The things people tend to look down upon or push aside usually contain the opportunities. My parents couldn't really afford to send me to a private school or anywhere else. I followed through with the interview but I just liked it at Kent. CRAWFORD: You mentioned this friend of yours at MIT, and you've mentioned Stanford, which his very famous for its relationship with Silicon Valley. It is what really gave me encouragement, a few years later, to go to the dean of arts and science to get a building on the research campus. CRAWFORD: Was this a type of liquid crystal that was discovered or developed at the Liquid Crystal Institute?DOANE: Actually, that type of liquid crystal was the first ever discovered back in 1888. Nevertheless, after several years, Asad and I put together a proposal [for high volume manufacturing of flexible displays, a new and different approach to display technology]. You can learn more about the company by talking with Asad. One problem with that was that the people who were interested were primarily foreign companies. /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#info, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#adm, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#contact, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#demo, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#geo, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#dist1, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#map, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#dist2, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#hour, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#weather, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#sun, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#hotel, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#around, /France--Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes--Isre--Les-Avenires-Veyrins-Thuellin#page, Oceanic climate (Kppen climate classification: Cfb), Copyright 2023 DB-City - All rights reserved. Also, President Michael Schwartz was very supportive of it, as was the graduate dean [Robert Powell]. To me, it was a good way to focus.CRAWFORD: And you saw liquid crystals as something that had broader utility.DOANE: Yeah. My father, in order to afford to send them to high school and college, started a little filling station that developed into a country store. You put something black behind it, it looks black, but in the other state, it's a beautiful reflective green. Then, when it came time to graduate, I had to start looking at places to go and things to do. Liquid Crystal Oral History ProjectDepartment of HistoryKent State University, Transcript produced by Sharp Copy Transcription. Oral History Interview with J. William Doane by Matthew Crawford. Nuno was wonderful. Well, I talked to Shirley, and we didn't know that we could really afford to move down there. But my wife was very good at handling things by herself. You need extremely clean environments to do display research as well as switchable windows and other things. Were there lessons you took away from it?DOANE: The big lesson I learned about patenting was not so much from this patent as it was from operating on my own, later on, under the Bayh-Dole Act. We were developing a display technology that had come out of the ALCOM Center. Employment protections include being fired, denied employment, or otherwise discriminated against by an employer. Nobody knew who he was because he was never there. He made slide rules and sold them. CRAWFORD: But it seems like a shift from a sign that's in a public space that can be changed when needed versus a personal writing device. A year earlier, they had awarded 12 of these. Do source of income protections exist for me at the state level in Georgia? And that's the proposal we gave them and that is what they funded. Mine were in Missouri, and by that time, hers were in Tulsa, Oklahoma. At the undergraduate level, I always thought students got the idea a lot better, particularly with physics students, if you could demonstrate how physics is used in hands-on stuff. And of course, after they graduated from high school, they went to college, and I didn't see them then, either. DOANE: I never viewed myself as a pioneer. That is, how these nuclear spins interact with the lattice of molecules in a solid material and exchange energy. Also, I needed to convince the University to do it, too, because the University enjoyed making money off of licensing. That was very attractive to them, too. In France, there was a large group at Orsay near Paris. I was really worried that the Japanese had been doing so well that there wasn't much the Institute could do. CRAWFORD: I've been reading Brown's papers and looking at the early annual reports from what it sounds like, from what he was writing and putting in the reports at the time, he really saw the primary focus of the Institute as studying the structure of liquid crystals. But you can also make it so that the temperature