91av

Razor blades rarely elicit glowing endorsements from scientists. But
one unusual set of diamond-coated blades from an even more unusual inventor
has prompted enthusiastic outbursts from leading academics: ‘I cannot emphasise
too strongly that you are potentially on the threshold of a multibillion
pound industry,’ said one, Ekhard Salje, co-director of the superconductivity
research centre at the University of Cambridge.

Two years on, frustration with attempts to exploit the technology has
forced the inventor, Ernest Nagy, to give away his discovery of a cheap
and elegant way to lay down a thin film of diamond. Scientists in many of
the world’s largest companies have spent millions of pounds and many years
of research trying to perfect the trick for doing just this. The 50-year-old
Nagy passed up the chance to become a very rich man rather than risk seeing
his technique consigned to the back room of a multinational corporation,
gathering dust.

Nagy spent more than a year trying to clinch a development deal with
Anglo American, the South-African based conglomerate. He could not afford
to exploit the invention himself and yet did not want to share ownership
with someone who could. Instead, he offered the company an exclusive licence
to commercialise and market the technique. In this way, he would retain
as much control as possible over the invention’s exploitation, while securing
his own independence and ensuring that he was free to get on with other
work. But Nagy became frustrated with the time it was taking to establish
an agreement and, early last month, the negotiations broke down. He told
the company he had reached the end of the line, and a week later rang round
telling anybody who had expressed an interest that the technology was free
for them to use. This unconventional step is typical of the man. He wanted
to avoid the frustrating round of negotiations between inventors and large
companies that can last years and end up with the idea never being used.

Nagy, whose full name is Ernest Nagy de Nagybaczon, was born in Hungary,
but left as a refugee around the time of the 1956 uprising, when he was
14. He never went to university, and dropped out after two years from evening
classes that would have led to a degree in physics. ‘Mine is not a hard-luck
story because I can easily promote myself. Neither does it do anything for
me to have people say ‘Wow, what a genius he is’.’

Nagy wants to use his experience with the diamond coating process as
an example from which other inventors might learn. People with ideas must
not be cowed by large companies into giving up control of the fruits of
their creativity, he says. ‘It is not that I got in a huff with them. If
there had been a better commercial proposition I would have held up that
as an example. I have nothing against large companies, in fact I recognise
the difficulty they have in dealing with Herberts like myself because the
whole process is so confrontational. Things ought to be more cooperative.
Inventing is like sex – the more you do it the better you get at it . .
. and you have to be able to work interactively with other people.’

EDIFYING EXPERIENCE

His thesis is that inventors need not necessarily seek to make money
out of their bright ideas. The most important thing, he says, is to show
these ideas to the world and feel edified by that. ‘I want to give confidence
to the thousands of others with latent talent. When you create something
and see it manifest itself, it is very spiritually uplifting. I’m not really
worried that I’m not going to be a zill-ionaire. What is important for me
is to go to bed at night, wake up after eight hours, and not be a miserable
person. I don’t want to end up a distraught old guy wandering around muttering
to myself.’

The news that Nagy’s technique was up for grabs electrified everyone
who had an inkling of its potential. The Department of Trade and Industry
moved within 24 hours to help support the idea. Douglas Ponsford, who runs
the DTI’s technology transfer schemes in southwest England, is expected
to authorise £25 000 for the University of Bristol to help further
research on the technique. Flann Microwave Instruments, a small engineering
company from Bodmin, Cornwall, has said it will match this sum. The DTI
money will help to stage a conference in Bristol next month, when Nagy hopes
to demonstrate his diamond-coating technique to 300 industrialists. ‘Now
it’s up to British industry to do what they want with it,’ he says.

The technique is delightfully simple. It relies on precisely controlled
‘buffing’, in which a pad treated with diamond powder is spun at around
30 000 revolutions a minute while in close contact with the sample to be
coated. Ponsford says: ‘I think the thing has considerable potential and
looks exceedingly promising. This has all happened so fast. It is now up
to British industry to react faster than our foreign competitors.’

Five or six British and Continental companies are known to be interested
in the technology, but Salje predicts that the Japanese will be the first
to exploit it. Nagy acknowledges the dilemma he faced. ‘I have an interest
in seeing British industry get a leg up,’ he says. ‘But so many inventors
are sitting on good ideas that no one will buy from them. Sometimes it is
better to throw things away or give them away.’

David Dingley, a reader in physics at the University of Bristol, says:
‘If these films could be made consistently and uniformly this is an enormous
breakthrough.’ The diamond in the coating appears to undergo a phase transformation
as it is laid down – switching from a cubic to a hexagonal form. ‘Something
unusual is happening,’ Dingley says. ‘It is fascinating scientifically that
the film produced this way seems to be so flat and to have such an interesting
structure. We couldn’t go ahead until Nagy had made a decision on what to
do. Now he has broken his ties with Anglo American, I think we are in a
favoured position.’

