Oral History Interview with Philip Bos by Matthew Crawford

October 28, 2022

Liquid Crystal Oral History Project
Department of History
Kent State University

Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription

MATTHEW CRAWFORD: My name is Matthew Crawford. I'm a Historian of Science and Associate Professor in the Department of History at Kent State University. Today, I am interviewing Dr. Philip J. Bos. Today’s date is October 28th, 2022, and we are conducting this interview in the Department of History at Kent State University in Kent, Ohio. Dr. Bos, thanks for agreeing to speak with me today.

PHILIP J. BOS: Thank you!

CRAWFORD: First, can you tell us your current institutional affiliation and title?

BOS: Yeah. I'm a Professor in the Physics Department, technically, and also a member of what is now called the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute.

CRAWFORD: Here at Kent State?

BOS: Here at Kent State.

CRAWFORD: What does it mean to be a member of the AMLCI? How do you fit into the broader structure of it?

BOS: Good point, because that has always been kind of a question. [laughs] Basically, it’s people who are interested primarily in liquid crystals or soft matter. The name reflects a broader thing, but I'm not sure that really applies. We're really soft matter, liquid crystals, things like that. For people who are interested in that, that's how they would associate. There's no formal appointment or added pay or anything. [laughs] It’s more an informal association at this point.

CRAWFORD: That makes sense. How would you identify yourself as a scientist, and your field of research?

BOS: In the Physics Department, I guess I'd have to say applied physics. But if I was in a broader university, probably engineering. I'm most interested in applying science to new types of devices and things like that.

CRAWFORD: I want to start by talking a little bit about your early life. I wonder if you could tell us when you were born, where you grew up, and what your early childhood was like.

BOS: November 6th, 1950. Holland, Michigan. Holland is a Dutch community, immigrants who came around 1830. It has changed, obviously, like all kind of ethnic cities in the United States. It’s much more diverse now. But at that time, it was Dutch. That was kind of interesting. You had that northern European stoic [laughs] kind of thing. So, it was good. My dad had a small company. Initially it was a wholesale business. He’d go around and sell things. But the take-home from that as far as me goes is that, if you've had parents who have had a small business, you have a little bit different perspective on business, and supporting yourself, and being self-sufficient, and not just being a cog in the works, but you are the works! [laughs] And so if you grow up in a family that somebody has been—especially a small business—then you have a little bit different perspective on where you have to go and what you have to do.

CRAWFORD: Did you work for your father's company?

BOS: Of course, yeah. Absolutely, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Did you have siblings?

BOS: Yeah, I did. I had a brother, Dave, and a brother Tom. My brother Dave went to Harvard and Union Theological and was a Presbyterian minister. My brother Tom, he migrated toward the business, and took over my dad’s business.

CRAWFORD: At what age did you become interested in science? Were you interested in it as a kid?

BOS: It doesn't seem like that big of a thing now, but at that time, television and radio were almost like still in the realm of miracles. Of course, television and radio had been around since 1920, 1910, but still, there was that kind of unbelievable aspect, especially of a television, that you don’t maybe think too much about now. But here’s this guy talking to you from New York City. So, it immediately raises like, “How in the heck does that work?” [laughs] So, it was really through that kind of thing.

CRAWFORD: Trying to understand how television works. Did you have an opportunity as a kid to take things apart and work with machines at all?

BOS: Oh, of course. At that time, you could buy little tube radios. There were tube radios, right? A friend of mine, we took one all apart, and we found the wiring diagram for it, and we made a big—like a poster, like a board, with the wire diagram, and put the components on, so you could kind of trace out where the flow of electrons were, through this radio. Things like that, little projects, were fun.

CRAWFORD: What about members of your family? Did they encourage your interest in science and doing these sorts of things?

BOS: Oh, very much, yeah.

CRAWFORD: In school, like in high school and stuff, did you have the opportunity to study science?

BOS: Of course, there's the usual high school classes. One thing that relates to—especially if you have somebody who is in a small business—is the need to kind of find a focus, and to follow that. So, I've never gotten very excited about disciplines—you know, physics, chemistry, or even history, frankly. It’s when there's a focus that things get interesting for me. Because then you can sort of say, “Okay, I see what I've got to do. We're just not going to do physics.” [laughs] So through high school and college, it was a little bit of, frankly, a lack of focus.

But I was really, really lucky, because the chairman of the Physics Department where I went to school—Hope College, in Holland, Michigan—when I was ready to graduate and I was thinking about graduate school, he could see that—guys who are good professors, they kind of pick out, “This guy needs some focus.” [laughs] He said, “You know, this place over at Kent State, they've got this new focused program on liquid crystals. It’s not just the Physics Department or the Chemistry Department, but they're developing a focus.” And that did sound good to me. Then you come here and you find out that, here’s all these people working together, talking the same language. A little bit different areas of this central area of focus, like there's chemistry, physics, synthesis, engineering, and all kind of working together to forward this field. That's how I came to graduate school here at Kent State. I was a graduate student of Bill Doane. Which was really fortunate! Really lucky. I'm a lucky guy! So that's how that all went up, through Kent State.

CRAWFORD: Did you go to college wanting to study science, knowing you wanted to do physics?

BOS: Physics, right. I was in the Physics Department. I had this kind of vague idea. Physics obviously leads to a lot of things in engineering—radio, television, and all the way down the road. E&M, electricity and magnetism, things like that. Really, like I said, it was just kind of “What am I doing here?” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about the experience of studying science as an undergraduate. Did you have the opportunity to do research or hands-on projects?

BOS: Yes, I did! Hope College is a small, liberal arts college, but they have really nice undergraduate programs, much more so than much larger universities, because they're not a research university; they're an undergraduate liberal arts education. So, they had things like a little particle accelerator in the basement that students help build. They got the grant, and students helped put this thing together and build the electronic detector circuits for it, and the alarms. So there was a lot of building things and being involved in putting a system together, which was really interesting. Again, when you have something like that, you've got something on your resume, and you've got a professor who can say, “This guy contributed to this research project in that way.” All that was a huge help.

CRAWFORD: You helped build this particle accelerator at Hope College?

BOS: Yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s not like a CERN or something like that. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Yeah, but still!

BOS: Or at Stanford! But it was the right kind of level of equipment that simple nuclear experiments could be done. In building it, you understand how particles are generated in an accelerator, how they're accelerated, and what the basic reactions are, nuclear reactions and stuff. So it was really interesting.

CRAWFORD: Now, you mentioned the chairman of the Physics Department who clued you in to Kent State. Do you happen to remember his name?

BOS: Of course. Harry Frissel. Dr.—Professor Frissel.

CRAWFORD: Were there any other professors or faculty that had an influence on you as an undergraduate?

BOS: Oh, there were really good people. That's the nice thing about, again, a small liberal arts college, if they have a good ranking, good departments. Hope is very well-rated, especially in the chemistry, but also in the physics. The professors are there not to do big research projects and do a lot of publications in high-click journals, but are really more interested in doing something with students. So you get people who are very involved, and sometimes very, very insightful. There was a guy by the name there of Jim van Putten. We're talking the 1960s, right? He had this statement that he would always make, that he would pull out—kind of an interesting thing—he’d pull out at that time a discrete transistor, and he would use them as thumbtacks in his office. He would say, “You know why I do that? They're cheaper than thumbtacks!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: His point was that electronics were on this curve of cheaper and cheaper and cheaper. And he made a statement which I've always kind of remembered, because it is so true—that anything mechanical that can become electrical, will. It may look like at the time, no, no. Like a switch on the wall, you know? You're going to turn that into a touch thing? What’s wrong with the mechanical switch? How are you going to do that cheaper? Well, he realized, and a lot of people realized, that mechanical things wear out. So on your iPhone—or a better example is like these little Canon cameras. I've gone through like four, five, six, of these little things. Why do I go through them? Because the focus thing stops working. The little thing—reh, rrrr, reh, rrrr—rr, rr! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah, the mechanical component.

BOS: Yeah, the mechanical component is the thing that fails. Anyway, but this was way before electronics were even that—this was when computers were just barely getting off the ground. The very, very, very first computers. I mean, desktop computers. There was this thing called Altair, and some other things. Anyway, the point is that he had a real forward perspective on where technology was going to go, which was really, really interesting. It sort of said, “Look, it’s not going to stay the way it is now. This field is going to move things.” That was really encouraging, that “You're in the right area, kids!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Right, and a real sense of excitement, perhaps, about the field.

BOS: Yeah, and a sense of excitement. Exactly.

CRAWFORD: Did you choose to go to Hope College because of the physics program?

BOS: Well, to be honest, it was in the town I was from, my brother went there, both my parents went there. It was—just easier, right? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That makes sense, for sure. Had you considered pursuing a graduate degree in science before Dr. Frissel suggested the program at Kent State?

BOS: Sort of. But like I said, without a focus, it’s kind of like—you're going to go to a school that has a physics department? Frankly, I see that in a lot of undergraduates who are in a discipline. Frankly, they come with the idea that they are going to participate in this discipline, but when they get here, they're lost, without some focus. The world is getting too complicated. There's too many things to know that you can’t know physics at a level where you're going to be productive. It’s just not possible. So it’s just you come into a place, and it’s just like, “Whoa.” It’s just so much stuff. “How am I ever going to use this, anyway? I don’t think I'm ever going to use this.” Because the connection isn’t there. The focus isn’t there.