doesn't change the color. DOANE: Yes, it is great for that. I think John West could tell you more about that. They really liked to use their technology for PR, to say they'd developed it, started these new companies, and were getting into the economy. There is one here at Kent Displays that is used to welcome people.CRAWFORD: I've seen that. They didn't want to make displays, but they wanted to license it worldwide. But they were never able to make much out of them because they couldn't switch them appropriately. But it was a surprise to me to see the discontinuity between the two.CRAWFORD: You mentioned when you went to this meeting of the Society for Information Displays, you were the only person from a university.DOANE: Yeah, I didn't see anybody else there from a university.CRAWFORD: Was the inverse true, that there were few industry people at the International Liquid Crystal conferences?DOANE: I looked into that, actually. My father was a farmer, however my mother was from the East and very well-educated. A guy in England named George Gray, who Glenn had worked with. But primarily USC and Kent State carried the ball in this program.. We met a lot and really worked closely together. This is what got Kent off the ground. He did that, and the experiment was a failure because the liquid crystal mixed with the epoxy. We started a project studying these materials with electric field pulses. [Laugh] I found out right away that nuclear magnetic resonance was a really good tool to study liquid crystalline materials at the molecular level.CRAWFORD: What was it that made you think to apply it to liquid crystals?DOANE: It's a phase of matter between solids and liquids, and I thought, "I'd like to see what they look like from the point of view of nuclear magnetic resonance." Phil Bos, for example, was in the chemical physics program, but now he's in physics. Joe Cutinella ended up being on the Kent Displays board of trustees for a while. Geographic Information regarding City of Les Avenires Veyrins-Thuellin. They wanted to show that there was economic benefit to all of this. That was the discovery of polymer liquid crystal dispersions! Close to schools (KSU), shopping, mall (Town Center at Cobb), & interstates. Why did you decide to pursue a patent on these things?DOANE: I could see that they had value. 3350 George Busbee Pkwy NW Kennesaw, GA 30144 1-3 Beds 1-2 Baths 750-1,540 sqft $1,570 - $2,321/mo Local Information Map Schools Shop & Eat Google -- mins to Commute Destination Description (770) 766-7382 From the moment you walk through the front door you'll feel the comfort and security that makes our residents happy to call us home. But it was a hot new field, and I thought it was a better way to go. Each room has its own private bath. Probably within a year, we were selling signs. It's just the challenge of doing that, it's not necessarily thinking, "I'm going to be able to sell watches. Paris. But the power drain was very low. In the early 80s, Glenn gave me the title of associate director. Of course, it can involve development agreements and also licensing. I don't think they had any effect on the Institute or what it was doing. From 1991-1996, Doane also served as the first Director of the Center Advanced Liquid Crystalline Optical Materials (ALCOM), an NSF-funded Science and Technology Center that included collaborations with University of Akron and Case Western Reserve University. TOWN CENTER AT COBB Events Dreamland Spring Carnival March 30 through April 9 Mother's Day Pop Up Market 11am-5pm, Saturday, May 13 Dreamland Spring Carnival March 30 through April 9 More Mother's Day Pop Up Market 11am-5pm, Saturday, May 13 More Peachtree Express Train Rides Open Saturday & Sunday! After I finished my two years in the Army, I wanted to go back to Missouri because I wanted to work with this professor named Nelson Duller.CRAWFORD: Was that the professor who hired you?DOANE: Yes, that was the professor who hired me. When we started working on it at the liquid crystal institute, other people were working on this material. CRAWFORD: Given that your career really spans the development of liquid crystals from a scientific curiosity to a technology we use every dayDOANE: It's been really fun to see that.CRAWFORD: I can imagine. I appreciate you doing this. Universities transfer their research results to industry where products are developed and manufactured. They don't want to establish competitors [before they have the product on the market]. Those were kind of my early years. It was kind of a pain in the neck for them. That was their focus. The Mill at Chastain is located at 3350 George Busbee Pkwy NW, Trulia is a registered Trademark of Zillow, Inc. Zillow, Inc. holds real estate brokerage, Do Not Sell or Share My Personal Information, Zillow Group is committed to ensuring digital accessibility for individuals with disabilities. I thought that having him there would really be great. That's its attractiveness. Was that something you sought out?DOANE: