Engineer, journalist, editor, consultant, display industry storyteller, and flag bearer for SID A recipient of SID's prestigious Lewis and Beatrice Winner Award, Ken Werner joined the display industry about 36 years ago. He is well known for being the editor of Information Display, a position he held for 18 years. When Ken wrote articles about a startup or a new product, companies got funded and products got sold; everyone in the display industry read his articles. He is an amazing writer and editor who always took the time to think through subject matter, and he never hesitated to speak his mind. Ken began his career as a design engineer at RCA Solid State, where he was responsible for the design of bipolar power semiconductor devices, process design, and development. He worked on factory startups of new devices and processes, production line troubleshooting, and failure analysis. Upon leaving RCA, Ken became the science editor of Choice magazine from 1971 to 1975; acquiring science editor for Cambridge University Press from 1975 to 1979; physics and electrical engineering editor for Academic Press in 1982; and senior acquiring editor for Macmillan Publishing Company from 1982 to 1985, where he created the Macmillan series in Optical and Electro-optical Engineering. From 1985 to 1987, he served as senior editor and then managing editor for IEEE Spectrum magazine, supervising editors and writers, scheduling articles and issues, and developing and sourcing content. In 1987, Ken was appointed editor of Information Display by then-SID President Larry Tannas and served in that position until 2005. He then joined Insight Media, where he became co-founding editor of the popular Display Daily newsletter and managed clients and projects. When Meko bought Display Daily in 2014, Ken went along as an analyst and contributor. Around that time, he became director of marketing for Tannas Electronic Displays. In parallel, he founded and managed Nutmeg Consultants starting in 1987, where he served a variety of clients, including Clairvoyante, Wooyoung (Korea), Shanghai Video and Audio Electronics, DEMPA Publications, David Sarnoff Laboratories, ED Research (Tokyo), Interlingua, Jenmar, Displaytec do Brasil, Welch Allyn Lighting, Nomura Securities (Hong Kong), and Samsung Display. He has served as an expert witness in a variety of display-related patent cases, and as a consultant to securities professionals. Ken spoke regularly at Alaide Mammana's Ibero-American display conferences and at conferences of the SID Latin American Chapter. He also served as program chair for several of the SID LA Chapter's popular one-day conferences on emerging display technologies. Sri Peruvemba (Sri): How is life in retirement? What is your typical day like now? Ken Werner At IEEE Spectrum office in 1985. I still read ID, along with Display Daily, various online newsletters, and material on my new technical interest: electric vehicle technology. I also read books and articles on fly fishing, cold-water ecosystems, and historical novels. I'm a director of the Mianus Chapter of Trout Unlimited (“If we take care of the fish, the fishing will take care of itself.”) and a member of the Limestone Trout Club in Canaan, Connecticut. Sri: Tell me about your early years. Were you always interested in writing? KW: From the fourth through ninth grades, I grew up in Bayside, Queens (New York City); I was an avid stickball player, as were most of my friends. My teammates assigned me to first base because they were not confident in my fielding skills. Even with me as first baseman, they weren't confident, so they would throw the pink ball at me with a gentle underhanded lob that made me stretch almost horizontal to the ground to reach it. As a result, my nickname was “Stretch.” I have one sibling, a sister. After high school in Morristown, New Jersey, I went to Rutgers University, majoring first in electrical engineering and then switching to physics. My father was a psychiatric social worker, and my mother was an elementary school teacher. We were just comfortably middle class, but my father was still able to pay for my $1,700 tuition out of his checkbook. I worked while I was at school, making hot dogs at football games and maintaining equipment at the Bubble Chamber Group in the Physics Department. The bubble chamber was an early technology for making visible the tracks of atomic particles. The chamber had been invented previously by Nobel Prize winner Donald Glaser, who received his inspiration while drinking beer with his graduate students and watching the bubbles rise in the beer pitcher. This gave him the idea of reducing the pressure in a liquid nitrogen container, causing bubbles to surround the particle track. He later tried it with beer. It didn't work. Sri: Your graduate school major was also in physics? KW: Yes—experimental solid-state physics at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. I clearly remember one morning when I was in a graduate quantum mechanics class. The young instructor, a theoretical physicist, was doing the proof for the existence of quantum oscillators. At the end, I raised my hand and said, “This is very elegant, but what's the application?” The instructor looked horrified and said, “The mathematics is the application!” At that moment, I realized I should be an engineer and not a physicist. Sri: Was RCA your first job out of school? KW: Yes. Honeywell wanted me to work on magnetic bubble memories. I wasn't smart enough to realize bubble memories were a dead end, but I did realize that this was applied physics and that I wanted to make stuff. I think I told that to my Honeywell interviewers. They agreed I should look elsewhere. RCA's Solid State Division in Somerville, New Jersey seemed like a good match. Sri: What did you work on? KW: We designed bipolar power semiconductor devices in my group. One of my devices was a high-voltage silicon control rectifier (SCR) used in the deflection circuits of