?

DOANE: After the establishment of ALCOM. The University had on its books the physics department's first graduate program called Chemical Physics. It was called that because chemistry got their PhD program first. The physics department was very small, and the only way you could get a doctoral program was to do something with chemistry, so they created this graduate program in Chemical Physics. 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. This chemical physics program was still on the books, but nobody was using it anymore. I thought, "I'm going to see if I can get the administration to let me use this program in the Institute."

I had a lot of trouble doing it because chemistry viewed it as an encroachment. We had to develop courses. Chemistry was really opposed to it because they saw these courses encroaching on their courses. It was difficult, but I finally got it through. John West was very helpful on all of that stuff. It was a lot of work. However, since then, I retired in '96, and around 2010 or so, they moved the faculty in Chemical Physics into the various departments, like physics and chemistry. Phil Bos, for example, was in the chemical physics program, but now he's in physics.

CRAWFORD: But students still get their PhD in chemical physics?

DOANE: As I understand it, they do [but it may now be broadened to material sciences. It’s been over 25 years since I retired from the university and a lot has happened since then.]

CRAWFORD: This kind of fits with a little bit of what we're talking about right now, how the Institute relates to the two main departments that are related to the study of liquid crystals, physics and chemistry.

DOANE: Actually, biology is getting more and more involved [and, as I understand it, also engineering and there may be more].

CRAWFORD: You mentioned that as part of ALCOM, the University committed to this new building, which is the LCI building at the end of the science mall on campus. That moves LCI from this space where it had been in between physics and chemistry to its own space. You had talked about how part of moving into that space between physics and chemistry was to encourage interactions and stuff.

DOANE: It was golden. Originally moving into the space between physics and chemistry was essential in getting the ALCOM Center. After ALCOM, the new building was needed as the program had grown substantially.

CRAWFORD: I was going to ask if that new building made it harder to encourage interactions.

DOANE: [No, in fact the opposite since by the time of ALCOM there are now other departments involved such as Mathematics, Biology, and, now more recently Engineering. Institute was still on the research campus but now had a broader scope involving more science departments.] 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].

CRAWFORD: ALCOM is funded in 1991, and five years later, you retire. Why did you decide to retire?

DOANE: Several reasons. First, I wanted to start spin-off companies. The only way I knew to do that was to do it myself. Actually, I started KDI in ‘93 before I even retired. I retired in '96.

CRAWFORD: KDI is Kent Displays, Incorporated.

DOANE: Yes. Forming the company while I still directed the Institute caused some issues. [Laugh] But I was able to do it. I got an investor who could handle a lot of it. I wanted to create KDI to set an example so others would do it, and it worked. I think there have been quite a few spin-offs since. Bahman Taheri founded one of them, Alpha Micron, Inc.. That was one reason. I wanted to make a success out of KDI. The other reason was, at that time, I'd been at Kent State 31 years, and the University had what they called a five-year buyout plan which was an incentive. But I think one of the main reasons was that I wanted to leave the Institute in good shape for the new director. It was doing very well then to give a new director time to settle in before ALCOM ended.

CRAWFORD: Did you ever consider just stepping down as director and going back to doing research as a faculty member?

DOANE: Back then, you could retire, and after you were retired for so many years, you could run the Institute again. But I thought, "Maybe the Institute needed new direction." I'd been there for 13 years, and I thought it was time for new blood to come in. I thought I was too old to be a good researcher anymore. My experience is that all the good research comes out of really young guys. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Why do you think that is?

DOANE: It just happens. It seems like a lot of the Nobel laureates are really young fellows or at least made their discoveries at a young age. [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. Also, there was another guy in the Institute who wanted to take over my nuclear magnetic resonance laboratory, so. It just worked out. It seemed to be the best thing to do, and my wife, Shirley, agreed.

CRAWFORD: Was it hard to leave the Institute after running it for 13 years? 

DOANE: Yeah, it was, but my focus changed to the company because I really wanted this company to survive and do well. It was important to me that this company, the first spin-off formed, turn into something. I had a lot of government support that I could bring into the company as well. DARPA was funding research in the company very well. We were developing a display technology that had come out of the ALCOM Center. We discovered we could make a unique reflective display. The reason I thought this important was that back in the late 80s, I was on a panel to go to Japan that was funded by DARPA, and NSF, to learn what the Japanese were doing and how they got to where they were. It was called JTech.

I learned a lot from that, and one of the things I learned being on this panel was that there was a serious issue with the technology they were developing in Japan, the forerunner of that on your cell phone. You need a very bright backlight behind it to see a color image. And then you can only see a nice image indoors. Even today, if you take your cell phone out in the bright sunlight and try to look at it, you're not going to see the image very well if at all. Back then, backlights were not very well-developed, and they took a lot of power. In a liquid crystal display there are color filters. In order to get color, you have to filter the light through red, green, and blue filters, and those filters absorb a lot of light. This means you have to really have a very powerful backlight to see the image that took a lot of power from a battery. 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. Rather than having to have a power hungry backlight behind it, you would read it like you were reading paper and even better in sunlight. This was a prime incentive in forming Kent Displays.