So I was really lucky that this guy, Dr. Frissel, pointed out Kent State. Because speaking a little more about what Kent State was at that time, in its focus, like I said, at that time, and really for a long time after that, it was still an anomaly in undergraduate and graduate education, in that it wasn’t just the Chemistry Department. As I've said several times; overemphasized. But actually the key to success of Kent State’s Liquid Crystal Institute has been focus. That, okay, we're not going to be everything for everybody. We're going to do this real well. That's good, not only for a group of people, to have a focus, instead of being all off in different directions, but it’s also good for an individual, and it’s good for a graduate student, to come into a place that says, “This is where our students have gone. They've gone in this direction. They didn’t go all over the place. This is where you're headed.” And they know that when they apply. So applications that we get—I'm getting a little ahead of myself right now, but for myself, yeah, it was the focus. That's really what really attracted me to coming to Kent State.

CRAWFORD: A couple of quick follow-up questions, on this idea of focus. Obviously, liquid crystals are a focus, or soft materials or soft matter, like you said.

BOS: At this point, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Are there other examples of programs or areas, of this kind of focus that you are trying to articulate, that you can think of? Are there other programs or other areas of focus?

BOS: At Kent State?

CRAWFORD: Or anywhere.

BOS: The Physics Department at Kent State, at that point, really had two areas—nuclear and liquid crystals. Now, it’s more diverse. The guy who was doing the nuclear like when I was a graduate student, a guy by the name of Dick Madey, he was kind of a—maybe I'll have to redact this, but kind of a [laughs]—an autocrat. He had a vision—“This is what we're going to do.” And people were kind of afraid of him, because he was [two bangs on table]—“This is what we're going to do!” For him, what they were going to do was to be a national presence in experimental nuclear physics. And man, if you were in that area, you got on that train, or—you know, just as soon “Get outta here!” Students were kind of afraid of this guy. Oh, I got called into Dr. Madey’s office! [laughs] But you know, he drove the focus, right? And Kent State did become really a national prominence with excellent, high-quality papers in the area of nuclear.

So there's those two real areas. The Physics Department here at Kent State, rather than be everything for everybody—the usual thing in a discipline, and I'm sure you have that same thing like in our department, is you’d have, unlike at other places, other universities—like Western Michigan, and Michigan State and all those places, they try to have one person of everything. You've got your solid-state guy. You've got your nuclear guy. And so, you've got one of everybody. And so, at the end of the day, you're not great at anything. [laughs] You're just—Western Michigan University. I don’t mean to be negative about Western Michigan. But there's so many schools of that size, that are good schools, and they prepare students, but they're not internationally known.

CRAWFORD: You also talked about this idea of programs that have focus, like on liquid crystals, for example, and giving incoming students a sense of a professional trajectory. Did you have that sense when you joined the Physics program at Kent State and were working on liquid crystals in 1973 or so?

BOS: Yes. Oh, yeah. Absolutely. Because everybody you talked to, all the faculty, they all knew what a liquid crystal was, and they were looking at different aspects of it. So you kind of had the feeling that you were at the center of it, right here. Here’s a guy, Al Saupe for example, who wrote the first kind of theory of liquid crystals. And here’s a really good x-ray guy who was the first one to really understand the structure of this particular phase of matter. And there's this theoretical guy, and experimental people. So it was very cool, for a graduate student. Very nice.

CRAWFORD: What about liquid crystals themselves? Were you particularly interested in those at that time?

BOS: No, but when you come here, they right away show you why you want to be interested. Because the beauty of liquid crystals is that it’s something that a relatively compact group of maybe 20 people can cover the field. You can have somebody who understands the physical chemistry and understands how to design the basic molecules. You can have people who are synthesizing the molecules. You can have people who know how to characterize the phase structure. And then going further, you have people who are interested in actually applying this material to something. So it’s kind of like you can sit in one building, and say “I see the front to the back of this field.” There's not many places you can do that [laughs]—in any field! But with liquid crystals, it isn’t so terribly broad—it’s much broader now than it was then—but that you could be in an institution where, if you had any question about anything that had to do with liquid crystals, there was somebody there who knew the answer to that question.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: Which is really—you kind of get the feeling, okay, you've got it all in the same place. Very, very cool.

CRAWFORD: You came here in 1973 for your MA?

BOS: Right. Yes.

CRAWFORD: And took your MA in 1974 and your PhD in 1978. Was it a combined MA/PhD program?

BOS: The master’s at that point, and still here, is mostly just a check-off. After you've been here a year, you've got your master’s. You may not even realize it. [laughs] There's no big ceremony. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] I had a similar experience [laughs] with my degree. Who was your mentor for your MA/PhD work?

BOS: Bill Doane.

CRAWFORD: Bill Doane.

BOS: Oh, yeah. Lucky me, huh? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

BOS: Well, because Bill was the guy who really then was—at that point, he was a Professor of Physics, and Glenn Brown was the Director of the Liquid Crystal Institute. But Bill Doane is a remarkable, energetic, visionary. He’s a good scientist. He gets things done. He’s not just, I don’t know how to say this, but just playing in the sandbox. Sometimes you get the feeling that some researchers are just following their curiosity. Which is good for a lot of people, but not for me, because there's no focus. But Bill was, and still is, really good at finding a focus, from a good science viewpoint, and running things through, like I just mentioned. He kind of in one sense was a part of this train, where he could go from good science to good applications. Yeah, he kind of reminds you of somebody who would own a small business. Well, later on, he did! He migrated to business, right? Because of that sense of, “What do we have to do here? What do we have to do to succeed?” Figure out what that direction is. And let’s do that. Let’s not just—explore. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Is that kind of the influence that he had on you, instilling that sense?

BOS: Yeah, and also just being a really nice guy. I mean, he is really helpful, and a very, very—people would come here from—he would have people come in from foreign—Slovenia, especially, had good interactions there—and from around the world because the LCI was getting this international pull. So people would come, or he would have a postdoc, and he would lend them his car. Dishes. I mean, way beyond just give them a check, you know?—“Here’s your appointment paper. Sign here. Good luck.” He’s really a nice person. Really. So that really brings a sense of community, too, because he’s that way with everybody. So you end up with him building a cohesive unit that people enjoy being at, and things like that. I could see that. Took me a while to learn that. [laughs] Still haven't learned it as well as he knows it! But no, he’s a great person.

CRAWFORD: When you were at the LCI as a graduate student in the 1970s, and also as a postdoc, what was the Institute like at that time? How would you characterize it?

BOS: In transition. Like a lot of places, it started off just basic research. Because at the beginning of the Liquid Crystal Institute, people didn’t know what a liquid crystal was. They didn’t know what the phases of matter were. They didn’t know what it looked like in a microscope. They didn’t know how it responded to different stimuli. So there was a lot of just basic research trying to figure out, “What are these things? How do we classify them? How do we do this and that?” Especially toward the end of my graduate career, a lot of that was getting kind of worked out, and some of the emphasis was changing, going more to this area of applications. Of course then later on, Bill really took that to a different level. So it was a little bit more basic research, starting to look out into the applied aspects.

CRAWFORD: Then for your PhD research, what did you focus on? I know Bill did a lot of NMR work.

BOS: NMR. Right, exactly. What we were looking at was—so these liquid crystal molecules fluctuate around. You might ask a question, “Well, how do they fluctuate around? Do they go like this, or do they go more like this than that? Do they do end-for-end flips? Or are they spinning? And how does the motion translate to the phase behavior and the phase transitions that these molecules do?” So, Doane was using NMR to try to understand these what are called molecular fluctuations and order parameters in liquid crystals. That was really kind of fundamental and kind of basic, to get a good solid understanding of trying to understand, okay, how are these molecules fluctuating, and stuff like that, so that you can then see the connection between the molecular structure and motion to the more macroscopic behavior, the phase behavior, and elastic properties, and things like that. So, that was good. Lucky me, huh? [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Yeah! Then your dissertation work was looking at these motions and phase behaviors?

BOS: Right, with NMR, yeah.

CRAWFORD: And so forth. You've said a lot about Bill Doane and his role as a mentor. Were there other professors in the program that—? It sounds like a fairly close-knit community, but were there others that really stood out?

BOS: As a group, there's just a whole bunch of really good people. Again, because of Bill’s influence, too. He would bring in—because he was a really good guy, and a good administrator, but he was also a good scientist. People respected him, at many levels. So he could bring in really good people. And he did. For example, there was Dave Allender, and a whole range of people that he brought in, while I was a graduate student. Since then, obviously many more, but while I was a graduate student, he was bringing in theoretical people like Dave Allender. He really wasn’t in charge of the Liquid Crystal Institute or the Physics Department at that point, but it was his kind of personality that would help bring those sort of people here. All these guys. Like I said, you could walk around, and you could go talk to this guy about that topic, or this guy about that topic. As a unit, it was just a really wonderful experience. Really good.

CRAWFORD: You finish your PhD in 1978, and stay on as a postdoctoral fellow?

BOS: Right.

CRAWFORD: Why did you decide to stay as a postdoc as opposed to moving on?

BOS: Well, Bill offered that, for one thing. And things were kind of, like I said, in transition. Because it got kind of clear at the end of my PhD that a position in NMR or basic research, those things were getting less attention than the more applied aspects. The idea of staying another year and starting to think about those—“Where could I go, maybe in a company?”

CRAWFORD: I see, yeah.

