 So here the SID display week and for you I'm Terry Schaeffer and so what do you do well right now I'm consulting on LCDs mainly liquid crystal and silicon displays but also specialty displays various kinds not not mainstream TV displays and you've also been involved in the LCD getting into the market? Oh a long time I guess since about 1970 some of the eight I think oh no earlier than that 1972. So what did you do in the LCD in the history of the LCD? Well we I worked on worked at a company in Switzerland that made the first twisted pneumatic displays and sold to the Swiss watch industry and also to Japan to Casio and then worked at the research center at Brown-Beverie which was a kind of the Swiss equivalent of Western house and they were manufacturing the twisted pneumatic displays and then our group invented the super twist displays which then was used in all the laptop computers for about three or four years before the active matrix displays became cheap enough to replace them. So there's for example this guy called Martin Schat right were you working together or? No he was at Hoffman La Roche and we were at Brown-Beverie and we had a Martin Schat invented the twisted pneumatic display and but at that time there was a cooperative agreement with Brown-Beverie in medical electronics so Brown-Beverie had a license a free license to manufacture twisted pneumatic displays and so they set up the first factory in Switzerland to make the watch displays. So is a what does Switzerland have to do with the beginning of the LCD? Is it just because of the watches that they did or what a bunch of requests and development in that direction? That was a big reason I mean Martin Schat worked at Hoffman La Roche which was a chemical company and they they manufactured the first liquid crystal mixtures that were stable at room temperature and had the right properties for the twisted pneumatic display and then Brown-Beverie used that material in their first manufactured twisted pneumatic displays for watches. So the watches were the customer back then? Well the watch industry in Switzerland was one of the customers but probably a larger customer was Kazio from Japan for watches. And did you imagine that the LCD would be like every single everywhere is just LCD? Was that your plan? Now at the time of course everybody was talking about televisions that would hang on the wall and everybody thought that there would be you know maybe just 10 years away. That was in 72? Yeah in 72. And they said the hanging wall TVs would happen in the 80s? Yeah I think they quite overestimated the developments in the time it was needed to make a really big screen TV. Why did it take so long? Oh wow there's well one of the things that needed to be done was the thin film transistor that had to be made reliably and without defects for you know millions of transistors on the glass panel and that was no easy thing to do. You didn't have such high resolution in the beginning right? No yeah at the beginning they were. What were you doing like just a few pixels in there? No like VGA, VGA resolution. That was in the laptop right? Yeah and that that was considered high resolution in the day but of course now you've got 4k which is inconceivable back back then. So you were pretty proud of the VGA laptop displays? Oh yeah. You had some? Oh yeah all the computers had VGA laptop computers used VGA for the long time and people were happy. In fact even the first ones were CGA which was even half the resolution of VGA. And you had you had some of these? Were you using them? We actually made some prototypes using the super twist technology and that was you know without the active matrix technology. So what is that? The segmented? Well that was just a liquid crystal panel was just a matrix of columns and row electrodes and the drive was just on the periphery of the glass panels on the edges and so you had you had to drive let's say x times y pixels but you only had x plus y electrodes so you had to do some magic to get it to work. And was it kind of like a proud feeling to have these initial first laptops? Because without LCD your laptop is not possible right? Well the first laptops did have electro luminescence and they had yeah it was electro luminescent panels and there was another technology orange color but certainly not color. So it was special it was really cool to be able to do that. Oh yeah I mean to have a display that didn't use a lot of energy so you didn't have to have a huge battery and it was very thin so you could build it into a laptop computer. And what was your role in all that? Well I was on a team that invented the super twist display so that was a big step forward which kind of got the whole laptop computer industry going. You call it the super twist? Yes. What was twisting about it? Well it was twisted instead of 90 degrees which was a conventional twisted pneumatic these were twisted 270 degrees and so they had a very steep electro optic made it possible to multiplex the display. What does that mean? Well that means you could you can drive a huge number of pixels with just a small number of drive electrodes. So it's a big deal this invention right? Without that we wouldn't have a huge LCD market today. Well no it would still be a huge LCD market but it would have been delayed probably three or four years. So instead of waiting 50 years we would be waiting 53 years for where we are? Probably something like that. And it