This new reflective technology came about when early on, the Xerox group was working on things called cholesteric liquid crystals. I'd known about this group for years. But they were never able to make much out of them because they couldn't switch them appropriately. Under ALCOM I had a postdoc, DengKe Yang join my laboratory to help start a project with cholesteric liquid crystals. He had worked on cholesteric liquid crystals as a graduate student in Hawaii. I brought him to Kent to work on it in my lab. We started a project studying these materials with electric field pulses. One day, he walked into my office and said, "Look at what this crazy stuff does. If I apply a voltage pulse, it does this and if I change the voltage of the pulse it does that." I thought, "Oh, he's switching between two bistable structures, something that others had not been able to do. We could make a low power reflective display with that.” [Laugh] I sat down with DengKe and we wrote a patent.

CRAWFORD: What did it look like when he was switching?

DOANE: It would switch between a specific reflective color to no color at all; that is, become totally transparent. One state would reflect a color, and the other state was transparent. If you had something black behind it to create a background, you could switch on and off a bright red image, for example, on black background. Actually you could use and switch any color. Right away, I could see this might have some value in reflective display technology, so we wrote the patent really quickly, and that patent was followed by other patents related to that technology, all developed under ALCOM. And that's what I formed KDI on. Here, we had a new technology, we had patents on it. The University wanted to license it, and I talked the University into letting me form a company around this. I went around looking for investors, since I had no money on my own to do it. I knew it would take millions of dollars to do it.

At the time I happened to be on a board of directors for a display company in Troy, Michigan. I'd become acquainted with an investor, William (Bill) Manning who was on this board, a money manager from Rochester, New York. And in the meantime, I'd talked with others who may have wanted to invest in it, some people up in Cleveland who thought they might do it. But Bill Manning really got interested in this technology. I had several visits with him, and he invited me up to Rochester to show him some displays. Then, one weekend, this Bill comes to Kent and knocks on my door and says, "I have my son-in-law, Joel Domino, out in the car. I'll fund this company and Joel can be the financial officer." I thought about it for a short while and agreed. Joel turned out to be terrific. I, with the help of Bill Manning, were finally able to convince the University to grant a license to this technology. They didn't want to do it. They'd made money before licensing PDLC materials. But, eventually, we were able to come up with a plan that convinced them to grant a license and we formed KDI. Joel Domino, was the company's first employee. He has been key to the company’s success and is with the company today.

CRAWFORD: And that was in 1993?

DOANE: Yeah. I think this is another reason I retired when I did because I also convinced DARPA that this might be a nice technology, the reflective technology, because you could see it in the bright sunlight, you could use it in airplanes, and so on. It was bistable, so we could make low-power, full color reflective displays. They provided funding to the company and Kent State to further develop it.

CRAWFORD: What was the name of the postdoc you were working with from Hawaii?

DOANE: DengKe Yang.

CRAWFORD: Thinking about your career at the LCI, both as researcher and director, what would you say were the most significant achievements for you during your tenure?

DOANE: I think it helped put Kent State on the map scientifically [and create a graduate program around a needed display technology where students could find great jobs]. Not that there wasn't other good research going on at Kent State, but Kent wasn't that visible as a university where technology is created. This gave high visibility to Kent State internationally. I think that's one of the nicest contributions it had. Another contribution was creating new products. I wanted to see more spin-off companies. I wanted to see the city of Kent benefit from this, employment, and so on. But I'd say from Kent State University's point of view, it was the visibility in the science field. It has played a big role [scientifically and technologically]. We wouldn’t have had such good displays on our cell phones if it wasn’t for this Institute. [These beautiful displays have been a major contributor to today’s social media for example. I don’t think it is generally realized the importance of liquid crystal materials has played in today’s digital world. The liquid crystal display is a major part of it. The institute strongly contributed to that in many different ways.]

CRAWFORD: And that's important because that's a ubiquitous technology. Why don't we pause for now?

[End Part 2]


[Start Part 3]

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm an Associate Professor and Historian of Science in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today, I'm interviewing Dr. J. William Doane, Emeritus Professor of Physics, Emeritus Director of the Liquid Crystal Institute at Kent State University, as well as Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at Kent Displays. Today's date is Monday, August 16th, 2021. This is our third session. Dr. Doane, thanks for agreeing to speak to me again.

J. WILLIAM DOANE: Thanks for inviting me.

CRAWFORD: We left off at our last discussion talking about the end of your career at the Liquid Crystal Institute with your retirement in 1996, at which point you moved to working full-time with Kent Displays, Incorporated. I just wanted to ask if you could say a bit more. 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. I wonder if you could say a little bit more about why you decided to establish Kent Displays. What were your hopes and goals for the company when you founded it?

DOANE: There were several reasons I wanted to start the company, one of them being that at that time, I was directing the ALCOM Center at Kent State, and we were developing new technology. I wanted to see that technology get into the US economy in some way. That was really what the objective of ALCOM was, to make a connection between basic research and the economy. Before, the University would simply license technology. One problem with that was that the people who were interested were primarily foreign companies. There were some US companies such as General Motors and a few others, but it was mostly going across the ocean. I wanted to try something different to keep it local. I had a friend at MIT who told me that was what they liked to do at MIT, get faculty, post-docs, and students to be entrepreneurs to spin off the technology. I thought I would try that. I found an investor, which I needed because it was going to be expensive to do it, and I wanted to set an example so other people at the University would do it.