BOS: To kind of look at those more applied papers. That really wasn’t what I was doing as a postdoc, as part of the funded thing, but it was an activity at that time, was saying, “Okay, now who’s hiring out there, anyway, and what are they doing? What kind of papers are they publishing?” Things like that. So it was good to have that extra year. Again, from Bill Doane, the opportunity to have that extra year, to kind of sort out where it would be good to go, that was really good.

There is another thing related to the transition from graduate school to a job, and that is, again, this is the Physics Department, that was so good, and the people involved in liquid crystals, they would organize, by driving their own car or van, all the graduate students or something, to go to an APS meeting or an ACS meeting or one of these large—one of those was an American Physical Society meeting in Washington, D.C. These guys took us all there, and we got to sit in there, and maybe give a little 15-minute presentation in one of the sessions. But here’s the thing; that's how I got my job. Because at that conference, then, there was people from different places, and one of them was from Tektronix, and I had the opportunity to meet this person and talk. Because they were talking about doing more things in the area of liquid crystals. They didn’t have any real thing going there right at that time, but they thought, “This could be cool.” So that made that connection, and then that person came to Kent State the following week after the conference, and we talked. Anyway, that led to a job.

But again, if the professors in this area, for one thing, weren’t well-known in the area of liquid crystals, then this person from Tektronix wouldn't have said, “Hey, you're from Kent State” and made the connection. Because this was a huge conference. It’s not like 100 people; it’s like a city. So having something that stands out in somebody’s mind enables a connection. So one thing was the focus that the Department had. The other thing was this helping of students. Carting them all off [laughs] when they couldn't afford maybe to fly everybody there, and maybe the expense of hotel rooms—they just figured out a way to get everybody over there. Again, it was—I was just really lucky, to be a part of this Department [inaudible].

CRAWFORD: Was it usual for, say, the APS meeting, for there to be people from companies and industry there?

BOS: That's a good point. At that point, slightly, but there was other conferences subsequently that I've learned about where you'll find more of that sort of thing. But you do. So, that was again a lucky break for me.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] So, you end up taking this position at Tektronix Laboratories?

BOS: Mmhmm.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could tell us a little bit about what Tektronix did at the time, what it was known for, its significance. Obviously you're not a historian of the company but—

BOS: Right, but just real briefly. The founder was an engineer. He, during World War II, helped design radar scopes. You've seen those radar scopes, right? They've got this little image that moves around on them, right? He was in this Royal Signals and Radar Establishment in World War II. When he got back, he realized that oscilloscopes were going to be a big thing. An oscilloscope is something you put the electrical signal in, and you can see it on the screen. There is a very similar structure to a radar tube actually, because you have these two plates that steer the electron beam around, like that. So, they did that. The first thing when I was there that I thought “That's an eye opener” is that they were designing these electron tubes that would deflect a beam around with an amazing level of detail in physics. Because I thought, “I'm going to a company now, I'm from academia, and they're all going to be impressed with how much I know.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: But you get dispelled of that in a big hurry! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: Because these guys were designing electron tubes that needed to take into account the relativistic effects of electron travel. And the design of the electrode structure in these things was—awe-inspiring. Like, how did they design that thing? It’s amazing. They would design—this may sound like, I mean, just like a trick question kind of thing—but their oscilloscopes were so good that the beam across the screen was faster than the speed of light.

CRAWFORD: Really!

BOS: And you go, “That's not possible. [laughs] I graduated Hope College in physics!” [laughs] I mean, you know, but it is! Because the particles aren’t going faster than the speed of light; the image is going faster. Like if you had a hose, right, and if you wiggle it like this, if the hose had an infinite length, well, the end of that thing would be flying around, but the water is not going faster. So, it’s not a trick. But on the other hand, all the circuitry that would run that fast required the highest level of electronics engineering at the time. So they were a leader. Then it went to this.

[inaudible] computers were just coming out. The computers used low-quality television screens for the graphics, which were low quality at that time. I mean, sub-VGA. I mean, not good. And so, Tektronix used their ability with electron tubes to design a computer monitor that was a random deflected beam. Televisions are raster scanned. I mean, they used to be, when they were CRTs. So they leveraged their expertise in oscilloscope design, to be, when I joined, the world’s leading producer of graphics computer terminals. At that time in the evolution of computers, if you wanted to display graphics on a computer, you got the Tektronix 4051. And they were all over the world. All labs had them. And so, they were at that point one of the leading display technology companies on the planet! And so, yeah, it was like, “Whoa. These guys are good.” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: And it was that leadership in displays that got them interested in liquid crystals, because they saw liquid crystals emerging on the market, the very first things, and they thought, “I wonder if we can use these things somehow in the future.” And like that. But yeah, it was an amazing experience. And it worked out good for me.

CRAWFORD: You gestured at this a little bit, but I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what the transition was like for you, going from academia to an industrial corporate setting.

BOS: There's this line from Ghostbusters that you may remember, which is so good. These guys were at a university, right? Dan Akroyd and whoever the other guy was. They're in this university, and they get thrown out for doing things they shouldn't have been doing. Anyway, so they're out, and they're sitting there drinking, and one guy said, “Well, what are we gonna do?” “Oh, don’t worry, I got it. We're gonna go to industry!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: And the other guy says, “No. You don’t understand. In industry, they want results!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs] Would you say that that was indicative of the spirit of the time when you joined Tektronix, which was I think in 1979, that there was generally a sense that the work being done in academia was more challenging and more serious or something than what’s happening—?

BOS: I wouldn't say more serious. I'd say more out on the clouds someplace. I mean, that was the view from industry, right? Because they knew what they were doing. They knew why they were there. They knew what they had to do to get better at what they were doing. And they continually worked at that. There was again this sense of focus in industry, right? No, they knew they were the best in their field. Yeah, there was no question about that! [laughs] They knew they were better than all these academics in what they were doing. Absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Would you say it was a fairly easy transition? If both institutions—

BOS: Yeah, it was, because I was lucky.

CRAWFORD: —had a focus?

BOS: Because again, Tektronix, at that time, was—and I made the point—was run by this engineer. Just for a little background, this guy was the richest person in the state of Oregon. Tektronix at that time was a billion-dollar company, which at this point is like, “So what?” but at that time, it was a lot of money. They were the largest employer outside of the wood industry, in Oregon, so this was a big deal. They had a big campus, beautiful campus. This guy, Howard Vollum, when he was going to build this new campus and they wanted the administrative building—if you’d come to an East Coast company at that time, it would have marble stairs, and you’d know you were in the administration building. Mahogany, and things like that, and the boardroom table, and all that. But at Tektronix, there was no such thing. So, even though he was one of the richest people in the state, in charge of this billion-dollar company, his office was on the third floor of the engineering building. Of the engineering building. There was no administrative building. And he had a cubicle, just like everybody else—

CRAWFORD: Wow.

BOS: —and he did not have a reserved parking place! So if he got there late—and, I want to tell you, this is a huge, like Walmart-style parking lot—he had to walk in.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: What I'm getting at is that that was the culture at Tektronix, so that made it really pleasant. It was very horizontal. There wasn’t a lot of vertical integration. So you could talk to anybody. You would see Howard Vollum in the lunchroom, and if you didn’t go talk to him, he might—“Hey, what department are you in? What are you doin’?” So it was a great atmosphere. Just great. It was a groundbreaking company—it really was—in the field of technology. And a lot came out of it. Things changed. It was good at the time, when I was there.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] What was your role? I know you were with the company for I think about 14 years.

BOS: Fourteen, yeah.

CRAWFORD: And you were in the Display Research Department, obviously.

BOS: Right, yeah.

CRAWFORD: I know you had different positions from scientist to principal scientist. Could you talk a little bit about your role and the kinds of things you were working on or doing?

BOS: Yeah. Again, Tek at that time was very successful, and they were actually seen as a leader, if not the leader, in computer graphics and displays. Because of that, I got kind of a blank check—“Just do what you want. Have a good time.” But again, there was the end of the results. So, “Have a good time, but you know what we want, right? We want a product. You know that, right?” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: And patents. So innovation, patent protection, and you can do things. So, I was able to work on—ferroelectric liquid crystals at that point were a new thing, and I was able to design displays and make prototypes in that area. ​​And [another project that I worked on was field-sequential stereoscopic displays.] For example, we had a project with IMAX. IMAX does these 3D theatres. There's IMAX 3D, and there's also Omnimax 3D. I think the Omnimax has almost disappeared, but it was very cool. It was like a dome, not just a screen but a dome. They wanted to make that 3D, and Tektronix wanted to help, because they thought, “Oh, hey, this is new display stuff.” So I worked on the liquid crystal technology that enabled 3D for IMAX. We had a thing going with IMAX. Then we had 3D displays—because of this shutter-type technique—basically the way it works is you block one eye, then you block the other eye, you block—and then the display works in synchronism with that. So, when your right eye is blocked, it’s showing the left-eye image, and—like that. That's how you get a stereoscopic effect. The same basic idea as the RealD and places like that. So, I got to work on those kind of projects. Things worked out, and they kind of spun out a little company on the 3D, and so it was all good.

CRAWFORD: [laughs] That kind of work you're talking about—3D imagery and stuff—just out of curiosity, it sounds like there is also the human element of that system as well as the technological one.

BOS: [laughs] Yeah, there is!

CRAWFORD: Understanding psychology and stuff like that.

BOS: Mmhmm. I don’t know anything about it, though. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: No? Oh, really?

BOS: [laughs] Well, the thing you learn real quick, especially if you put on—like a lot of my projects now are with Meta. And if you put on a VR-type system, if they do the wrong thing, you want out of there immediately. Have you looked at the Quest or any of those?

