Werner Haas, LCD pioneer, passed away on March 30,
2008
By Joel Pollack and Andy Lakatos
With so much of today’s LCD fabrication coming from Asia, it
is easy to forget that the early R&D for LCDs was being done in the
When we think of the most important technological inventors
we often think of theoreticians who approached problems through mathematical
modeling. But often, some of the most
important contributions came from creative minds that approached problems a
very different way. Werner Haas, one of
the pioneers in the LCD industry, died on March 30th of a heart attack in his
Webster, NY home, at the age of 79. He
was a prolific inventor at Xerox’s
Werner led a life that had its share of stress, escaping
Nazi Germany with his family in the mid-30s as the Nazis rose to power. They traveled to
Werner was a man with a well-tuned sense of humor and a gift for knowing people. He had insights and perspective on the developing LCD industry that had significant impact on Xerox R&D management. He delighted in every turn of events in the display industry and closely followed every new innovation, reading every publication as if it were the one that could save the world. His friends and colleagues found great comfort in a visit to his office, which was always, stacked high with publications and copies of technical papers.
Werner was an inspiration to both us and so many of his colleagues at Xerox. His expressions and sense of humor have stuck with so many of us for years. He would say, “science is not a potato,” meaning that unlike the highly complex nature of living things, the science of display materials and the technology of display devices could be understood if one only chose to do the proper experiments and measurements. He dedicated his life to doing just that.
When Haas began his research on LCDs in 1965 LCD technology was barely more than a laboratory curiosity. At that time the key interest was in the enormous variety of LCD textures and alignments, rather than TN with an active matrix backplane. His lab at Xerox was filled with vials of LCDs, cell samples and a variety of optics to examine what he had found.
In the early days, the application for LCDs was far from obvious, and we all grappled for the best way to use these unique materials. At that time cholesteric LCDs played a bigger role than nematic LCDs. One such device, using the cholesteric LCDs, developed at Xerox, was referred to as the Thermally Induced Transition. As a very hefty laser was scanned across the surface one could heat the material and change the texture from a scattering focal conic texture to a Grandjean nonscattering texture. When Xerox’s top management came through for the critical demo, Werner was sarcastically asked if he was developing blackboards for Eskimos. Needless to say this was not one of the ideas that went far. To Werner’s credit, comments of this nature didn’t discourage him from pursuing the next good idea, and out of this work came some of the industry’s earliest optical light valves. Perhaps one of the lessons many of us learned from Werner was the value of persistence and patience.
We must relate a story about the first 10-in TFT LCD. Peter Brody and Fan Luo at Westinghouse made the very first large-area TFTs using CdSe and sold one sample to Xerox for the tidy sum of $50,000, which in 1972 was worth far more than today’s $50,000. We set up the precious panel in Werner’s lab, but neither Werner nor any of the rest of us had the courage to turn it on for fear we would wreck it. Literally months passed until any of us had the courage to turn it on, but this was the precursor to Xerox’s investment in the development of TFT backplanes, 5 years later.
Due to shifting corporate business priorities at
Xerox, none of the early LCD patents were commercially developed nor
enforced by the company. In 1973
Werner entered the equally exciting world of high-speed ink jet printing.
Werner’s efforts in the early 70s contributed to Xerox’s development of a
synchronous multi-jet, high speed printing device with performance far beyond
the inkjet machines we are using today. It
was not until 1979 that Werner reentered LCD R&D activities at Xerox, but
this time as a senior advisor to the newly formed LCD development team,
which was also part of the pioneering Large Area Electronics Facility, at the
Werner also worked on advancing the performance capabilities of electrophotographic or xerographic printers. A two color or highlight color high-speed printer was developed in collaboration between Werner’s group in research and another group in engineering. This became a very successful Xerox product throughout the 80s and 90s.
Werner served the display and electronic printing industries well with
his years of hard work and leadership. He
had remarkable scientific insight into complex problems. With a very high rate of success he was able
to differentiate those problems which could be solved from those where the
barriers to be overcome were out of reach.
He was a Fellow of both the SID and of the IS&T (Imaging Science and Technology). During the 80s as Engineering and then Conference VP of the IS&T he was a key driving force for establishing IS&T as the leading professional society in printing technologies. There are few people who have contributed so significantly in so many different ways over such a long tenure to both displays and electronic printing as did Werner. He will be greatly missed by many for his incredible humor, his outlook on life, and for the inspiration that he offered to many of us who endeavored to turn LCD displays and electronic printing technologies into today’s very profitable businesses.