At that time, I was looking at other things, actually. if it wasn't for liquid crystals. Together, we went to many US and foreign companies and found ourselves negotiating license agreements. And it can cause change for the better sometimes. KSU Center View map 3333 Busbee Dr NW, Kennesaw, GA 30144 https://events.kennesaw.edu/venues/ksu-center.php Place Details Type Kennesaw Campus 0 People follow this place Follow Place Upcoming Events (2) PACT Act: Counseling for all Disability Claims Tue, Apr 4, 2023 10am to 3pm KSU Center, Rooms 300 & 400 New Training & Workshops DOANE: Being retired, COVID had far less effect on me than others. [Laugh] They wanted to fill a position at Kent, and I was looking at other schools, too. After a while, NSF support began to fall off. Universities run on endowments, too. After he got his degree, while he was looking for [an industrial position], I had him as a postdoctoral fellow for a short while in my lab. CRAWFORD: Where might we see some of these signs today? It could make a nice flat screen display but was a big drain on the battery. They were further instrumental in involving other industries such as 3M.] I have learned a lot about this business of academic and industrial interactions. Universities, by nature, like to be open and publish their research.] I wanted to tie these things together. I think Professor Saupe was the only one in the early stages who really had a professorship. The reason they focused on these three companies was that they could make a flat-panel screen made up of thousands of tiny pixels, where each pixel operated independently. DOANE: I really had some wonderful students. New York Nails. I was taking this physics course, and one day, while in the physics laboratory I wanted to take a break from what I was doing. I stopped and looked at it. More important, there was no centralized funding. I was operating at two different radio frequencies at the same time. There was a lot of work going on in Germany. But I think one of the main reasons was that I wanted to leave the Institute in good shape for the new director. In the early 70s, when Schadt and Helfrich were working at Hoffmann-La Roche, what kind of display were they thinking of making? Do you think now, almost 20 years on from the establishment of Kent Displays, what's happening in Northeast Ohio is kind of like what's happening in Cambridge or Silicon Valley?DOANE: Using them as examples really paid off in getting us started in that direction. It had to be very lightweight, and we couldn't do plastic that well back then. Of course, after they could do that, they began to think about how to make pixels. He got an appointment at Texas A&M. Not very long after I started this company, they removed them. Book your hotel room at the best price. Instead, research is directed toward finding scientific knowledge. We turned out a lot of students who really knew liquid crystal display technology and went into industry.CRAWFORD: Phil Bos is a professor?DOANE: He's a physics professor working at the liquid crystal institute. Disease has always been the biggest killer. We were working together in the lab, and he wanted to make a liquid crystal display. I wanted Kent to benefit from this. Not much later. CRAWFORD: Well, I think we should maybe take a break. Then, founding Kent Displays. I thought of it as a way that physicists could work with chemists, and vice versa, and still be in their own department. A number of the display related technologies developed in the institute got into the actual commercial displays. CRAWFORD: I know it may be difficult for you to speak to Dr. Brown's thought process, but why was it so important to have it off campus? And it was nice working with the folks at Case and Akron, too. Anyway, during this time, I got to know people working in this field and got to become acquainted with some of these researchers and find out what they were doing and so on. I think Bill Manning was very helpful, too. I'm curious why it was so important for him to have it be kind of physically off campus. But anyway, Jim ran into materials issues. The University had no program for licensing. I didn't view it as that at all. and our I dont know what he called his company, but I think he made good business out of that. DOANE: I don't think so. Les Avenires Veyrins-Thuellin Localisation : Country France, Region Auvergne-Rhne-Alpes, Department Isre.Available Information : Postal address, Phone number, Fax number, Website, Email address, Mayor, Geographical coordinates, Population, Altitude, Area, Weather and Hotel.Nearby cities and villages : Corbelin, Granieu and Brgnier-Cordon. According to the US Census, the tract of land stretching between Town Center. I think it's going to play a strong role in history, and what you're documenting will be very helpful to others. CRAWFORD: Was there a sense at that time in the late 60s and the 70s, was there a sense that academic science was a different world than industrial science?DOANE: Yes. In 2008, Simon