In Toledo, the seat of the U.S. glass industry, McMaster enjoys--literally--iconic status. There is a bust of him in the lobby of McMaster Hall, the University of Toledo physics building. (He has been a generous donor to the university.) Students ritualistically walk by and touch the nose for good luck before exams.
That sort of idolatry is light-years from the farm in northwestern Ohio where McMaster grew up, and where he discovered that husking corn in February, with "icicles running off my nose," was not his idea of a great career choice. After receiving his masters in nuclear physics from Ohio State, McMaster landed a research position at one of the country's premier glassmakers, Libbey-Owens-Ford, in Toledo, where in time he, arguably, came to know more than just about anyone about how to temper glass. Tempering involves heating and then rapidly cooling the glass. The process compresses the glass, adding tensile strength. The glass can be shaped. If broken, it shatters like rock salt, leaving no sharp edges. Not a bad advance if you happen to be a maker of auto glass, patio doors, and the like.
McMaster founded Glasstech in 1971 to commercialize his work in tempered glass. Glasstech machines currently produce 80% of all the automotive glass and 50% of all the architectural glass in the world. In 1987, McMaster sold the company for $100 million.
McMaster may have gotten rich, but that hardly dulled his drive. During the 1970s, as the country slogged through the energy crisis, he began staring hard at the sun during retreats to his second home in Arizona. He calculated that he could create a solar panel so efficient that a field of such panels arrayed over 2,000 square miles of Arizona desert--about 2% of the state's landmass--could sate the entire country's appetite for heat and light. He could solarize every power plant in the country and end the hegemony of oil.
Backed by 57 local investors in Toledo, McMaster founded Glasstech Solar in 1984, which he then retained after the 1987 sale of the parent. Glasstech Solar began working with thin-film deposition, a technique for coating glass with photovoltaic, or PV, cells. (See "Why the Buzz?" below) That meant depositing on glass a semiconductor material called amorphous silicon to create a layer of PV cells. For five years Glasstech Solar worked with amorphous silicon to little effect, running through $12 million in the process.
Suddenly, in 1990, McMaster boldly changed course. Glasstech Solar was reincarnated as Solar Cells Inc., and McMaster offered to pay back any of his investors who wanted out. Then he raised another $15 million--$2 million of which was his own--to put into the company, and started again with a relatively unknown but risky semiconductor material, cadmium telluride.
The Vision
McMaster's penchant for taking the road less traveled is reflected in the ambitious strategy he has set for SCI. He aims to use SCI's leading technology to crack open the market for solar energy by flooding that market with solar panels. That will drive down the cost of the panels and within five years will make solar energy cost-competitive with other sources of energy.
That is a huge leap given that global demand for PV cells in 1997 amounted to just 125 megawatts, a small figure compared with the 600 megawatts that one ordinary nuclear plant can easily generate. Most of the 1997 production of PV modules went to niche markets far off the grid, where cost is not as big an issue. Peter Meyers, director of R&D at SCI between 1990 and 1994, recalls how McMaster would refer to the pilot production machine the company built in 1993 as a "toy"--even though refinements have since brought its current potential to about 20 megawatts, or roughly one-sixth of last year's global solar-energy output. McMaster had far grander designs in mind. "Harold was talking about building a machine that would produce 500 megawatts a year," Meyers recalls.
McMaster's ambitious plans for SCI flow directly from his grand success at Glasstech, which, in effect, created the market for tempered glass. "People said we'd sell 5 machines worldwide," says SCI's Cicak, Glasstech's former president. "We've sold 400 in the U.S. alone." The Glasstech product, broadly defended by a host of patents, virtually monopolized the fast-growing markets it helped create.
Norman Nitschke, a cofounder of Glasstech, says SCI, similarly well-defended by patents, is set on a similar course. "Harold's aim is to make a large-production machine that will provide many times the current world demand," he says. "He expects the market to develop as a result." To realize that vision, McMaster foresees integrating SCI's panel-coating process into "float lines" in the glass industry. (A float line is the industry's equivalent of an assembly line.) That way, every glass plant could turn out windows one day and switch to producing solar panels the next--all on the same float line.
And doing that is a slam dunk if you listen to Cicak. "We know every president, every CEO, every guy in charge of the major glass companies in the world," he says. "The engineering and science on this are done. Now it's just a question of upscaling the machinery and marketing the product."
If McMaster sees the glass industry as, in effect, his joint manufacturer, he looks to the domestic utility industry--volume driven and very price sensitive--as his prime customer. Hence, McMaster says, it's imperative to ramp up production in order to drive down price and meet the huge market demand that will be inevitable. "You have to ask yourself, 'Will this technology allow you to process 500 tons of glass a day?" says McMaster. "If it can't do that, it's a waste of time to do it."