I didn't know of anybody else at Kent who had done this sort of thing, spinning off technology from the University. I was determined to do that, and at first, I tried to do it at a lower cost [to better attract investment]. Also, I needed to convince the University to do it, too, because the University enjoyed making money off of licensing. One way to do that was not to take an exclusive license for the entire patent, but to narrow it down [and license it for some specific application]. I convinced Bill Manning to come aboard and also found somebody to run the company. I couldn't run the company because I was directing the Institute. We decided to focus on the use of displays in signs. This would give the University the opportunity to license it off to other companies for other kinds of display applications besides signs. Everybody seemed happy with that, so we did it. We got the company started, and the company got off to a very quick start. Right away, we were beginning to make signs out of the cholesteric liquid crystal technology. But they were finding it not a very big market and a very unusual market.

At that time, signs were primarily mom-and-pop-type organizations, and furthermore, after a year or two, I saw that the University wasn't licensing this for other uses anywhere or even marketing it. I was their marketing component before. I began to see the need for the company to be able to develop and manufacture displays for other uses instead of just for signs. I saw an opportunity [to develop high-definition flat panel displays for the defense agencies]. They began to take a real interest in this technology because it was reflective, displayed color and was low power. You could see it very well in bright daylight, so they wanted to explore it further and put some money into it. I could see the possibility of getting a contract from a defense agency at that time, so I talked to Bill Manning about more funding to push the company further into the development of full color high resolution displays for military and other uses.. Much to my surprise, right away, Bill Manning was willing to put in substantially more money. At that time, I think he committed $20 million up front. I was then able to convince the University to take an exclusive license for the technology for all applications. I was further able to convince them, because Kent Displays was very small and didn't have much of an R&D unit, to let us use their facilities, at a cost, of course, to develop the technology further. Also, of course, the University would get a royalty. We recapitalized the company and changed the name to Kent Displays, Incorporated. Before, it was called Kent Display Systems. That was in '96.

CRAWFORD: Could you talk a little bit more about the problems with licensing, that things were going other places, other parts of the country? What did you want to see develop here?

DOANE: The university was doing an awful lot of licensing of switchable window technology to Japan. There was even some interest in Europe, and here was some licensing there, too. The only places I could see it going in the US was to General Motors, 3M, and a small company in Texas. In talking to my friend at MIT, he was saying their experience–and he had a lot more experience than I did, was that MIT had trouble making money on licensing. It was kind of a pain in the neck for them. They really liked to use their technology for PR, to say they'd developed it, started these new companies, and were getting into the economy. It was good PR for MIT. It was a different approach for a university to deal with. From what I understand, today, it's still a lot like that. Universities don't like to get too involved in this business. I know Kent State doesn't, for sure. I've been retired from the university for 26 years, so I really don't know what goes on in universities now.

CRAWFORD: But at the time, you were thinking in terms of economic development for the region?

DOANE: Yes. I thought it was good for Kent State, too. I wanted something like MIT and Stanford, where they had companies building up all around the universities. They benefit each other mutually. They provide places for the students to work. It's a win-win situation to have local companies build up around a university. 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? Are there other benefits to the interactions between universities and spinoff companies?

DOANE: [A local industry helps fuel university research. A successful company generates royalties for the university They build upon each other.] Universities run on endowments, too. Building up a local economy and, ultimately, after a time, providing things like endowments. [I have no idea how much endowment MIT and Stanford get from the local economy, but they both have huge, profitable high tech industries with many faithful alums.]

CRAWFORD: I'm wondering about the relationship between Kent Displays and the Liquid Crystal [Institute]. You mentioned using LCI facilities, but were there other interactions?

DOANE: [We still use institute facilities at Kent State today as well as facilities of other universities in the area.] That is a major benefit because small companies, particularly, cannot afford the very expensive research equipment that universities have for their research. Even today, we make use of universities, which is very helpful in this regard. Of course, we pay for it, but it's nice to have that facility available, and it's nice for them to make it available.

CRAWFORD: Did Kent Displays then, and does it now, send its own people to use the facilities? Or are you working with scientists at the LCI?

DOANE: Yes, today we use those facilities. We have also worked with scientists and professors, who have been consultants for us. And we've employed students in the summertime as interns. That's another win-win situation.

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. The College of Wooster is down the road, and we've had a lot of students from there. From Akron University [we have hired students with expertise in polymers. Having local universities around really helps industries and vice versa. This not only includes your local university, but other universities and small colleges. There are numerous small colleges in Northeastern Ohio.]

CRAWFORD: I would imagine as a company, it's beneficial to have students, both undergraduates and graduates, who can come here and work that you know have experience in physics.

DOANE: Particularly experience in liquid crystals. That's really a benefit for [Kent Displays]. Akron has a very strong polymer program, which is helpful to us, too.

CRAWFORD: If I understood you correctly, a spin-off company doesn't necessarily mean more financial benefit for a university than licensing does. The benefit is that they can say, "Look what we're doing for the local economy."

DOANE: Yes, I think that's [one major benefit]. At that time, I know MIT looked at it that way, so I tried to focus Kent State in that direction, too. It benefits in many ways, beyond licensing income. Although, spinoff companies can provide license income to the university as well. However, licensing in general is not a very good business to be in no matter who you are, I found out. [Laugh] [I am sure, however, there are some examples where it has paid off.]