The process is far from refined, and the films it produces, though continuous,
are not consistent. But Dingley is confident enough of the industrial possibilities,
and sufficiently excited by the prospect of interesting science that he
is pressing hard for Bristol to carry out the first systematic study of
the films.

Diamond is famous as the hardest substance known, but has other remarkable
characteristics that make it uniquely useful. It is a better conductor of
heat at room temperature than any other material, yet is also a good electrical
insulator. And if it is free from impurities, diamond is one of the most
transparent materials. In industry, diamond can form a tough, noncorrosive
coating for tools or high-speed motors, smooth surface coatings for anything
from missiles to frying pans and virtually friction-free bearings for turbines.

Its biggest potential may lie in electronics. If scientists could create
a consistent thin film of the material, they might be able to use it to
create a new family of semiconductors. Such devices would dissipate heat
rapidly, so electronics manufacturers could pack the elements that form
them more closely together. Processors built from such devices could thus
operate more swiftly than today’s silicon devices.

But producing such films has proved an intractable problem. The huge
research effort directed towards this has spawned a number of methods for
depositing or growing diamond crystals. The most successful has been chemical
vapour deposition, but this can be a slow process involving reaction chambers,
vacuum pumps, high temperatures and pressures, and dangerous gases. The
approach also produces quite rough diamond surfaces.

Nagy’s method uses a machine he developed for coating surfaces with
Teflon. The machine consists of spinning cylinders, or ‘mops’, each built
up from a pile of discs made of cloth – Nagy had developed it by cannibalising
equipment used for polishing surfaces. The machine’s first mop deposited
Teflon on a surface, then its second mop polished the coating. One evening,
almost ten years ago, someone left the machine running by mistake, without
adding any Teflon to the surface being polished. In the morning, Nagy found
that a tiny amount of Teflon stuck in the second, polishing mop had been
laid down on the surface as a very fine film. Over the next few years, he
experimented further, with various powders, and found he could lay down
thin films of almost any material on almost any surface. ‘I recognised almost
as soon as I started work on it that something of enormous value had dropped
into my lap – but I cannot claim brilliance.’

FILM FOUNDATION

He knew the discovery must have wider applications, and began to explore
one of the problems he had read about – the difficulty scientists were having
making superconducting devices. The main constraint was in finding a suitable
substrate, or foundation layer. When in 1989 he approached scientists at
Salje’s superconductivity research centre in Cambridge and asked them to
name the ideal substrate, they chose diamond. So he went to Anglo American
and spoke to Jack Holmes, the company’s technical director. Holmes sent
him £5000-worth of diamond powder free, from which Nagy produced his
first samples – the diamond-coated razor blades. At Holmes’s suggestion
he asked researchers at De Beers, an affiliate of Anglo American with expertise
in industrial diamonds, to analyse the films. But De Beers was not impressed
with the technique and returned the samples without examining them, says
Nagy. He respects the company’s decision, and the rebuff did not defuse
his admiration for Holmes’s entrepreneurial spirit nor that of the other
officials he came into contact with at Anglo American.

Instead he took the samples to the Cambridge team, which eventually
confirmed that he had deposited a fine film of diamond. But before they
did so, the researchers had to admit to an embarrassing mistake, inadvertently
supplying Nagy with one of his best anecdotes and lessons for aspiring inventors.
Salje’s team initially reported finding nothing on the razor blades, but
then discovered its researchers had studied the wrong side. ‘This goes to
show you should never rely on things fed to you from on high, or hold scientists
in awe,’ Nagy observes.

Second time round, Salje did the tests himself. He wrote back in enthusiastic
tones: ‘It appears that, for the first time, extended areas of diamond coated
material have been produced using a surprisingly simple and cost-effective
procedure. It must be stressed that the films have a relatively smooth surface.
This observation is relevant for all applications in which such a coating
can be used to reduce surface friction of a component.

‘Having seen the sheer simplicity of your process and the relatively
small sums of money you have invested in producing these samples compared
with the enormous investments which are made by major companies in this
field, it is even more astonishing that you could produce these films. They
are certainly superior to film produced by other techniques at an equivalent
early stage of their development.’

In a subsequent letter Salje talked of the possibilities of developing
the technique for producing superconductors. ‘This might turn out to be
one of the most important developments in the field of superconductivity
and thin-film deposition.” He also advised Nagy to ‘seek adequate funding
at the earliest possible opportunity in order to continue your work’.

But negotiations with Anglo American turned sour, and after repeated
delays Nagy became impatient. He gave the company a two-month deadline in
which to conclude a licensing deal. But the company prevaricated, and on
Tuesday 10 November he told the company he had had enough, and was giving
the technology away. Anglo American can still exploit the technology, but
so can everybody else.

‘When you hit on something that is really valuable, a patent is only
as good as the money you are prepared to use to protect it. I felt at first
that I needed the resources of Anglo American. But I told them that unless
they agreed to the thing on my terms, then no matter how much money they
offered me it was going to be useless. I wanted to tell my story and would
not have accepted anything that restricted my independence or tried to
silence me.’

