Troy, Mich., in the belly of the automobile industry, is an odd place to spark a revolution against the internal-combustion engine. But, then, Stanford Ovshinsky is no ordinary gearhead.

The son of a Lithuanian-born scrap-metal dealer, Ovshinsky opened a machine shop after high school, but that couldn't satisfy him for long. Although he never went to college, he founded a new field of physics based on the superconductivity of certain alloys. The company he formed in 1960, Energy Conversion Devices, makes the photovoltaic cells used on the Mir space station to generate electricity from sunlight. In the '80s the Japanese licensed his patents to produce digital video discs. But what really revs him up these days is a car battery. How dull is that? Not at all, if it can "change the world," as he claims with a subversive glint in his eye.

In his wood-paneled office, the 76-year-old inventor with an Einsteinian shock of silver hair paces before a white board covered with mysterious equations and diagrams. "All you hear," he says, "is that electric cars are not realistic. But we are providing the means." Ovshinsky's patented new battery powers the 1999 model of General Motors' EV-1, the first modern American electric car to be marketed to the general public--although only in Arizona and California so far. It can go 150 miles before it needs recharging, more than double the distance achieved by electric cars powered by traditional batteries.

The breakthrough came in 1982, when Ovshinsky, the self-made alchemist, invented small, powerful batteries made from alloys called nickel metal hydrides. American manufacturers were indifferent, but Japanese electronics giants embraced the technology. Last year 780 million NiMH batteries were made for computers, cell phones and other gadgets, most through licenses on Ovshinsky's patents. In 1988 the PBS science program Nova aired a documentary on Ovshinsky titled Japan's American Genius.