CRAWFORD: Why is that?

DOANE: A license won't last very long. 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. The patent you are licensing is suddenly not so valuable anymore. [Laugh] [You can also find yourself in expensive court battles trying to defend it. Further, patents have a limited lifetime.]

CRAWFORD: You mentioned this friend of yours at MIT, and you've mentioned Stanford, which his very famous for its relationship with Silicon Valley. Do you think now, almost 20 years on from the establishment of Kent Displays, what's happening in Northeast Ohio is kind of like what's happening in Cambridge or Silicon Valley?

DOANE: Using them as examples really paid off in getting us started in that direction. Immediately after we started Kent Displays, Inc., other faculty, students and postdocs got the message and said, "Maybe we should do this." There now have been many other spinoffs. I think John West could tell you more about that. [We are, of course, not anywhere near where Cambridge and Silicon Valley are but we do, at least, have a start.]

CRAWFORD: So there have been spinoff companies. Just from your experience having worked at Kent Displays, Northeast Ohio of course is different in some ways than Cambridge, Massachusetts, or Northern California in lots of ways. What are the advantages and challenges of running a technology company in this place, in Northeast Ohio?

DOANE: First of all, investment. It's a lot easier to start a company in California, particularly in Silicon Valley, than here because they can more easily find investment. The investment may be here in Northeast Ohio, but the mentality isn't. It takes a lot of money to start a company, particularly in a new technology.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like you're saying it's partly a cultural thing.

DOANE: Yes. People in California are able to start a company a lot more easily. That was my biggest trouble, finding investment.

CRAWFORD: Was it difficult to find venture capitalists here?

DOANE: You can find venture capitalists, but finding one
that fits with you can be an issue. I looked at several people before I went to Bill Manning. The more venture capitalists there are around, the better it is.

CRAWFORD: [Did] the University do anything to facilitate those connections, or did you have to do that on your own?

DOANE: [I had to find investment on my own. I visited many potential investors, the contacts that I set up were on my own.] However, there were a couple people on the board of trustees at Kent State University at that time who were very helpful. An ex-CEO of the Hoover vacuum cleaner company, Joe Cutinella, was on the Kent State University Board of Trustees at that time, and I think his influence really helped, particularly in getting the University to accept this idea of starting local companies. Joe Cutinella ended up being on the Kent Displays board of trustees for a while. I think once the University got into it, they thought it was a nice way to go, too.

CRAWFORD: Is there anything else particular about Northeast Ohio that's advantageous for companies?

DOANE: Well, it's just a nice place to live. I think Ohio generally is a good place for industry development. There's a lot of industry here. Back then, I had a little problem with the State of Ohio. They didn't want me to do this at all. 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. But it's different now. Not very long after I started this company, they removed them. Things like the Bayh-Dole Act got the state to start thinking differently. Today, the state of Ohio does everything they can to help form companies. In fact, this company has received funds from the state of Ohio. Our very first high-volume manufacturing line was supported by the state of Ohio. I can get into that later. It's very different today than back then.

CRAWFORD: When the company first started, it didn't have a manufacturing line. Was the intention originally to produce products for the market?

DOANE: We wanted to make and sell things, and we did. Probably within a year, we were selling signs. I think one of the biggest customers was actually in Israel. The Knesset really liked these signs because they fit well with the religious beliefs because they didn't require any power to retain an image on the screen. We had nice sales in Israel. But it was clear that it wasn't going to be a very big business, and I wasn't sure that Bill Manning would ever get that much enjoyment out of signs. And the Army became interested in full color, and I was able to get a contract with the defense agencies through DARPA to develop full color on flexible plastic substrates. That was what got us into flexible plastic substrates. Right after we recapitalized, the company was kind of an R&D company for a while because we were developing full-color, high-resolution displays on flexible plastic substrates. We made some [very nice full-color, high resolution, flexible color displays].

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 competitive twist cell technology in Asia was getting better and better. Their backlighting technology was becoming cheaper and cheaper as was battery technology, and it was becoming harder to compete. Nevertheless, after several years, Asad and I put together a proposal [for high volume manufacturing of flexible displays, a new and different approach to display technology]. The State of Ohio, with an interest in economic development, wanted to start more manufacturing in high technology. We were able to get grants to help us with this. These grants with our own funds helped us build this high-volume manufacturing line so that we could really turn out displays in high volume.

CRAWFORD: And this was in the early 2000s?

DOANE: Yes. That turned out to be a really good thing to do. One thing that hurt the company a lot in the early years, a company down in Texas started making cholesteric displays infringing on our technology. We had all the patents on this, so I flew down to Texas to talk to this company and tell them, "Look, we have the patents on this, and we're going to protect them. You really need to negotiate a license with us to manufacture." I hadn't been back in Ohio but a few days, and they sued us. They tried to invalidate our patent, claiming our patent was invalid. That was a major distraction for the company. It took several years to get through it, and I think the total expenditures on this, which were provided by Bill Manning, were around $8 million. It was horrible. In the end, we won out. We put the infringing company out of business, and their attorneys faced a little bit of trouble, too. 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. The government doesn't give you money for protecting it. It grants you the patent, but you have to protect it. Patents aren't as convenient of a thing as you'd like to think they might be. But that was a distraction for the company. That $8 million would've been a lot better spent going to developing products and marketing. 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. It was so secret, I never knew what it was, but we were given the contract to develop the display for it. In the process of all of that, was a person monitoring the contract who became very interested in our company. By that time, our CEO had left the company, and this person decided to join the company as our new CEO because he'd become interested in the cholesteric liquid crystal technology.