Nagy anticipates a certain amount of wrath from Anglo American because
it may now be harder for the company to establish a monopoly. ‘They have
already told me that they think what I am doing is insane.’ A spokeswoman
for Anglo American confirmed that negotiations with Nagy have broken down.
Holmes would not comment other than to say that he felt it was ‘not in anybody’s
interest to air these things in public’.

Nagy is in a strong position to strike lucrative consultancy deals with
companies that adopt his diamond-coating technology. He has already made
thousands of pounds from feasibility studies for firms interested in exploiting
other uses for the coating technique. These include an investigation for
the US Treasury on protective shields for dollar bills, and work under way
at Siemens in Munich on diamond heat sinks for electronic devices. In the
early 1980s, he was earning £7000 a week from this sort of contract.

Nagy’s financial history is peppered with bizarre anecdotes. Ten years
ago his business went into receivership; he was working on a system of dry
transfers to help speed up technical drawing. His landlord was Coutts bank,
and he owed several thousand pounds in rent. He rang the bank’s chairman,
David Money-Coutts, from a telephone box, arranged to meet him that day
and persuaded him to wait for the rent until things looked up. ‘People always
complain that the big banks and big companies are unfriendly and unhelpful,’
says Nagy. ‘But if you approach them with a good idea and communicate it
well they can be very imaginative. Even accountants can be creative if you
give them the chance.’

LISTENING BANKER

Money-Coutts is approached directly only once or twice a year by a customer
with a problem. He remembers Nagy, who he said stood out among those who
have asked for the bank’s support for scientific projects. ‘He wasn’t being
an airy-fairy scientist, he was being sensible. He wasn’t whingeing and
saying no one will support me, he was just getting on with it.’ He concurs
with Nagy’s view that large companies are not always the rogues they appear:
‘If you are sufficiently imaginative, and show that you know what you are
talking about then people will get interested. He is tremendously enthusiastic
and that’s infectious.’

Brian Briscoe, professor of interface engineering at Imperial College,
London describes Nagy as a great man, with much scientific acumen. Nagy
is able to distinguish good technology from bad, says Briscoe, but appears
to do little market research. ‘His talents might have been better utilised
in some other arena,’ Briscoe believes. ‘The trouble is that he has chosen
to work in technologies which were not appropriate to our current economic
climate.’ Briscoe says that computers or pocket televisions might have proved
better bets.

Last year Nagy once again faced eviction, this time from his family
home in southwest London. The day before the deadline he was handed a cheque
for £25 000 by the US corporation Xerox for a licence on one use of
his coating technique. This deal was as unconventional as his recent wrangling
with Anglo American. He signed a licensing document drawn up by Xerox, but
then insisted on a few changes. He agreed to accept three lump sums amounting
to £50 000 for the licence. He said Xerox could keep any royalties
on products it made in Britain, Hungary or Canada – countries to which he
had a personal attachment. But royalties from other places, such as the
US or Japan, were to go to the Xerox employee whose efforts had meant the
deal went ahead and his technology got an airing. ‘They were gobsmacked,
but went away and eventually agreed to do it.’ The product is under development
now, and there is someone at Xerox with much to gain if it succeeds.

Nagy claims that a subsidiary of the US corporation Johnson and Johnson
modelled a research team on his unorthodox approach to generating ideas.
This is based on the approach of much experimentation on subjects you know
little about. He says the best ideas that have come from his employees are
always from the ‘idiots’ in his workforce – those with no background in
science, and no preconceptions about what can and cannot be done. ‘You cannot
discover something if you know it’s there. You should always come from a
position of ignorance.’

Briscoe has known Nagy for many years. He describes him as the kind
of man who would get done in a week what others would expect to take months.
‘His approach to life is absolutely unique. I don’t know anybody who would
be prepared to work so hard, with such personal and familial sacrifice,
for so little apparent reward. Life is not fair if people like Ernest Nagy
don’t get on. There is a rather special character there.’

Dingley adds: ‘He is a very unusual character. He is determined to show
that you don’t have to have umpteen letters after your name to make something
of great value in science. He is more concerned about making that point
than a fortune.’

Nagy remains philosophical: ‘One can look upon invention as a huge bucket
of gold landing on your desk. In the future I hope that I will have other
ideas that will be marketable and if they are not, I will give those away
as well,’ he says. ‘I get angry when people say that the fact that they
didn’t go to a public school or to a university is the reason why they cannot
come up with good ideas. That’s such a pile of horseshit.’

Nagy believes there is no such thing as ‘an inventor’, or a specially
anointed group of people that can invent – everybody can do it, he says.
‘I want to show people that you don’t have to come from a famous family,
or have a million pounds to have good ideas.’

Susan Watts is science and technology correspondent of The Independent.