America-Israel Patent Law Blog

If you grew up in the Detroit area from the 1970’s until 2009, you knew the name Bill Davidson: he was the owner of the Detroit Pistons, who won back-to-back NBA championships in 1989-1990. But he was also a philanthropist, giving money to the business school at his alma mater, the University of Michigan; helping to restore parks in the City of Detroit; and establishing an annual donation of several million dollars to the Detroit Symphony Orchestra.

That philanthropy wasn’t limited to Michigan, however: if you’ve ever been to the excavations on the southern side of the Temple Mount, you’ve probably been in the Davidson visitors’ center there, and just down the street from where I live, there’s the Davidson Center for Science Teaching at the Weizmann Institute, which among other things offers classes to students whose schools can’t afford teaching laboratories.  He also helped establish a center at the Technion to teach people how to manage technology companies, and donated $75 million to Hadassah Hospital in Ein Karem in Jerusalem.

In my youth, I never paid much attention to how Davidson made his money. I just knew that it had been in automotive and industrial glass. Which is why this June, when Iranian missiles landed at the Weizmann Institute and the resulting shockwave broke glass for hundred of meters around – including a pane in the lobby of my building – I thought of Bill Davidson, and was prompted to look a bit more deeply into how exactly he’d made that bundle. That’s when I found this piece in the Ann Arbor Observer.

Turns out there’s an IP angle to Davidson’s story.  For a little over 100 years, from 1848 to the 1950’s, sheet glass had been made by pressing molten glass between two rollers. Problem was, the surface wasn’t as smooth as needed, so the glass needed to be polished, adding to the production cost. In the 1950’s, two men working for Pilkington Brothers in England came up with a new process: extrude the sheet of glass onto a bath of molten tin. By designing the shape of the bath correctly so that the glass cooled gradually as it moved away from the rollers, the surface of the glass could be maintained sufficiently smooth for use. US Patent no. 2911759 describes the process; Pilkington Brothers has a number of other glass production patents that it obtained in the succeeding years.

The way this process made its way into auto glass manufacturing in the USA was that Ford Motor Company believed in vertical integration, i.e. doing all of its own work. I remember, for instance, touring the Ford River Rouge plant in fourth grade, and watching a huge slab of red-hot steel emerge from an oven, because Ford was the only one of the Big 3 automakers that made its own steel. So too with glass: when the Pilkington process became available, Ford licensed the patent so it could produce its own glass more efficiently.

This posed a problem for Guardian Glass Co., which was owned by Davidson’s father-in-law, and which until then had sold glass to the other auto manufacturers. So Davidson took a calculated risk: he guessed that Pilkington wouldn’t sue for patent infringement and that Ford wouldn’t sue for tortious interference or the like, hired away Ford’s chief glass engineer, and started making his own glass using the Pilkington process. It worked: Guardian’s fortunes rebounded. And then, in what in Israel we call true chutzpah, a few years later, after Guardian was on solid footing and supplying glass to much of the industry, Davidson went to Pilkington and licensed the relevant patents…but on better terms that Ford had received.

The piece in the Observer contrasted Davidson’s success with a similar story that had a less happy ending, although it turned out it had a personal if merely tangential connection to me.  There was another engineer at Ford, who tried to steal the Pilkington technology, but who got caught and convicted and eventually returned to his native Turkey. I didn’t follow the story at the time, but I realized upon reading the Observer piece that the engineer’s son overlapped with me in junior high and high school, and that we performed a concerto for two horns together in 1983.

So thank you, Bill Davidson, for taking some risks, and for sharing the wealth that you accumulated with some סייתא דשמייא (heavenly help).