RCA's CRT color TVs. Everybody else used high-voltage power transistors, but RCA couldn't make reliable ones. So, we made these SCRs for the maddeningly complex deflection circuits that placed killing demands on SCRs with brutally fast changes in current and voltage. I studied those circuits carefully and never fully understood them. I did understand that even a small amount of initial leakage over the surface of the device would increase over time and result in failure. We binned the devices that came off the line and used only the ones with the cleanest, sharpest reverse characteristics. The others received different type numbers and were sold into less demanding applications. When I was hired, the era of lifetime employment for engineers was just ending, but we didn't know that yet. I started off with six months of training, much of it at the fab in Mountaintop, Pennsylvania. I learned a lot about manufacturing engineering from the guys at Mountaintop. Because of the mutual trust we established, when Mountaintop needed support (or just a sign-off on process changes) from the design group, I was usually the designated hitter. These experiences have stayed with me over my entire career. I became good at predicting the difficulties of scaling up production of power semiconductors, and found the lessons also applied to displays. My main takeaway: Making one (or a dozen) displays in a lab is a completely different animal from designing a series of manufacturing processes that will produce tens of thousands of essentially identical displays month in and month out. With that truth buried in my psyche, it was easy to spot the insanely optimistic claims of dozens of startups that “we will be in volume production in 18 months.” Sri: Did you encounter any display-related work at RCA? What Deadline? Ken busy at the helm, even after retirement. The RCA Princeton team later succeeded in getting interest from a Somerville integrated circuit (IC) group because they needed an application for their otherwise uncompetitive ICs. They made a little watch circuit, combined it with a basic segmented display made with the Princeton material, and formed an unsuccessful digital watch business. Eventually, they sold the business to Timex, at the time a maker of inexpensive mechanical watches. Timex LCD watches were a success. Unlike RCA, Timex knew watches. Sri: RCA was a pioneering company. Why did you leave? KW: “General” David Sarnoff (president of RCA and founder of NBC) had become ill and retired; he turned over management to his son and a bunch of business school types. General Sarnoff loved engineers, but within months, the bean-counter and business school mentality of the new management took hold, and the atmosphere changed rapidly. Management bought the Hertz Rental Car business and Banquet frozen foods and created an RCA mainframe computer business to compete with IBM. The bad results were predictable. They started laying off engineers—first the dead wood and then the good people who complained about the new direction. That caused more good people to leave voluntarily. I hit my three-year anniversary. I was retained, I assumed, because of my good relations with the factory; but I did not like what was happening, and the applications engineers who supported my devices were being laid off, so I left voluntarily. I also had discovered something about myself. I found the first six months of a project challenging, and the next two years of grinding out the details tedious. How could I use my technical knowledge in a way that would allow me to be a jack of all trades? Sri: Was that the start of your career as an editor? KW: Yes. I became a science and technology editor for Choice magazine, which was owned by the American Library Association. I either reviewed, or sent out for review, science and technology books. The idea was to recommend those books that were valuable for college and university libraries. Then, I became an acquiring editor at Cambridge University Press (CUP)—one of the people who talks authors into writing books for their publishing house. Since many of these books were graduate- and professional-level textbooks, I traveled extensively to university and technical conferences to meet potential authors. Sri: The famed Cambridge University Press, an editor's dream. Why did you leave? KW: I didn't; I was fired after four and a half years. My job was to obtain books that suited the US market served by the New York office on 57th Street, but these books had to be approved by the Syndics of CUP. The Syndics came to their editorial meetings dressed in academic robes. (Think of the Rembrandt painting The Syndics of the Drapers’ Guild that appears on packages of Dutch Masters Cigars.) Some of the Syndics were not inclined to trust the judgment of the editors concerning what books made sense for the American market. So, it became impossible for me to please both my boss in New York and my boss in Cambridge. I chose New York. But I knew my time was getting short, despite my Cambridge boss telling me about a particularly contentious proposal: “It's your decision to make, of course.” We both knew it wasn't. I enjoyed my time at CUP, and I learned another lesson. Every professional relationship has an expiration date. Sri: Where did you go next, and how did you get involved with the display industry? KW: After CUP, I moved downtown to Academic Press. I was the physics and electrical engineering acquiring editor, and things were going very well. But Academic was owned by Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. The company had to move from its New York building because of a huge impending rent increase, so Bill Jovanovich threatened then-mayor Ed Koch that he would move out of New York unless Koch provided large tax incentives. After not reaching a consensus, Jovanovich moved the company against the advice of almost everybody in the publishing industry. Academic wound up in Orlando, Florida, and I