As Clear As...

摘要

He power of wishful thinking is on display in the office of Robert Saxe, chairman of Research Frontiers. Surrounding his desk are pictures not of his family but of Thomas Edison, Neil Armstrong and Sir Isaac Newton―inspiration for a 38-year-old public company that claims to be spearheading one of history's biggest revolutions in glass. Alas, it has yet to earn a dime. Be patient, urges Saxe, 68. "When Bill Gates started Microsoft, I'm sure he struggled along for a while," he says. Not quite as long as Saxe has in developing something called SmartGlass, which changes from dark blue to almost clear with the turn of a knob. A 1960 Harvard Business School grad who did market research for Corning Glass Works, Saxe in the early 1960s sank $168,000 into the rights for light-valve technology, a method of controlling the amount of light coming through glass, only to learn that the technology had already been patented by Polaroid Corp. founder Edwin Land in the 1930s. That didn't stop Saxe. In 1965 he founded Research Frontiers to exploit a related expired patent of Land's.