CRAWFORD: I haven't yet, no.

BOS: Steady your stomach first. But anyway—because there is a human element, and it has to be taken into account, and it’s a very big deal. But I was just on the hardware side.

CRAWFORD: I see, I see. Was there a team working on the human element?

BOS: Oh, yeah. They had a human factors guy, and so, yeah. Again, because if you're a company and you want to say, “Okay, we're going to do this area,” you kind of have to cover it. You can’t just make something that turns out—“Well, that won’t work, because of this and that and that.”

CRAWFORD: Again, forgive my ignorance maybe, but it sounds to me like what you were doing in grad school—basic research, a lot of NMR stuff, fundamental properties of liquid crystals—now you're at Tektronix doing applied and hardware, you said. Those sound like very different things. Did you have to learn a lot on the job, or how did you—?

BOS: Oh, yeah, absolutely. But it was easy, because the company was interested in technology. They didn’t look down on technology, right? It’s not like, “Oh, our Engineering Department will do that. I'm the sales guy.” A lot of places, the direction is set by the marketing, and the marketing goes over to the Research or Engineering and says, “This is what we need.” The Engineering Department is going like Dilbert, like, [inaudible]. [laughs] But Tek was not a Dilbert place at all. It was run the other way. Yeah, so it was kind of an easy transition in that respect. Because they were understanding that you were developing new things, and they know that doesn't happen overnight. So, no, it was actually very easy for me, again because I was at the right place at the right time.

CRAWFORD: I wanted to ask you about something that you wrote in this essay for the 50th anniversary of the Liquid Crystal Institute. This is from 2015. You wrote about your time at Tektronix, and you wrote that at the time that you were hired—and I'm quoting from your essay now—“Science and technology innovation was a key indicator of business success.”

BOS: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could say a little bit more about that statement. What do you mean by that? I'm also getting the sense—and correct me if I'm wrong—that you're also saying that this company that was run by engineers, that was maybe a better setup than some other approaches to business and technology.

BOS: Oh, yeah. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little more explicitly about that.

BOS: The thing is, is that, coming out of World War II, right? So there was a lot of—physics had developed a lot of new technology—radio, television, the transistor, the integrated circuit. All those things were evolving in that era after World War II. But then about the time I was at Tektronix for a few years, there was a shifting idea that all technology was going to move to Asia, and that the U.S. was never going to be a manufacturing company place again. There's some sense of that now, but it was much stronger, then. I mean, there was a period of time when it was believed that all manufacturing was going to go offshore, and that it was going to be our job to do systems. Like put together something, not to necessarily develop the new technology or to manufacture the new technology, but you'll buy these components from Asia. At that point, it was all Japan. And you were going to buy your display from Japan, and you were going to buy all these different things, and you were going to assemble them and be the marketer. That was a business model at that point.

And that killed a lot of industrial research. I don’t know if you know about—AT&T Bell Labs was a driver in the technology for this century. The transistor, just so much stuff came out of Bell Labs. And, where is Bell Labs now? I mean, you know—“Bell who?” [laughs] At that point, those things were all being shut down. And there was major research at RCA. And Westinghouse, right over here in Pittsburgh, was a major—so the companies thought it was important to do technology research, in the 1950s and 1960s, but then it shifted away from that.

Even at Tektronix, it got to be like one of the marketing guys was so proud that he could build a computer monitor with only 15 minutes of Tektronix employee time, because all the components were coming from overseas. Of course, the culture at that point was like, that’s not a long-term growth strategy. [laughs] That gets you through the quarter. It’s going to be a little blip on your quarterly sheet, because all of a sudden you've got this highly profitable thing. [Of course, eventually, the components suppliers could assemble the full product.] [laughs] They made all the components, and so maybe they can just sort of say, “Well, we can do that.”

Of course, at that time, American companies were so arrogant that they thought, “Well, no, no. We're the only ones who can—we understand the business, and what the people want.” Like that. “They can make the parts, but we'll make the money!” [laughs] It may sound bad, but that was a transitioning thought at that time. That that was what was going to happen. Semiconductors were all going to be made offshore. And there was a general corporate belief. There were only a few companies that said, “No, no, no, no, no.” Motorola, Intel. Very few, though, really said, “No, no, no, no. We're going to do the technology.” Since then, of course, that has come around and gone the other way. Apple is really one of the leaders—to jump way ahead—that brought technology back. They couldn't have made those things by just buying the displays from Samsung. They could never have done that.

CRAWFORD: And you're pointing to my Apple MacBook here that’s on the table here.

BOS: Yes.

CRAWFORD: So, you saw this shift at Tektronix in the 1980s as the result of the rise of manufacturing in Japan and in Asia, and so forth.

BOS: Moving offshore, right.

CRAWFORD: Maybe this is part of the answer to the next question, I’m not sure, but you leave the company in 1993 and come back to the LCI.

BOS: Right.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could talk a little bit about that transition, why you made that move.

BOS: Yeah—Bill Doane! [laughs] Because he, at that point, has gotten this ALCOM Center1, this big National Science Foundation center grant, the most prestigious of the NSF grants. Again, he got it through focus. He didn’t sort of say, “We're going to do materials research.” Right? No, no, no, no, no, no. And actually, not even full liquid crystal research. But he had a focus on wanting to make—well, one of the things was to do this particular type of display that was like a tablet display, kind of like the iPad is now, but that technology wasn’t available at that time. He had this structure that brought in physical chemists and physicists and people who understood the basics of liquid crystals, the basic science of liquid crystals, and kind of was able to give some kind of focus toward this area. Now, it was broader than just this display, but he could trot that out as, “This is what we're going to do. We're going to change the world.” Not that that, “Yeah, we're going to do new materials.” No, no, no, no, no, no, no. “We're going to change the world with this group, and this National Science Foundation grant.”

And, he did! That thing he was working on them has passed, but I’d be happy to talk about how that really did change the world. But it was done, again, through a focus, by a guy saying, “Look, I know what I want to do.” Also in this case, you could have a marketing guy who says, “I know what I want to do, but I have no idea how to get there!” [laughs] But in the case of somebody like Doane, he knew what he wanted to do, and he understood the basic science and everybody in the field that could help him do what he wanted to do. He could organize it.

CRAWFORD: During your time at Tektronix, did you maintain contact with the LCI and Doane?

BOS: Oh, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Not just personal, but professional contact? Did you collaborate?

BOS: Not professional. Not so much. Because it was evolving more toward the application side. I was called Principal Scientist in the Physics Department and stuff like that, but it was engineering. It was what, at a university anyway, would be called an engineering department. So, it was starting to make that transition, but it really wasn’t there. I actually came from Tektronix because they were interested in building that up more, to get more into the application side.

CRAWFORD: So, partly, you're saying LCI was interested in you because of your experience—

BOS: At Tektronix.

CRAWFORD: —in industry and so forth.

BOS: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: I know you said it was Bill Doane that brought you back to the LCI.

BOS: And the whole group he assembled. That’s his thing. He assembled really good people. People who were easy to work with, collaborative, smart. He had pulled together this team of people that just made the whole thing sound great! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Who stands out in your mind as members of that group, when you came back in 1994?

BOS: There’s so many. Of course, Peter Palffy and John West, and Deng-Ke Yang. Deng-Ke is interested in almost exactly the same topics I’m interested in. He was here. He was very encouraging. I thought, “Oh, hey, this guy is interested in the same sort of thing I’m interested in.” And he’s again a really nice person, really easy to work with. Everybody’s just so pleasant. Oleg Lavrentovich was here. He was another one of these guys that you sit down and talk to him and he explains very clearly what he’s doing, and it just is exciting. Bill had put together this really wonderful group of people.

CRAWFORD: What topics were you interested in at that time?

BOS: Basically applications of liquid crystals, to be real general, so to kind of follow with what Bill was interested in. But he had people at that point who were really good at the base technology that he was interested in. Deng-Ke Yang was working on that. John West. L.-C. Chien. And so, I thought, “Well, that’s really covered. I’m going to look at some other alternative liquid crystal technologies that might be able to do something similar.” So I was looking at some alternative liquid crystal technologies that would be applicable to a tablet. That’s really what people wanted, at that point.

CRAWFORD: Like a writing tablet?

BOS: A writing tablet, but basically just a paper replacement. Bill also attracted this guy from—the Knight newspaper, in that area. He at Knight was looking at the future of newsprint, and he was trying to promote this idea that it’s going to be a tablet. And everybody is like, "Oh geez." [laughs] “Paper’s really cheap. How are you going to replace paper?” And, “This thing, look how much it weighs. Nobody is going to carry that around! You've got to plug it in.” Because that was the state of the technology at that time. But Bill attracted this guy to Kent, not in our department but over in some other department. Again, it was part of this vision that that’s going to be a big thing. These electronic tablets, it’s going to be a big thing. So I was interested in that, and looking at an alternative way to the mainstream thing, that ALCOM was—a lot of the people were here when I got here.

CRAWFORD: The base technology, the mainstream technology, was this polymer dispersed liquid crystals, PDLCs?

BOS: You're right. There were two things, right. There was that, and the bistable cholesterics. The tablets were these bistable cholesterics, that Deng-Ke Yang was working on. But PDLC was another thing. Right, right, right.

CRAWFORD: What are the properties of bistable cholesterics that maybe make them useful or advantageous for tablets?