declined to join them. I found my way to Macmillan Publishing Company, where I enjoyed the support of a large staff of talented professionals, but clashed with the decisions of senior management. From Macmillan, I moved to the east side of Manhattan and was hired as a senior editor—and later managing editor—of IEEE Spectrum magazine. The editors researched and wrote articles, and we also obtained articles from industry experts. One of those authors was the late display industry pioneer and SID President Larry Tannas. He wrote an article on LCDs (circa 1985). Larry was busy with other projects and asked for a lot of support in writing the article. We developed a great relationship, which continued to a second article the following year. During this period, probably because Larry encouraged me, I went to a SID meeting. I remember seeing a large monochrome IBM plasma display in 1985, and this red-orange display captivated me. Sri: What was it like running this publication? Why did you leave? What a Catch Ken with a 31-inch striped bass off the coast of Maine. Photo credit: Ray Hamilton. Although editing ID was more than a full-time job, I supplemented the income with consulting work under the name Nutmeg Consultants. Over time, SID contracted with me to provide other services, including running press relations for annual conferences and doing marketing for some of the minor conferences. Dian ran the press room at the annual conference (not yet named “Display Week”) for years, and we established a very warm relationship with members of the press and SID. With these and other assignments from SID and other clients, Nutmeg's income was adequate. The design work we did at that time lives on in the current SID and Display of the Year logos. As ID editor, I traveled to Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Europe, and Brazil because I believed (and still believe) that an important function of ID is to report on SID conferences around the world and interview interesting industry figures in each chapter's territory. Since I was the person from SID who appeared at these conferences year after year, I was seen as the formal representative of SID International, which I wasn't. But it was important to the local chapters and companies to be able to show me to their local government officials and stakeholders as a way of projecting their own international appeal. I fulfilled this role happily for many years. But, as I had already learned, any relationship between a society or company and an outside consultant has an expiration date. Mine came. It was time to move on. Sri: And then you continued to work in the display industry for approximately another 18 years? KW: I did. I went to work for Chris Chinook at Insight Media—I wrote technical reports and papers. At Insight Media, the late Steve Sechrist and I became the founding co-editors of Display Daily (DD). Initially, Steve and I wrote all five DD articles each week, but that became unsustainable, so we added contributors. Chris sold DD to Bob Raikes at Meko in the UK, and I went along. DD had become a very influential publication in the display industry. Bob recently sold DD to Jon Peddie at Jon Peddie Research. Jon has given the newsletter a more modern look and new editorial mix. DD continues to evolve. Sri: In your opinion as a successful journalist, can someone make a living as a journalist in our industry? KW: No, you can't make a living as a full-time journalist in our industry. Those that provide the service today are either volunteers, such as yourself; are supported by non-profits, such as SID; or work for research and analysis companies, such as those that use industry news to help sell their research reports. Even including these, the number of opportunities are extremely limited. Sri: You once mentioned “competition by suicide.” Tell us about that. KW: During one of my trips to Asia, I visited a Taiwan display company. The CEO was delighted to speak openly. He showed me their plasma display facility, but he wanted to talk about his new LCD fab. With jolly gallows humor, he said there was no way he would ever make back what the bank was investing in the new LCD fab, but if he were to stop and try to survive on the income from his existing last-generation fabs, then the bank would no longer support him. “So, I have to expand and become a larger company that will lose even more money; this is competition by suicide.” But it wasn't just him. It is well accepted that Japan never made any money on displays, but the displays enabled a large monitor and personal computer industry that benefited Japan Inc. hugely before the bulk of the industry moved to Taiwan, Korea, and now China. Sri: What a story—true for most LCD panel factories for sure. What were some of your happiest moments in the display industry? KW: There were many, but among the happiest were the opportunities to cover display events in Asia and around the world, and make friends in Japan, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Europe, and Brazil. One US-based incident I remember fondly was speaking with Tei Iki, who ran Sony's CRT monitor operation in San Diego. Tei's job was to build and sell as many CRT monitors as he could before LCDs made CRTs completely obsolete. Tei once placed a 14-inch Trinitron CRT monitor (which had a flat face) alongside a 14-inch LCD monitor. The front flat surfaces of the two monitors had been precisely aligned. “See,” said Tei, “both have flat panels. The rest,” he continued, while dramatically spreading his hands to indicate the depth of the CRT monitor, “is just infrastructure!” Sri: Ken, thank you for your time. I have learned so much from you over the years and hope to one day be half as good a writer as you are. Sri Peruvemba is an associate editor for Information Display. He is the CEO of Marketer International in the Silicon Valley and works with high-tech companies in board and advisory roles. He can be reached at [email protected].