In the late 1960s, Robert Parker, a weapon’s program engineer who began his career at the Livermore Laboratory in 1958, was studying how materials like liquid crystal films and coatings responded to rapid heating to determine potential usefulness as diagnostic tools to map rapid temperature rises. A liquid crystal is a substance that possesses properties of matter in both liquid and solid states. Excited by the versatility of these materials, Parker began experimenting with commercially available liquid crystals outside the Lab and soon developed a prototype construct:a digital thermometer with hand-etched numbers that would change color as the temperatures they indicated were reached. Feeling his product was ready for commercialization, Parker left the Lab in 1972 and launched his own start-up company, Robert Parker Research (RPR), located on East Avenue in Livermore. It was here that an overnight sensation, the mood ring, would later come to market.
While liquid crystals may have been the stuff of sci-fi fantasy in the 1960s, the discovery of liquid crystals dated back more than a century to 1888, when Austrian botanist and chemist Friedrich Reinitzer observed that heating a sample of cholesteryl benzoate, extracted from carrots, led to two melting points. The cloudy liquid detected by the Austrian scientist is what is now known as the liquid crystal phase. Following his discovery, Reinitzer contacted German physicist Otto Lehmann and requested that he conduct an independent investigation to confirm his experimental observations. Upon examining the samples, Lehmann described his findings as “flowing crystals,” and later coined the term “liquid crystal.”
Despite the ubiquitous use of liquid crystals today, in everything from phones and television displays to use in optical imaging, they remained a laboratory oddity for nearly 80 years after their discovery, being thought to have no practical applications. It was not until the mid-20th century that liquid crystal science went through a renaissance. In the mid-1960s, the Liquid Crystal Institute was established at Kent State University in Ohio, where the first international conference on liquid crystals was held; and, in 1968, RCA unveiled the world’s first liquid crystal display. It was in this period of early revival that Robert Parker began his initial research at Livermore, sparking ideas for products utilizing these “new” materials that he would soon after produce and bring to market.
Parker’s experimentation with liquid crystals at the Lab led to what he envisioned as an application of the material to a marketable line of “thermochromatic” products, those that changed color as they changed temperature, like novelty coffee cups, water temperature indicators for sporting goods, and digital thermometers — all some of his early concepts for the use of liquid crystals. Initially, Parker’s prototype items had fairly short lifespans, as the cholesteric liquid crystals that he used for his thermometer’s numbers, for instance, would quickly crack and fade when exposed to air. His problem, however, was solved when he discovered that a team of scientists at the National Cash Register had developed a method of encapsulating spheres of liquid crystals in a gelatin base to insulate them from the oxidizing effects of oxygen. It was this method that Parker would use to commercialize liquid crystal technologies for temperature measurement and bring his family of thermochromatic products to fruition.
In 1972, Parker left the Livermore Lab and launched his first product: the digital thermometer. According to the entrepreneur, “[b]efore I even started RPR, I gave a phone interview to The Wall Street Journal…. I told them the thermometers were going to be a big business, and as a result of the story, I had an order for 100,000 units before I even started.”
Three years later, in 1975, Josh Reynolds, a New York businessman, came into Parker’s shop on East Avenue and proposed putting Parker’s plastic-encased color-changing liquid crystals into a jewelry setting for use as a temperature-feedback ring to help people control their emotions. The so-called “mood” ring would change colors based on a person’s body heat to indicate the wearer’s mood. While there is some debate over the actual inventor of the mood ring, as no patents were ever filed, the idea is mostly attributed to Reynolds, who said he came up with the notion for the item after the stresses of working on Wall Street led him to explore biofeedback, a type of mind-body technique used to control physiological functions. Reynolds would later capitalize on another product, when he brought the ThighMaster to market in the 1990s.
To Parker, the rings “were made almost as a gimmick to give to a few people” but unexpectedly became an overnight sensation. After Reynolds delivered the first rings to an upscale store in New York, the novelty item quickly captured the world’s attention, and Parker’s company stayed busy over the next few months, churning out millions of the wearable biofeedback devices. Initially priced at more than $30 a piece, the cost almost immediately dropped as low as 30 cents as imitations soon flooded the market. According to Parker, “[i]t turned out to be a fun kind of thing, and I have fond memories of it, not only for all the money we made but because it was fascinating. The total market lasted three months. It wasn’t a long life, but it was a good one.”
After the popularity and marketability of the mood ring dried up, Parker went on to launch what he saw as the follow-on to the mood ring: the mood underwear. Parker would spend a good part of the 1980s developing a battery tester strip, which he eventually licensed to Duracell in 1990, helping the company stake a lead in its market. He also developed late-night television shopping staples like the Eggrite, which showed when eggs were cooked, along with the Pasta Per’fect and the Grill Per’fect, which did the same for pastas and meats.
In 2012, Robert Parker was named as one of the charter inductees into the LLNL Entrepreneurs’ Hall of Fame. Throughout his career and life, Robert Parker amassed over 80 patents and was still working on new ideas when he passed in 2022.
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