CRAWFORD: Who was that?

DOANE: His name was Albert Green. He reconfigured the company. Not long after he came aboard, he promoted Asad Khan to be his CTO. The company soon became a manufacturing company, marketing and selling a consumer product in high volume. When Al Green joined we already had this manufacturing line. There were a number of things we could make on it. The question was, what display did we make first to make use of it? We picked the simplest display we could possibly make, and that was the writing tablet, the Boogie Board. That focused the company right there. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Was that the primary reason the company decided to focus on the Boogie Board, because it was simple?

DOANE: It was the easiest thing to make on a manufacturing line because you didn't have to pattern [the electrodes] or anything. It was just a great display to start high volume manufacturing. Also, we needed electronics to erase what was on screen, and in order to make it at a very low cost, we had to use electronics from a Chinese company. And there was a market for writing tablets in China. I think that was probably our first market for that thing. We decided at one time to try Amazon, and we sent them a number of them. Before noon on the day it was launched, Amazon was calling up and wanting more. [Laugh] It was clear that it was really going to take off. Then, there were some other companies, like Brookstone, that really wanted to sell these things. That was what really got the company off the ground and involved in marketing and sales that had to be developed.

CRAWFORD: Had the company done any test marketing or user studies?

DOANE: No, it really didn't have much in the way of marketing. [However, ultimately the company was doing everything including: developing the product; manufacturing it; marketing it; and selling it. It was a consumer product. It wasn't easy for the company to do all that. But Albert Green, at that time, had a big job on his hand in taking it to that level].

CRAWFORD: What do you think he brought in particular? Business acumen?

DOANE: He was a Stanford graduate in physics. 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. That was what really got the company off the ground.

CRAWFORD: Could you explain what a Boogie Board is for the recording?

DOANE: It's a writing tablet. We considered it a paper replacement. That is to say, you can write on it with almost anything, even your fingernail, but usually with a pointed stylus. It has a writing texture similar to paper. But the nice thing about it is, you can erase it and use it over again. You don't have to wad it up and throw it away. Also, as a blackboard or white board replacement, it is not messy; that is, you don’t need chalk or ink. The company has been improving on this over the years. It really got into the writing experience, as well as advancing it to fit this into digital technology, how to do it in color, things like that. The company today develops all sorts of stuff to get it closer and closer to paper yet make it interactive with digital electronics. It's a paper replacement you don't have to throw away. You can even write on it and store it on your cell phone if you want to. There's a lot of work going on in product development. As a result the company became focused on writing.

CRAWFORD: Before the shift to the Boogie Board, you mentioned that the company was making signs and had some contracts in Israel and whatnot. What were those signs?

DOANE: They were called Info Signs. They were on glass substrates as opposed to plastic. And they're still made today. One of the employees at that time left the company and has taken that technology with him. The company licenses it to him, and he's still working on that, developing it further. That technology still exists outside of our company.

CRAWFORD: Where might we see some of these signs today?

DOANE: They're in airports. There is one here at Kent Displays that is used to welcome people.

CRAWFORD: I've seen that. So, that sort of thing?

DOANE: Yes, it is great for that. I have lost track of where they're sold now but I think mostly overseas.

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.

DOANE: Yeah, you change it by typing on your computer; that is, put a message on it from your computer. The attractive thing for a sign is that once you address it, it takes no power to retain the message. It's not like the other kinds of displays that have to be electronically refreshed over and over as well as require a backlight. These don't have to be refreshed. That's its attractiveness. The name of the company who manufactures this now and markets it is Ebulent [and its CEO is Xiao-Yang Huang]. A lot of their sales, I think, are foreign. I’ve been told that China likes them in train stations and various public places.

CRAWFORD: Same thing with the Boogie Board, right? It's a very low-powered device.

DOANE: The Boogie Board takes no power to write on it. The written image stays there forever without any power. It only takes a tiny amount of power when you erase it. And we'll have writing tablets coming out where you don't need any power to erase, either. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: How does the surface of the Boogie Board record the writing? Is it based on the pressure?

DOANE: The Boogie Board makes use of a type of liquid crystal that's extremely unique. When you put it between two sheets of plastic, it can assume two different types of contrasting visual textures. One texture reflects a beautiful colored light. It can be green, red, whatever you want it to be. We usually make it green because the eye picks up green very well. The other texture is transparent. You put something black behind it, it looks black, but in the other state, it's a beautiful reflective green. So you can see green writing on a black background. Both states are extremely stable so that the writing stays there until someone wants to erase it. The writing can stay there forever if desired. What makes it useful for a tablet is you can write on it with your fingernail or a pointed object or stylus. A slight pressure of the pointed object creates an image. It makes a nice writing surface. Fundamentally, it's very simple. The physics behind it isn’t so simple, but it's a simple device and useful device as a paper replacement that can be reused.

CRAWFORD: Was this a type of liquid crystal that was discovered or developed at the Liquid Crystal Institute?