BOS: They're bistable. Kent Displays, you've maybe seen their Boogie Board. But the first things they did were matrix displays. Signage. Kent Displays. I think they even had the word “sign” in their title at one point. Anyway, you can make these displays that take—you can write them, and then they remember it, so it takes zero electronics. You can turn off all the electronics, you can pull the plug and, like that. Also, they're daylight readable. You don’t need a backlight. They're reflective. That gave them a lot of really nice features that Bill saw as something that could do this pad thing. Because the electronics don’t have to be super-fast. Like with this display, the electronics are running as fast as the thing is being scanned. There were none of those things, right, but the CRT at that time, had this raster scan thing, right? Everything had to run at that rate. But with the bistable technology, you can write a line at a time. So you can actually write it quite slowly, so the electronics can be very low power, very cheap. Also, once it’s written, the display, line at a time, then the electronics can all go to sleep. It will remember. That made the battery life feasible. Yeah, so Bill had that all this could work.

CRAWFORD: Is that what bistable means, that it will just hold its—whether it’s on or off?

BOS: It will remember where it was.

CRAWFORD: Clear or opaque. So then if the bistable cholesterics were the main technology, what were you working on then?

BOS: Some of the ferroelectric work that I had been doing at Tektronix. Because ferroelectric displays at that time were kind of a thing. So I worked on understanding and improving the design of ferroelectric displays to get better optical performance, speed, and stuff like that. And bistable nematics. At Bell Labs, for example, at that time, there was a guy named Dwight Berreman who had considered several types of bistable technologies that were nematic-based. They weren’t chiral. They weren’t the cholesteric-based. But at that time, like I was saying, that was a time when Bell Labs and places like that were getting closed down, and guys like Berreman weren’t making much more progress and they were just getting frustrated. “So, hey, I can do that!” [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: So I started looking at those bistable technologies. Really most of them had gotten started at Bell Labs, but they weren’t really continuing on it too much. They could still use future, more development, understanding, things like that.

CRAWFORD: I wonder just for the audio, could you explain the difference between chiral and nematic? And nematic is N-E-M-A-T-I-C, is that correct?

BOS: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Just for the recording.

BOS: Liquid crystals, if they don’t have any other additives, generally the molecules—the molecules are thermally fluctuating, but there’s this thing called a director, which is the local average axis of the molecule. So in a group, a little microscopic group, they're all fluctuating all over the place, but from a continuum viewpoint, from a materials property viewpoint, there’s a local director, a direction which is the local average axis. Anyway, so that’s uniform, or wants to be uniform, in a normal nematic. But in a cholesteric, often the way it’s done is you add a chiral material that makes it want to twist. Then its equilibrium with no external field applied is a twisted director field. In the case of like the ones we're talking about, that twist can be fairly—almost at the wavelength of light, fairly tightly twisted. Anyway, that’s the basic difference between the two.

CRAWFORD: Great. We've talked a little bit about the kind of research work that you were doing, and also the general research that’s going on at the LCI at this time. I know also a few years after you joined the LCI, you became the associate director in 1997. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about your role as associate director.

BOS: John West had that position as part of this ALCOM grant. He had been doing a really fantastic job of trying to organize an industrial partnership program and a cleanroom where you can make prototypes, and stuff like that. He had brought in funding for this cleanroom. He had helped get the building over here that we've got. At that point, there was another—before that, there was the one that’s closer, between the two. So, he had built a prototype facility in that building, and then later in the other building. Oh, yeah, maybe let’s talk about the associate director. So the associate director was when we were in the new building, and when Bill Doane had made the transition to his company, and John West was the director of the Liquid Crystal Institute. He had been the associate director in this applied area. So he said, “Hey, do you want to do that?” I didn’t know any better, so—“Sure.”

Basically it means extra work. But still, it was exciting, and I really enjoyed working with companies, and handling the interaction with companies that would call and say, “Hey, we've got this problem. You guys are at the Liquid Crystal Institute. Can you help us?” It was really wonderful. Because of the setup that Bill and John West had done, we were really getting—if you were at Apple, or if you were at any kind of company, and you wanted to know about liquid crystals, you would call Kent State, and I would be the guy there to kind of answer the phone on that. [laughs] It was really nice, because you got a lot of interaction with a lot of really smart people at industry that were thinking, “Hey, I wonder if a liquid crystal could do this. I wonder if a liquid crystal could do that.” So, it was just great.

CRAWFORD: I know at this time there was another associate director. I think Peter Palffy held that position at the time. Was there a difference between the two positions?

BOS: Peter was really more on the academic side. Maybe he might be in charge of the academic research. I was more on the applied side, the interaction with the companies.

CRAWFORD: At that time, how would you characterize the emphasis of the LCI between, say, academic or basic research, and applied research; or academic activities and applied activities? Was it fairly equal or was it more in one direction?

BOS: Bill, again, with his idea, didn’t really draw any real strong lines between the two, and many people were doing both. They were interested in the basic physics or the basic phase properties, but then right away—“What can I do with that? I wonder if I could get General Motors to fund that.” Things like that. Still there were people who migrated more to the academic, and the basic science, curiosity-driven, and more the applications. I would say a little heavier on the academic side, but about the same.

CRAWFORD: Given your role as associate director, as kind of the interface with companies, what kind of interactions did the Institute or did you have with companies? What did that relationship between the Institute and industry look like? You said they would call with questions and stuff, but if you could give us a few examples?

BOS: A good one is Hana Microdisplay. I think it actually started with Flextronics—no, I don’t know. But anyway, these guys came here from Hana. Or was it Flextronics, at first? It might have initially been another company [inaudible]. But they saw that there was getting to be more and more interest in these little, teeny tiny liquid crystal displays that would be a projector in glasses. Or, projection television. There was an interval in there where television went from CRT to projection televisions. That went away in a hurry, but it was a thing for a while. Liquid crystals could be used to do that. And those projectors, too. So there was a need for these little devices, they're called LCoS, Liquid Crystal on Silicon. They have a silicon backplane and liquid crystal on the top. They were interested in getting into doing that, but they didn’t know what—so, who are you gonna call? They called Kent State!

So they came here. One of the guys was actually a former graduate student, because that’s how a lot of these connections came in. People were from here, they’d go out in the industry, they know each other, and then there’s this network, and they also kind of know you. What happened here was that one of the guys, a guy with the last name Stefanov, he came here, by himself, basically, and said, “Okay, I kind of want to start something.” He started off basically in his garage, but with the support of his company, but he was the outpost of this company, here, to kind of get something going. He got it going, started making some first prototypes in our prototype facility, because we were the only place you could go to do that, in probably the world. Because most companies have their own thing, and no one else is allowed in, and universities maybe didn’t have that technology transfer interest. Then there’s liquid crystals, too, which makes it even more specific.

So he came here and started doing stuff, and that turned into, to make a long story short, Hana Microdisplay, which is in Twinsburg. They make a large percentage of these little displays that are used in pico projectors, or—I keep thinking—because so many rooms have those projectors up in the ceiling! But those liquid crystal and silicon devices, and things for Google Glass. That was a thing. I don’t know if they made those but they probably did, the little liquid crystal display in there. Now they make displays for VR-type things and a lot of things. They are one of the world’s leading producers of these little what’s called LCoS displays, Liquid Crystal in Silicon, that are used in projectors, pico projectors, personal devices like this, things like that. They located here, because of Kent State, and because they wanted this interaction. That was a good thing. Then there’s been the other example but that’s kind of the key one where it wasn’t just—didn’t grow out of Kent State. It was a technology that was attracted to come here to do a development and start a company.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious—and I hope this question doesn't sound crass at all—I can see what, say, this researcher from Hana Microdisplays or the company gets from being able to use the prototype facility. They don’t then have to build their own facility. They can take advantage of the expertise here at LCI. What does LCI get from the interaction?

BOS: Jobs! [laughs] Because that’s one of the main connections, is that if you grow a company and they know you, they hire your students. So, we've had many graduate students go to Hana, or go through Hana to other places. That’s often the thing that—from an educational perspective, it’s often what gets out of it, is that if you grow that company, you've got a job pipeline, and it’s kind of a running cycle. You get people out there, they know liquid crystals, they see applications, they see how there might be a better application, they may come back to Kent State, and say, “Hey, we want to develop this.” It gets to be kind of a nice cycle like that. So, it works well.

Can I just mention one other thing? Because that’s something that doesn't get brought up. Often at a university, it is brought up that research is a net loss, right? It’s a negative. There was a lady here—and I apologize; I don’t know her name—but she did this beautiful article on how a state like Ohio benefits from a university like Kent State. And how the benefit is—taxes! [laughs] Because when a company like Hana Microdisplay comes, they generate a lot of high-paying jobs. And if you look at the advantage to the state on the tax revenue that comes back from that, that’s where the whole package comes together, where the state of Ohio funds a university, the university builds industry, the industry brings taxes back to the state. That’s where the game is. And that always gets overlooked in discussions about the value of education. Your research department, it’s not adding much to the bottom line in the university. If you look at it as an isolated thing like that, then it’s true. But it’s part of a state plan. But there’s very few people who connect that dot. It just isn’t done! I wish I could remember her name, but this lady here at Kent State did a beautiful article on connecting those dots.

CRAWFORD: Interesting.

BOS: Of showing how if you had this many more undergraduates, or this many more graduates, what does that do to the state coffers. That’s a side point, but that’s another benefit. You may say, “What does the Liquid Crystal Institute—?” Well, they got the pipeline. But the state of Ohio got the increased taxes.