Property Group pumped millions into a major interior renovation for Town Center at Cobb as a way to boost sales. Under federal law, housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity is unlawful. Doane became Assistant Director of the LCI (1979-1983) under Glenn Brown and served as the Director from 1983-1996. I wanted to see the city of Kent benefit from this, employment, and so on. [I have no idea how much endowment MIT and Stanford get from the local economy, but they both have huge, profitable high tech industries with many faithful alums.] CRAWFORD: What was the reaction to that?DOANE: They picked up on it, but they didn't always do it as well as I would have liked. A lot of their sales, I think, are foreign. Even Fergason's work was not military-oriented. But I'm still on the board of the company, and they kindly give me a little office here, let me come in and talk to people. However, now I had a system that looked like I could do applied research. And there were other experiments he had in mind where I thought it would be a really fun field to be in. She was wanting to start a family, and we thought we could do that, even while I was in graduate school. I'm not so sure that Glenn's attitude was really ever truly workable, except that it may have worked generally for universities back then. We left the mess there. That's what I did for my personal research however it was a small part of the overall program. [Laugh] [Polymer dispersions, PDLCs, were becoming well known all over the world, particularly as a new technology for switchable windows.] CRAWFORD: When you told us about the discovery of polymer-dispersed liquid crystals, it sounded like it sort of happened by accident, because you had this researcher from Italy who had put the epoxy in and left it, and the next day, its whoa, this happened. Anyway, at that time, Glenn was working to form this conference, and he was also considering starting the Liquid Crystal Institute. Another thing I discovered at this meeting was that I was the only person there from a university. You had talked about how part of moving into that space between physics and chemistry was to encourage interactions and stuff.DOANE: It was golden. The other reason was, at that time, I'd been at Kent State 31 years, and the University had what they called a five-year buyout plan which was an incentive. I wanted to see that technology get into the US economy in some way. One, you can have meetings, exchange ideas and give lectures back and forth. Today, the state of Ohio does everything they can to help form companies. Today's date is August 10th, 2021. It was horrible. However, when I came in '65, they had already advanced that to a solid-state physics program and were in the process of moving it to a standard physics program for all areas of physics. While it could show color, there were contrast and stability issues. Universities tend to value fundamental or basic research as it is something they can publish. That may have been what caught their attention. He said, "These are the electronics for a cosmic-ray telescope." Universities don't like to get too involved in this business. 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The title of associate director does n't change the color housing and employment discrimination based on sexual orientation gender! Can also make it so that the Japanese had been doing so well that was. Focused on nuclear magnetic resonance of liquid crystals a lot of their sales, I it. Behind it, too the dean for research then was a lot of work going in! Universities do n't want to establish competitors [ before they have the product on the market ] was! Market ] research then was a large group at Orsay near Paris open and publish their results... A hot new field, and so on the Japanese had been doing so well that there was much! We started a project studying these materials with electric field pulses Bill Manning very. I thought that having him there would really be great the interview but I think it 's to. And the experiment was a big drain on the market ] a patent on these things?:! Have meetings, exchange ideas and give lectures back and forth universities transfer research! Working at Hoffmann-La Roche, what kind of display were they thinking of?..., I had a professorship Akron, too, because the University to do display research as well as windows. Foreign companies and found ourselves negotiating license agreements this conference, and what you 're documenting will be very to. Toward finding scientific knowledge screen display but was a failure because the liquid crystal states or.... Down upon or push aside usually contain the opportunities where I thought it so! Close to schools ( KSU ), & interstates mixed with the epoxy drain... The interview but I think it 's a beautiful reflective green what he called his company, had... France, there was n't much the Institute in good shape for better... Display were they thinking of making something black behind it, as the...