DOANE: Actually, that type of liquid crystal was the first ever discovered back in 1888. It’s called a cholesteric liquid crystal. It’s called that because it can be found in the cholesterol of living systems. When we started working on it at the liquid crystal institute, other people were working on this material. Westinghouse was using it for temperature sensors because it can be made to be very sensitive to temperature. It can be formulated so that the slightest change in temperature changes the color. But you can also make it so that the temperature doesn't change the color. Xerox was studying its electro-optical properties. However, up until the ALCOM Center, nobody knew how to electronically switch it from one texture to the other. When we discovered how to do that we realized we could make a nice electronically addressed display out of it.

CRAWFORD: When you told us about the discovery of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals, it sounded like it sort of happened by accident, because you had this researcher from Italy who had put the epoxy in and left it, and the next day, it’s whoa, this happened. But was this discovery of switching cholesteric liquid crystals electronically more by design?

DOANE: [No, it also was by accident. We were surprised to see this result. It came about when a postdoctoral fellow in my laboratory was experimenting on how cholesteric liquid crystals respond to an electrical pulse. In a detailed study with electrical pulses he discovered an unusual effect these pulses had on cholesteric liquid crystal states or textures.]

CRAWFORD: What was it that allowed you to switch between the two states?

DOANE: It has to do with how you switch it. [If you apply an electrical pulse to it at a certain voltage level it will go to the color reflective texture. If you lower the voltage of the pulse to another certain level, it will turn to the other texture for the background. This unique feature makes possible all sorts of low power, color reflective display applications. It makes for high resolution flat panel screens in that this electrical switching feature allows the display to be digitally addressed. For writing tablets, this allows one to make a simple writing device in which you write with a pointed stylus and erase with the push of a button. It turns out that writing tablets actually use both PDLCs and cholesteric liquid crystals in which polymers are dispersed in the cholesteric liquid crystal. The dispersed polymers are necessary to control the width of the written line. 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.]

CRAWFORD: Would you say that Kent Displays itself is a product of ALCOM?

DOANE: Oh, yes. Absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Did Kent Displays get funding from ALCOM?

DOANE: No. The funding for Kent Displays was strictly Bill Manning.

CRAWFORD: And then, you mentioned getting some defense contracts.

DOANE: Yes. I was able to get a lot of defense contracts. It was very helpful in addition to Bill Manning's money. Bill got the company going, but the defense contracts helped it to grow to further develop the technology. The State of Ohio money helped it with manufacturing. The government support, both federal and state, were very extremely helpful.

CRAWFORD: When you started working full-time at Kent Displays, what was your role at the company? You mentioned Al Green was the CEO and Asad was the CTO.

DOANE: At first, I had no involvement in the company at all because I was directing the LCI. But as soon as I retired, I joined the company as CTO for a while. But I always had somebody else running the company. I never wanted to run the company because I didn't think I had the right expertise. I come from the academic world. I knew nothing about marketing or sales, and I didn't view myself as somebody to run the company. After I retired from Kent State, I would've done it if I'd had to, but I thought we could do better with somebody from outside.

CRAWFORD: What kind of expertise did you have?

DOANE: Of course, I was the principal investigator on the government contracts and managed research and development in the company. We had contracts from the Navy, DARPA, the state of Ohio, and so on. Asad worked very closely with me on all of these things, and eventually he took over as principal investigator on all government contacts ultimately becoming CTO as I got closer to retirement. Today he is CEO taking the company into new exciting directions with new products.

CRAWFORD: Would you say your ability to win grants and contracts was a kind of expertise?

DOANE: Yes, that was an expertise. I knew how to work with government agencies very well. I knew the people, the issues, what the government needed.

CRAWFORD: How important would you say knowing people in government and funding agencies is?

DOANE: Extremely important. The more you know about what they want, the better proposal you can write, the better you can fit in, the better you can adjust what you're doing to what they're doing. You have to be able to see how you fit in and how you can contribute. It's not an easy job. When you're running a research institute, like I was at Kent State, and it's funded by grants and contracts, that's about all you have time to do. 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. But I really had to spend most of my time obtaining funding for the Institute as a whole. That's what you do as a director, you fund your organization. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Where did this expertise come from? Was this expertise something you learned as a graduate student?

DOANE: Yeah, I'd say maybe as a graduate student. As a graduate student, when I got into nuclear magnetic resonance, I had a research assistantship while I was working on my PhD, and that was funded with a grant. When you grow up as a graduate student in a physics department, at least back then, you begin to see how research is funded. 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. They may help you get started, but you're going to have to fund it to do it. Another great incentive is that your university appointments are only for nine months, and you've got to support your family in the summertime. [Laugh] There are all sorts of enticements. [Laugh] You better learn how to write grants. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: Is there anything else you want to say with regard to Kent Displays?

DOANE: I don't think so. You can learn more about the company by talking with Asad. He was with me during the development of the company, and now he runs it as CEO. The company's success is, in a large part, due to him and it is fitting that he be CEO today.

CRAWFORD: Around what time did you step back from full-time work at the company?