kind of jump-started the whole laptop industry and made it possible to manufacture huge volumes of laptop displays and the display looked okay. Well of course the film transistor displays have much better performance but at least at the time it was quite acceptable. So it's a big jump compared to before what you did was just like small watches and calculators. And watches and calculators. And then because of what you did it became laptops. And then everything else TVs and stuff? Well then and then thin film transistors became manufacturable in high volumes at low cost. So at that point the technology kind of morphed into thin film transistor displays. And you did all that in Switzerland or no? No no. Where are you based? Where are you from? Well I was I'm from the United States and I worked in Switzerland for 13 years. Where did you go to Switzerland? Why? Yeah? Well I worked at Bell Labs as kind of an intern like a two-year postdoc and after two years I had to find another job. So I went to find a job in Germany at the Fraunhofer Institute, worked there for two years on liquid crystals and then. Was it nice in Fraunhofer back then? Oh yeah. And then after two years it was an opportunity to join the Swiss team, a company called Brown-Bauvery, which had started making the Twisted Pneumatic Displays. They had a research center where I worked and we were striving to improve the performance of the Twisted Pneumatic Display and at that time then we got the idea to go to a Super Twist Display which made them high information content displays possible. So do you speak German or you could do everything in English? Oh I spoke German but not Swiss German. Yeah it's a little bit different right? Yeah it's a different language. I can understand it but really not speak it. Everybody just spoke English? Was it a big team or a small team? Oh no I spoke English to my boss but my colleagues I spoke German. We had people I worked with came from Czechoslovakia, Italy, some from Switzerland, some from Germany. So we had kind of a we spoke a common language of German but it was kind of a special German. Neither of us were highly fluent in German but we within a short time had a common language so we could communicate. So those 13 years were like the cutting edge of whatever is possible in Switzerland on Europe or in the world? Well I think at that point we were the first to manufacture Twisted Pneumatic Displays so I guess you're cutting edge in the world. That was definitely cutting edge at the time. And here with the SID display week there's lots of other people. How's the display market? Is it a lot of people trying to compete and being the most advanced and then a few years later they all meet and share stories or what happens? Well your guess is as good as mine. You know people get together here and find out what the people are doing and get ideas, attend the seminars, attend the meetings. You know it's a great opportunity to get up to speed on new technologies and also learn new details about old technologies. In 2019 is display industry as interested as it's ever been or the most interesting it's ever been? There's always something new. A lot of things are incremental improvements but then there's also potential breakthroughs. So how does it feel to know that your technology is everywhere? Well it's a good feeling to know that the things you worked on have become products. Change the world? Everybody's got one. How many LCDs do you have? Well let's see I got my watch and I got my iPhone. I guess that's it but then I'm carrying personally. I have my laptop computer in the ballroom there. New TV? TV in my hotel room. So it's everywhere? Yeah it's hard to believe. I worked at Techtronics for a few years and it was hard to convince them that there was display potential beyond the Catho Ray 2. That was before or it was after? That was after Switzerland. So after Switzerland you went to? To Techtronics. Which is based in? In Oregon. And you tried to convince them what? We tried to convince them that liquid crystal displays where they should really start paying attention to liquid crystal displays because Catho Ray 2 days were just about over. And they listen to you? No. So I left after five years. And then what? And then I went to Infocus Systems which developed the projection displays for board rooms and conference rooms. Was that LCD projectors? Yeah. How about the DLP is completely different? You didn't work with it? No I didn't work with that but it was sort of competing technology and Infocus Systems also sold DLP projectors. Nice. Projectors are really awesome too. Yeah but of course the rear screen projectors, that was a big deal for quite a while. Very popular in the US. But then once the 70 inch TV screens became available that in fact long before the bottom just dropped out of the rear projection television. Nice. So is a fun industry to work in? Oh absolutely. Is the coolest one. You recommend? Well I don't know about somebody just starting out. What they should do if they start now? You just make iPhone apps? No I think they should go into genetic engineering. Genetic modification technology. That's just a huge new field. You could potentially use displays to modify genes no? Well I think displays and computers play a huge role in that. Alright. Cool. Thanks a lot. I don't want to take too much time because maybe you want to be networking here at the SID display. Yeah it's fun. Thanks a lot.