American Superconductor commercial viability (1995–present)

MIT spin-off founded by Greg Yurek (with Vander Sande and Yet-Ming Chiang) using silver internal-oxidation route to HTSC ceramics. Twenty-some years on: limping, Chinese theft of wind-turbine software, some New York City transmission lines installed. The downstream consequence Tom predicted.

It turns out a vice president of American Superconductor was in the audience. He was not happy. American Superconductor is a spin-off of this department. From my point of view, the best thing — it was Greg Yurek, John Vander Sande, and Yet-Ming Chiang came up with this way to internally oxidize silver and make the high-temperature superconducting ceramics. From my point of view, the best thing that happened about high-temperature superconductivity was I got Greg Yurek's office. Greg had come six months before me as a junior faculty member, and he had been given John Wulff's old office, right there on the Great Court. One of the nicest offices in the department. When I was acting department head in '89, he came in and said, Tom, I'm going to resign my tenured position on the faculty. I said why. He says, I'm going to become president of American Superconductor. I said, Greg, you don't have to resign, you can take a leave of absence. No, I want to do it the right way. And he did, to his credit. He resigned, gave up his tenure. He didn't have to. He could have held on to it for another three years. He went off and founded American Superconductor.

Greg Yurek's 1989 departure from MIT to found American Superconductor; company has never made money but draws hundreds of millions in research grants on the promise.

So what did they do? They had the salvation in 1989. What was the salvation? Superconductors. High-temperature superconductors. The problem is this one didn't work. I always say the only good thing that came out of high-temperature superconductors is I got my office on the great court, when Greg Yurek resigned in 1989 to start American Superconductor. American Superconductor has never made money. They certainly get hundreds of millions of dollars in government research grants and industrial research grants because there is this promise of superconductivity as a material that would solve all the problems of all the power in the big cities, because you don't have enough room to carry all the power to all those buildings. They still have the problem and they're running out of space, and it will limit the ability to build buildings as big as we want.