DOANE: It happened gradually over the years. I did it formally a few years back, maybe three or four years ago. Before that, it was sort of informal. I just did less and less. I'd come in and do things on a part-time basis, primarily to help with intellectual property issues. It was sort of an informal, gradual retirement. But I'm still on the board of the company, and they kindly give me a little office here, let me come in and talk to people. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: In 1996, you received the Distinguished Corporate Inventor Award from the American Society of Patent Holders. Then, in 1998, you received the Jan Rajchman Prize from the Society for Information Displays, which is described on their website as, "For an outstanding scientific or technical achievement in or contribution to research on flat-panel displays." You described the Society for Information Displays as an industry group when you first met with them. What did it mean to you to receive these awards?

DOANE: It's kind of nice. It's just recognition that somebody saw what you were doing. [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 . In regard to the American Society of Patent Holders, Goodyear was involved. I was awarded it at Goodyear As an aside, I comment that following the award it turned out that Goodyear became interested in the technology because they thought it might look good on a blimp.[1] We could probably do it today on a blimp, but back in those days, we couldn't do that large of a display on plastic that would fit nicely on a blimp. Maybe someday we’ll do it.

CRAWFORD: What was the challenge that prevented it?

DOANE: Size and weight. It had to be very lightweight, and we couldn't do plastic that well back then. We were developing plastic, but we weren't far enough along. And the size. It had to be a pretty big sign.

CRAWFORD: In 2007, you received another award, the Slottow-Owaki Prize from the Society of Information Displays, and this is an award for your contribution to the education and training of students and professionals in the field of information display. We haven't talked a lot about your approach to education and training students. I wonder if you could say a little bit about that.

DOANE: I really had some wonderful students. Over the years, I've directed something like 25 doctoral dissertations, and I don't know how many master's students. Then, of course, I had undergraduates working in my laboratory as well. But I think what may have caught the Society's attention is that I was one of the first [university professors] to really get involved in the Society. That may have caught their attention. As I pointed out, when I went to the first Society meeting, I didn't see any other universities, it was all industry and they were getting heavily involved with liquid crystal displays. That may have been what caught their attention. As a university, we may have, at one time, been the largest contributor to talks and demonstrations at those Society conferences. Kent State university and its ALCOM center has probably graduated more students in the display industry than any other university in the US. Further, in the ALCOM Center, we had a very successful K-12 program, too.

CRAWFORD: When you were training students, how important was it to guide them on a trajectory into industry or academia?

DOANE: [My approach was just to teach them basic science and how to do research that they use either in industry or academia.] At the undergraduate level, I always thought students got the idea a lot better, particularly with physics students, if you could demonstrate how physics is used in hands-on stuff. When I lectured, even in elementary physics, I paid a lot of attention to demonstrations, rather than standing up at the blackboard. I spent a lot of time developing demonstrations. That was my approach to teaching, to try to show how it's used to inspire the student to learn. They have to have an incentive, or they're not going to spend the time on it.

CRAWFORD: Would you say that's true for yourself, that you've learned better when you can see the uses?

DOANE: Oh, yeah. I'm really an experimentalist as opposed to a theorist. I like theory, but I like to get my hands dirty. It's just kind of in my nature.

CRAWFORD: Given that your career really spans the development of liquid crystals from a scientific curiosity to a technology we use every day—

DOANE: It's been really fun to see that.

CRAWFORD: I can imagine. Do you see yourself as a pioneer in science and technology? Do you see yourself as a pioneer in scientific or technological entrepreneurship?

DOANE: I don't know how you define a pioneer, but I would say that my primary contributions, while I've published a lot and written a lot of patents, was more in working with others, getting others involved, building a program for Kent State University. Then, founding Kent Displays. I think people see me more in that light than in terms of making a big scientific contribution. I didn't know it at the time, but I think the biggest discovery for me was the polymer dispersion. That was a discovery that turned out to be not only of scientific interest but also ended up in many applications. Of all the discoveries I've made, that was probably the one that made the biggest splash. The discoveries with magnetic resonance were recognized, but only by academic researchers within the field. [Laugh] [Polymer dispersed liquid crystals (PDLCs) became known in industry as well, worldwide.]

CRAWFORD: Some work that was field-specific was important for the field, then the polymer dispersion had broader recognition.

DOANE: [I was amazed at how it caught on scientifically in the field of liquid crystal research. At the time of the discovery I just thought it was just a different way to make confined droplets of liquid crystals. I did see its potential in applications and recognized that it should probably be patented. I did not see at the time, however, how valuable the patents would be and all the applications and uses of polymer dispersions.]

CRAWFORD: You talked a lot about your work building a program at Kent State. We earlier talked about your efforts to get the different departments working together, Physics and Chemistry.

DOANE: I think that may be one of my best contributions, actually.

CRAWFORD: Could that be seen as pioneering? It strikes me as—you've talked about how those kind of relationships were challenging, the relationships between academia and industry, and so forth.

DOANE: I never viewed myself as a pioneer. I just did what I thought ought to be done. I'd rather leave that to somebody else to decide.

CRAWFORD: Looking back on your career in science, we can see, just from this conversation, that being a scientist involves much more than just working at a lab bench or working with NMR technologies. Thinking about the generation of young people becoming scientists today, could you talk about what's involved in being a scientist? Obviously, the science is important. But there's more to it.

