Gordon took over the nearly bankrupt Kidder in 1931 and turned it into a minor powerhouse on Wall Street, serving as investment banker to such firms as Carnation, Walt Disney and Mitsubishi Electric.
Its technology vaporizes germanium sulfide and cools it into 20-30 nanometer layers that, as they're combined, turn into nanoflowers: elegant structures that might look like the carnation on a prom dress or tuxedo, but are really energy storage cells with much more capacity than traditional cells occupying the same area.