CRAWFORD: It sounds to me like an important point about the Liquid Crystal Institute is that it is part of an ecosystem of local startup companies, or other industries and companies that are interested in working with the Liquid Crystal Institute. My understanding is that what has happened with liquid crystals in this area, with the various—because it’s not just Hana Microdisplays, right? It’s Kent Displays, Coadna, AlphaMicron. There’s a whole list of those. And it was modeled pretty explicitly on Silicon Valley and Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Route 128.

BOS: Exactly.

CRAWFORD: I think Bill Doane told me at one point that maybe he went to Cambridge, to MIT, to see how they did things, or talked to people there.

BOS: Right. And Stanford. Because those were the kind of models at the time. But those were not models for Kent State—universities.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

BOS: They're much more 1950s-based, where again, you had the physics Department, the chemistry Department, and like that. You really weren’t looking to focus and do some technology. I don’t want to be too negative, but in a lot of places in the 1960s, if you're at a university, you would kind of look down on industry. You’d get your hands dirty, or I don’t know. And so there was this divide. People in some universities, especially—not really the top; frankly that’s not the case—it’s at the mid-range that would have that kind of attitude. But Bill didn’t have that bias. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Are you saying that in part, universities like Kent State that maybe are in this kind of—not at the top layer, but the next level down—they're somehow more suited or have a need to be more focused, or focus on applications?

BOS: Oh, absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Why do you say that?

BOS: Let’s just take ALCOM and what has happened here. Bill wanted to do a particular thing, this tablet, with a particular technology. He built that program with that focus. So it had a focus. And people came, and they were interested in that focus. But of course, as they were here as graduate students and stuff like that, they also learned many other things about liquid crystals. They understood where things were going.

I’m just going to take a big diversion here, to a really big thing. It’s not really what the Liquid Crystal Institute has done in the world; it’s what the graduate students who came out of Bill’s vision have done in the world that is so amazing! For example, a story that I always really like to tell is how you got an iPad. Because Steve Jobs and those guys, they had the marketing vision. Well, they didn’t actually have it; it came from Xerox, Palo Alto Research, a guy by the name of Alan Kay talked about this thing called Dynabook. That concept was on Star Trek and all this, right? These guys walking around with this thing. But there wasn’t the technology that could do it. But when Steve Jobs had done the Mac, the first Mac, and even before that, he had done a lot of visiting at Xerox Park, Palo Alto Research, where they had Smalltalk, which he used, object-oriented languages, but also where he was exposed to this idea of iPad. But they didn’t know how to do it.

And so, at the time of ALCOM, when Bill was attracting these top students with a focus on liquid crystals and stuff like that, we were getting really top students from around the world, and a lot from China. At that time, Apple was growing, and again, they had a different idea of how to do things. There was Dell, for example, who buys all their stuff from Asia, and they were the leading computer company. IBM, same business model. But Apple was growing in a direction that, “No, we're going to change the technology to do what we want to do. We're not just going to go to some vendor. We're going to—” Literally, what they've done now—you can see it, right?—they built a castle, and everything is in that castle. No one comes in, no one goes out. [laughs] It’s all there. Everything. From the people who understand how electrons are moving around, to people who understand what a consumer wants, it’s all in one.

Anyway, so Apple wanted to do the iPad, and the technology wasn’t available. They hired, first of all, John Zhong, who was from Case Western, but part of the ALCOM consortium. He knew liquid crystals because of that. He went to Apple and realized that, hey, existing technology was not going to get this tablet. Again, which is really the ultimate thing, and what Doane was talking about, and more visionary, like Alan Kay, at Xerox. They wanted to do that, and they didn’t have the technology. The existing displays were taking too much power. The viewing angle wasn’t good enough. It was not good enough. And so, he hired John Zhong. John Zhong hired some Kent State graduates. One of them was Cheng Chen, one of my graduate students. So here’s the interesting story of how a community that Doane set up in place was able to really do big things. So you've got now this John Zhong and Cheng Chen at Apple, knowing they want to do this but they don’t know how to do it. But they had a lot of connections, and they're not stupid. [laughs] They've got those two things going for them, right? So, Cheng Chen realized that a type of device that had been reasonably patented by a former Kent State graduate student, Seung Hee Lee [sp], had the potential to be able to have the viewing angle and the power requirements that they needed to make an iPad. So he got the technology from his connection with Kent State, even though he’s at Apple. The technological direction. But then, they went to places like Sharp—I mean, major display companies at that time—and Samsung, and a number of places, and they said, “No, that’s a whole different technology. We're not doing that. Go away.”

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: The story that Cheng Chen tells is how he was at LG, in Korea, and saying, “Hey, we want to do a display with this new technology, liquid crystal.” They were like, “No. We have a successful business here. We're not going to revamp our assembly lines. It’s nice to meet you. Goodbye.” The way Cheng tells the story is, he’s kind of walking out, and a guy who had met at Kent State, who was now a vice president there—last name was ​​Choi—saw him and said, “Hey, I know you.” And they start talking. The way that Cheng relays the story is that they started talking, Cheng says, “Yeah, I’m visiting, I’m working at Apple now, and we're trying to get this technology, but it looks like it’s not going to happen. Glad to see you.” He says, “Well, wait a minute. I have control over an obsolete assembly line that is being closed down; maybe we could modify it.” So they start talking, and so this guy from LG, who is also from Kent State, says, “But it’s going to cost you some money, because we're not going to do that on our own. It’s too risky. It’s too big of a thing. It’s going to be a technology that competes with our existing technology. Why would we do that? So it’s going to cost you.” “How much?” “A billion dollars.” Okay.

So these guys go back to Steve Jobs and say, “We think we can make your display technology that you need for the iPad, but it’s going to cost you a billion dollars. And not only that, they won’t give the exclusive rights.” For a while they did, but then they said, “Okay, after like five years or something, if you give us a billion dollars to do this assembly line, we'll give it to you, but after ten years, we'll give it to everybody.”

Okay. So, imagine you're Steve Jobs. If you’re in most type organizations, some engineers come to you and say, “Hey, we can do what none of these display giants are doing. Just give us a billion dollars,” your thought might be, “Excuse me, but if this was such a great idea, they would be doing it. They're just ripping you off for a billion dollars. They know displays. Kid!” [laughs] “They know displays. You don’t know displays. They know displays. They're the world’s leader in displays. And if they won’t do it on their own nickel, I’m not giving a billion dollars.” That would be the usual response, right? Except Steve Jobs was not just a manager; he was a force, right? Very unique. The new guy could never pull that off. But he was a force. And he said, “Yes. I’ll do it.” But of course, it took some convincing. You just don’t say—it’s not an elevator presentation. But that made that happen, and that got the iPad, with its beautiful viewing angle characteristics, and low power, and long battery life, and all of that. So at the end of the day, what Bill Doane wanted to do, got done! [laughs] By his work! By ALCOM. By the focus. By the training of graduate students, and by the impact they had on the world. That’s a huge accomplishment!

I think a case could be made that it would not have happened without Bill Doane, and without ALCOM, because it generated this network of people, where this guy at Apple knows an inventor of technology, they know a vice president at Samsung, they get together, they make it happen. It’s just an amazing story to me! I’m just kind of blown away by that. It shows the power of focus. So what Bill started off to do is to do a tablet. It didn’t turn out that that became the thing. That was never a huge success. But it had focus that generated people and interest to want to go in this direction, and working in that direction, that focus can lead to great things. Yeah, I just think that’s so cool.

CRAWFORD: I’m curious to ask you a couple questions about ALCOM. You've said a lot about Bill Doane and his focus and his vision. Part of the function of the program that funded ALCOM from the NSF, the Science and Technology Centers Program, which there were only, I think, a dozen of them around the country or something?

BOS: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: But this was at a time when the NSF and part of that funding, part of what was built into it was technology transfer, right?

BOS: Right.

CRAWFORD: It was pretty explicit about the economic and industrial benefits of academic research and facilitating that sort of thing.

BOS: Yeah.

CRAWFORD: Sort of a counterfactual historical question—do you think this would have happened without ALCOM?

BOS: No. I really don’t. But here’s the other thing, why it’s so important what you're doing. Because at the end of ALCOM, no one saw that.

CRAWFORD: I was going to ask you if that’s a sense of—

BOS: At the end of that project, did NSF get what they wanted? Could they see it? Not really. Not really. But somebody like yourself who looks at the picture later can say, “No, they did get what they wanted. They got Apple as the technological powerhouse in personal displays.” In part—I mean, obviously, there’s a few more pieces in an iPad—but in part because of NSF’s investment in ALCOM.

CRAWFORD: Right. I know ALCOM ended in 2002, and I presume there was some kind of final report, some assessment of the success of the programs.

BOS: Yeah, yeah.

CRAWFORD: Do you know what went into that report?

BOS: I did then, but I’ve forgotten now. But there wasn’t the big story that somebody can tell now, about how somebody—not just doing a generic thing, but with a focus—and a good scientist, first of all. Let’s not forget that. He wasn’t a marketing guy. But setting a vision and selling that vision, and then what that would generate in the future. Because there were so many serendipitous things that had to happen. For this all to come together, you had to have a guy like John Zhong and Cheng Chen who knew liquid crystals, and they knew how to understand what’s going on, and that they knew there was this new technology. There was another guy at Kent State. Then they got that technology and they went to someone who could actually build it, and then he had a connection with Kent State. So there’s this group, which often gets to be an interpersonal relationship. And if he hadn’t run into ​​Choi at a visit—that he knew—in Korea, it may have never happened. And we’d be using Kindles.