DOANE: Doing science is much broader than what's normally perceived. Galileo did marvelous science, of course, but he had to support himself and his scientific work as well, and he did it by making things. He made slide rules and sold them. To do science, you have to fund it. Being a scientist isn't just science. These days, science means you've got to work with other people. You have to know how to do that and how to learn from others. It's a lot more than just doing science. It's a very complex issue. As everything is. [Laugh]

CRAWFORD: That's true. [Laugh] I have one bigger question for you. [One theme we've discussed is the relationship between academia and industry. I had a quote from Glenn Brown I wanted to read for you. This comes from a letter he wrote to an Associate Provost Bernard Hall at Kent State in September 1969. I'm interested in what he says about the role of the institute. I'm curious if you think it still applies today. "I want to make clear that the Institute was not founded to do feasibility studies for industries. As an academic institution, our prime responsibility is to pursue fundamental research. A university cannot and should not try to compete with industries on problems of interest to industry. Industry has the money and manpower to do the job better than any university."]

DOANE: That may have been how it was then. For example, there was Bell Labs doing a lot of feasibility work of combining basic research with applied and developing such things as the transistor. Industry was doing a lot of that kind of research then. [These days universities are now very involved in that kind of research, further exploring its feasibility for certain applications. It really helps to have a relevancy to your research work rather than just being something of interest.] Glenn Brown was a very good friend of mine, and I have a high regard for him. He did marvelous things, like starting the Institute and the International Liquid Crystal Conferences. 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. He just didn't adapt to the situation that was developing.

CRAWFORD: It sounds like from what you're saying about this idea in 1969, the ground was shifting. Do you have any sense of what was driving that change or what has driven the change from this vision Brown expressed?

DOANE: I'm not sure it was actually ever really feasible. However, I think it was the way universities operated at that particular time. In the case of liquid crystals, he was sort of correct in the sense that liquid crystals were a material nobody understood, and that basic research had to be done on it. As far as the material he was talking about, he was perhaps right. But continuing that attitude didn't work when the materials began to be developed and their use became recognized. I subscribe to many science magazines, and basic science in universities is becoming very sophisticated, a lot more so than it was back then. There's very fundamental stuff going on in universities with DNA research, for example, but they're involved very practically, investigating the feasibility for all sorts of industrial interests. I'm not so sure that Glenn's attitude was really ever truly workable, except that it may have worked generally for universities back then.

CRAWFORD: Maybe not as a categorial research program. I wonder if you have any additional observations or insights that you'd like to share. Is there anything we haven't discussed that you think is particularly important? I know we've covered quite a bit of ground.

DOANE: I have to say, I'm really impressed how prepared you were for this and how much you knew before you even set foot through this door. To me, that has made this a delight because you knew so much. It's been very helpful.

CRAWFORD: Well, thank you very much for saying that. The goal is to just have a conversation, and certainly, you've filled in the picture a lot about the Institute, and the development of liquid crystals, and the changes in the way science is done. I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you to tell us a little bit about what it's been like living through the COVID pandemic over the last year, what effects it's had on your professional and personal lives, whatever you'd like to share.

DOANE: Being retired, COVID had far less effect on me than others. I never really worried about COVID as a disease, I just followed along with what professionals thought we should do. But I think when I look around the country, it's had some good and some bad points. On the bad side, it shut down a lot of the interpersonal activity it takes to get things done. However, from another point of view, it never hurts to have a crisis because it causes people to think other ways. And it can cause change for the better sometimes. Crises aren't always that bad in the sense that they can move things along and force people to look at other ways. I don't think it's all been bad, I think it's had some good points, too.

Also, I think it forces people, particularly in governments, to look at how we deal with diseases. Disease has always been the biggest killer. It's caused governments and people in general to think about doing a better job in how we deal with these pathogens, viruses, and stuff. [Laugh] But as a retiree, I've been one of the least affected. But I did follow what Asad did for the company during the pandemic, and I thought he did a fine job. I don't think the company lost any personnel. I think he was able to keep everybody here and keep the place running. I think Bill Manning was very helpful, too. They got through it well. One thing I didn’t like was, during the pandemic, when I walked up on campus, I felt like I was in a ghost town.

CRAWFORD: They've basically shut campus down.

DOANE: Campus is a great place to walk and ride bikes, but I don't like to go there when it is shut down because it's so depressing to me.

CRAWFORD: And that's a really good example of what you were saying about how the pandemic has impacted social interactions. Hopefully, things will take a turn for the better soon. I really appreciate you sharing your reflections.

DOANE: Thank you very much. I appreciate you doing this. I think this is really nice. I think liquid crystals have played a big role in science, particularly in flat-panel displays. We wouldn't have cell phones with displays, flat TV screens, interactive wrist watches etc. if it wasn't for liquid crystals. And I think your work is absolutely essential in exploring how all of this happened and getting the history on it right. I'm glad you're talking to other people, not just me, and really getting a good handle on what actually happened. I think it's going to play a strong role in history, and what you're documenting will be very helpful to others. I'm delighted you're doing it.

CRAWFORD: Well, I want to just thank you again for being so generous with your time and sharing your story. It really gives us a lot of insight.

DOANE: It's kind of fun to go back and think through these things.

CRAWFORD: Good! I'm glad to hear it.

[End Part 3]

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[1] Dr. Doane wants to be clear that Goodyear's interest in liquid crystal displays for their blimp was separate from his receipt of the award from the Society for Information Displays.