CRAWFORD: Obviously the technology was very different and so forth. But could something like that have happened ten years earlier in 1981, let’s say, or 20 years earlier? Was there something about that moment in the 1990s that made that—? Again, obviously the technology was very different.

BOS: The technology was very different. The vision, this overall vision, was really coming out of Xerox Park, and how they were doing what’s called object-oriented languages, which are the structure of how a Mac worked. Also, the idea of the Dynabook was a thing that Alan Kay at Xerox really pushed. He called it a personal digital assistant. At that time, it was purely [inaudible]. Computer monitors were this big, the CRT, where you couldn't hardly carry the darn things. And he’s got this thing and you're kind of going, “Yeah, well, how are you going to do that?” So that was just too far out at the time at Xerox. But still—and because Xerox was not a Steve Jobs, they killed it. In fact, they killed the whole technology. Xerox is now a marketing thing for things that are made in Asia.

CRAWFORD: So it’s that same transition that Tektronix went through.

BOS: Right. So they just kind of blew apart with technology. The vision started there. But it couldn't have happened at that time. So when Doane started ALCOM, the technology that he was looking at, to kind of do something similar, couldn't do what Alan Kay wanted to do. It wasn’t dynamic. It was—bistable. Like a rewriteable piece of paper, basically. So you couldn't do that. So, it was just a lucky coincidence. But the ALCOM thing got the focus, and the people, with the training that they needed to then, when the rest of the technology caught up, they could put it together.

CRAWFORD: You mentioned this transition, that you observed, of a lot of companies moving out of technological innovation and manufacturing, because Asia was taking over, and then they were moving into more marketing and were assembling things, and so forth. This is a pretty big question, but did that create the opportunity for academic research centers like the LCI to move into that space because Bell Labs is closing down, Westinghouse is closing down, and so the slack was picked up by academia?

BOS: Right. Here’s an example. Tektronix at one point was going to—not really Tektronix, but some people from Tektronix left and made a company called InFocus. They still make projectors, and you'll see InFocus as a brand name for projectors. But they were just kind of getting started at that time. They started a project with Motorola, which was called Motif—Motorola and InFocus—and they had a boatload of money. They were going to build this facility to do a new type of unit for these projector displays. So they had a boatload of money, but they had no sandbox to play. They had no way they could go off, by a couple of engineers who have this idea, to get a prototype going, and to make it work, and to maybe talk to some people in the field, and like that. There was nothing available like that. So they just had to jump in cold.

What happened was, as you might expect, is they bought all this—when they went out to buy the equipment, they really didn’t know exactly what to buy, because they hadn’t developed the processes yet. So they buy a ton of equipment. Now their burn rate is like—you know, just feed it cash—pffffff—but the results are zero, because they're trying to develop their product. They're trying to develop the technology. And they're trying to develop this in a corporate timescale, which is like, “Are we going to have results next quarter?” So it failed. And a big, big, big disappointment for people in the area of technology and liquid crystals and stuff like that. Because here, Motorola had become committed to this, and they were going to do this huge investment and all that, and the whole thing just crashed.

So, there’s a vacuum—that’s what I’m getting at—to do a place where you can incubate a new idea. John West had done this prototype facility here, and that was a draw. Like I said, that got Mike Stefanov here to do the thing that became Hana Microdisplay. Because you needed to have a sandbox, which wasn’t available. Industries compete with each other, and it’s really hard to get something going. But if you’ve got a place where you can go and you can sort of—like Mike Stefanov did—and say, “Hey, I’m just going to go camp out at Kent, Ohio, for six months or a year, and see if I can’t get this goin’”—yeah, so it was a vacuum that was filled, no question.

CRAWFORD: Again it sounds like a really important story. Would you say that ALCOM and the LCI are good models of how to do academia-industry interactions?

BOS: Oh, absolutely.

CRAWFORD: Were there any challenges or tensions or anything?

BOS: Bill got these raving responses from NSF on his reviews, because he was doing it so well, going from the basic science to an application. Like I said, the payback at the end of ALCOM wasn’t as big as it was gonna be, but still, the way the thing worked was perfect. Like I started to say early on, if you just have like a physics department, you get students that come into “physics” and they may not have the foggiest idea of what they want to do. They get here and they take all these random courses. It’s good for liberal arts, but it’s like you're in a fog. [laughs] It’s so difficult. But that idea of interdisciplinary research and having a group of focus, where you bring together people from different departments or something, and say, “We have a mission here”—that was something that was really kind of unique. There were other places that did ad hoc things, obviously Stanford and MIT. But they did whole things at a whole different level, like Lincoln Laboratories. [laughs] But still, in this mid-range, and in your universities, that was really not a thing.

No, it was huge. A huge impact. And a model which—that’s why I’m glad you're doing this, because frankly, here at Kent State, they're losing that. They're losing that focus. They want to broaden in terms of “materials research.” What are we going to do with—? It’s just too broad, unless you're going to do a huge influx in capital and people.

CRAWFORD: You're talking about the recent transition of the LCI to the Advanced Materials and Liquid Crystal Institute.

BOS: Yeah. We had a lot of pressure to broaden beyond what is feasible to broaden.

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

BOS: No. I really don’t. It has always been a mystery to me. Because as of maybe five years or ten years ago, a lot of the liquid crystals in terms of displays was kind of getting done, and people in the field were broadening into soft matter—biological materials, things that are—the general field is called soft matter. But it’s not solid state physics. It’s not properties of metals. It’s not properties of wood, or how you produce a better piece of paper. It’s not materials. It’s a broadened focus from liquid crystals into soft matter. That made sense. They would not let us have that title! [laughs] No way! We were going to be—and I don’t know what they were thinking. Frankly, that has been kind of ignored, with the people in the Department. But we used to get people that knew why they were coming here. They knew why they were applying to Kent State—because it was one of the top places in the world to do what they wanted to do. But now we get people from, like I said, wood products, who are applying to Kent State, because they couldn't get in anyplace good. [laughs] So our applications are up, but I mean, why? So it has just been a huge disappointment for me, personally.

CRAWFORD: You're talking about applications to the graduate programs and so forth?

BOS: Right.

CRAWFORD: Because it has broadened the focus.

BOS: No one ever goes back and talks to Bill Doane! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: I thought at many junctures—the administration knows there’s a guy who knows how to do this. Go ask him! But, no. No. Top down. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I know there has been this transition to the AMLCI. But are there any other ways in which the institution has changed since, say, the end of ALCOM, around 2002, or any other significant changes?

BOS: I don’t think so. Because while the name changed and our applications are different because of that moniker, the people are still basically the same at this point. But I have heard from people outside, in the industry and other people, that it’s harder for us to attract top faculty in soft matter if it isn’t apparent that that is going to be our focus.

CRAWFORD: I see.

BOS: Because let’s not forget, we're a mid-level university. An R1 institution; that’s not nothing. It’s pretty darn good. But if you're stacking up against Ohio State, MIT, Stanford, Case Western Reserve, you've got to stand out, or no one is going to see you. [laughs] That’s the problem.

CRAWFORD: I wonder if you could just quickly explain what you mean by soft matter.

BOS: I was going to tap on that; that wouldn't be good. It’s deformable materials. Like biological systems are all soft matter. A material like rubber is actually soft matter. Like Akron does. But they are materials that are maybe commandable, deformable, that may be controllable by electronic or temperature or something, to change their shape or something like that. It has gotten a little bit harder to define. That’s the nice thing about liquid crystal; it’s so easy to define. A large part of soft matter is liquid crystals, but then kind of the theories of liquid crystals, and they go over to things like cell structure, for example. Like the cell membrane, for example, is a good example of a soft material that is not exactly the same thing that is in a display that has liquid crystalline properties. They have organizational order. Things like that. Primarily the payback in soft matter is biological systems.

CRAWFORD: Which is interesting, because that was a big focus of Glenn Brown, when he first started the Institute.

BOS: It was. At the very beginning, he was interested in lyotropics. Right, it is. It’s almost like a full circle. Right, exactly.

CRAWFORD: Changing tack a little bit, and talking about another dimension I think of your work in academia and as a scientist, which is teaching and education—I know in 2010, you won the Slottow-Owaki Prize from the Society of Information Displays, which is an award for outstanding contribution to education in the field of information displays. I wonder if you could talk a little bit about what winning that award meant to you and what role teaching, advising, and mentoring of students has played in your career.

BOS: That’s a big deal. I mean, I’m not saying it’s a big deal, but for me, it was a big thing. It’s nice to have that recognition. Because like I said, the real benefit of ALCOM, really, the payback, was not what it did; it’s what the students did. At the end of the day, that’s what happened, which is really what an education—that should be the grading scale of an academic institution, that you want the students to go out and do things that you weren’t doing. So, yeah, that’s an important part of it. Absolutely. Obviously again that’s Bill Doane. He got that. That’s what he wanted to do, that’s what he sold to NSF, that’s what he built. So, yeah, I was really glad to be a part of that.

CRAWFORD: I’m not going to dispute the influence of Bill Doane in all of this, but you have had a fair number of your own students that have gone on and done things.

BOS: Which wouldn't have happened if I was at Western Michigan, okay? I don’t mean to be negative, but that was close to me. I had to drive right past it to get here, right? [laughs] And it’s kind of in the same tournament thing, and stuff like that. Again, it’s because the focus that Bill Doane put together, that brought those really good students here with a focus. They didn’t come to talk to me. They didn’t know me before they got here. They came here for the focus of the institution, and that was internationally known. That brought top students from China and other places in the world, because they saw this as a growth area, something that they were interested in, and here is a place that is doing that. I was lucky enough to be introduced to these students, and to hopefully help them in some way. Again, if it was just sitting off someplace, it would never have happened! [laughs]

CRAWFORD: Obviously the institution is important. But your own trajectory through industry and back to the LCI, you have a pretty impressive CV all on your own—30-some patents, and so forth. You said encouraging students to go out and do what you weren’t doing. Would you say that that’s the ethos of your educational philosophy in terms of training students? Encouraging them to push boundaries, innovate? Something like that?

BOS: It’s always important in any field, if you're in an educational thing, not just to say what you've done, but where you think things are going, and here’s the tools you're going to need. I’d like to think that’s a part of graduate education here at Kent State. Yeah, there’s that.

CRAWFORD: Following on that, what do you see as the new directions in the field of, say, liquid crystal science, or soft matter? Your students that you have now, where do you encourage them to be looking for the future?

BOS: The current buzz right now is for VR. Meta, for example, which has got a funny story. But anyway, there’s a lot of interest in new types of optical components, new optical elements. How do you do the things like simplified lens design in a camera that is much more compact? Like we were talking about before, it’s the zoom element in these little cameras that goes out first. Could that be non-mechanical? Well, liquid crystals is an approach to do thing. So in terms of electro-optical components, it is going more from displays to optical components.

But the field is tending to go a little more to looking at these biological systems. And what’s more important than that, really? If you can say I can have a better display or I could be free of some disease, I’ll take the free of disease! [laughs] Because 50 years ago, 40 years ago, something like that, biology was kind of—if you were in the physics department, you wouldn't call it a science. You’d call it just an observational field. Because you really couldn't design things. Okay, well, that’s all changed now, right? It has gotten to the point where it is a science, and people do understand the phase transitions of proteins, and they do understand these different organizational patterns in living systems that really can be explained very well by the theories of liquid crystals. People who understand liquid crystals can see how these molecules are organizing into a cohesive group or unit. It’s not through covalent bonding, it’s not like a crystal, but they just sort of form. Like a cell membrane. Well, how does that work? A lot of that is the same type of thing that people in the area of liquid crystals do, so it’s a natural extension.

CRAWFORD: Is that an area that has the same kind of opportunities in industry as, say, the display world had in the 1990s and the early 2000s?

BOS: Oh, for sure. A guy who is just fascinating to talk to with this sort of thing is Edgar Kooijman. He’s in the Biology Department but he interacts closely with the Liquid Crystal Institute and with biological systems. He displays this amazing story for classes how by understanding the liquid crystal nature of the cell membrane, [inaudible] encapsulate it, people were able to design these messenger RNA vaccines. Because the trick is to get that messenger RNA into your cell. Because you put any kind of material in your body, and it attacks it immediately, right? So you want to get this thing through your system to be in the cell without being destroyed, but then get in the cell, and do something, not be destroyed there either. Well, so, you have to understand how to encapsulate, how to protect, and when this little protection thing should open, to let the messenger RNA into your cell and start doing something. Anyway, Edgar just does this beautiful story, where he goes into detail, where he really shows how, if you understand liquid crystals, it’s that same field that enabled people to understand how to do these COVID vaccines. So, yeah, there’s a lot of connection, and opportunity, obviously. [laughs]

CRAWFORD: I don’t have any other specific questions. Is there anything else you’d like to discuss?

BOS: That I really appreciate you doing this. Because like I said, I think the state of Ohio, for example, doesn't have a resource or anything that they can point to, that shows the success of the Liquid Crystal Institute, of the focus, of the idea of focus, and what great things that can do, and that by funding the research and the buildings and stuff like that, the part of it that is never or very seldom seen is the feedback with tax revenue, and how you're improving the quality of society. That whole system. Because if you just look at a piece of it, you're not really seeing the impact. Things like what you're doing help make what worked obvious, in comparison with what other places were doing that didn’t work. So, I really appreciate it.

CRAWFORD: Great. That actually does raise one other question I have, which is about the context of northeast Ohio. We're talking about a story about high-tech research feeding into very high-tech industry in an area of the country that pretty much throughout your career, starting in the 1970s and 1980s, was absolutely decimated in terms of manufacturing, and is known as the Rust Belt because of all this economic decline and so forth. At the same time, you have this story of the Liquid Crystal Institute. Does the context of being in Northeast Ohio have any particular meaning to the Liquid Crystal Institute? Did it present any particular challenges or opportunities, do you think?

BOS: I’m not really at that level, because I’m just a professor.

CRAWFORD: [laughs]

BOS: But when you look at what Bill Doane was talking about, he would point to when he started ALCOM, the support that he got from the university president, from the state of Ohio, from the senator, the national representatives of the state of Ohio in Washington, how he was able to get all of their support to get that to happen. In that regard, Northeastern Ohio has been very good for Kent State, and very good for this technology. The state has some nice interactions, like we have very good interactions with Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and their materials research, which has a lot of liquid crystal emphasis. So we've had a lot of good connections there. That’s not Northeastern Ohio, but it’s an Ohio institution. I had a joint project with NASA Glenn. Things like that are kind of Northeastern Ohio-based. The interactions with places like Akron, with their real strong expertise in polymers, and Case Western—again, a real strong emphasis on polymers—was a real good synergy during ALCOM, that Bill Doane saw, again, and was able to pull this together to get this greater influx of smart people looking at a common problem. Again, that was other Northeastern Ohio type connections, that was really good.

CRAWFORD: I’ve been asking people, because we are coming out of the COVID pandemic, or I mean, it’s still a concern but not as much as it was, say, last year. And I just feel, because we're in this moment, I’ve been asking people to just reflect on the experience of living through the COVID pandemic. What was it like? What were the challenges either professionally or personally, whatever you’d like to talk about. If you'd just like to share.

BOS: It’s interesting, because we were just talking about that today. Because I think for a lot of us, during the shutdown, when everybody was told “You can’t come into work, you've got to work at home,” it was great. Because I actually got way more done. I mean, first of all, I’m not driving for an hour. The other thing, I’m not interrupted by water cooler talk. I can just focus on something, and stay focused on it, with no distractions. And when I want to talk to somebody, I get on Zoom, I talk to them, I say “goodbye,” gone! Whereas before, that would have been an hour meeting. You’ve got to walk over there, you've got to set it up, you've got to wait for different people to show up. Meanwhile, you're just kind of looking at the ceiling, you're scrolling through your iPad. Whereas with the Zoom and working at home, things got much more efficient, way more efficient. So, you want to talk to somebody? You email them and say, “Hey, can we Zoom?” You don’t go walking around the building trying to find them. It’s just so much more convenient. And classes I thought were so much better. Because normally you're up at the board talking like that, right? And behind, they're sleeping, right? But when it’s Zoom, you've got them all right there in front of you. Every one of them. You can see. You can say, “Hey, George, it doesn't look like you understand that. You've got a problem?” The teaching went much better. Everything was better.

But, what we're seeing now is, in our department, there’s a lot of disconnects between the way the graduate students are interacting with each other, the way they're interacting with the faculty. There was discussion about how the graduate students are feeling lost, the new graduate students. Because you walk in the building, and people can come back now, but they're not necessarily encouraged to come back. And people got used to this home office setup. So, there’s not a lot of—so for new people coming in, and for cross-fertilization, you can miss that for a year, and it’s really not a big problem. But if it continues, like it kind of is now, it is a problem. I didn’t see that during the COVID thing, frankly. I thought, “This is great! [laughs] Why didn’t somebody tell me to stay home before?” [laughs] But then you sort of realize that, hey, there’s a lot of connections, personal connections, and just general things, that you're missing. And things can kind of deteriorate and fall apart, in an organization, because of that. So I’m starting to see the—“Oh, I see why I should be spending more time in the office.” Especially for the students, frankly. Because they walk into sometimes an empty building, basically. And if you're a new graduate student or even an undergraduate, you're kind of like, “Anybody here? I don’t know how to do this problem!” [laughs] So, sure, they can be proactive and send an email or something like that, but when everybody is in the same building, you just kind of walk by the office and go, “Can we talk?”

CRAWFORD: I want to thank you so much for your time, and for sharing your story and your reflections. Thank you so much.

BOS: No problem. Like I said, I really appreciate you doing this. Because the LCI is a good story. It’s a really inspiring story, frankly, that NSF viewed as a nationally significant story. But they didn’t even realize what the real significance was going to be. They didn’t see that. They didn’t see that we now have graduate students that are key technology leaders at Google, Apple, 3M. People who graduated from here that now are in research leadership positions at top companies around the United States. That came out of what you're talking about here. But it’s not a story that a lot of people can see. NSF couldn't have seen it, because they were out of there before the real impact happened. So, if you don’t have somebody like yourself who says, “I’m interested in the story here,” it gets forgotten, and the lessons of it get forgotten.

CRAWFORD: That’s the goal, to preserve the story.

BOS: Thank you.

CRAWFORD: I really appreciate it.

BOS: I really appreciate it.

CRAWFORD: Thanks.

BOS: Good deal. So, thank you, Matthew. This was really good. Really good.

CRAWFORD: Sure.

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