IT WAS 2009 when Clay Alexander, a thermal scientist who had recently sold a lightbulb design to GE, was in his kitchen staring at his plate of recently cooked scrambled eggs, which had already gone cold. He thought to himself: “The plate hasn’t changed since the caveman days, when it was a flat stone.” Alexander engineers temperature controls for a living—surely, he thought, he could come up with a better plate than this primitive one.
Thoughts just like these have launched a thousand smart gadgets. Some are true game-changers (like the Nest Thermostat), others are just parodies of Silicon Valley’s get-rich-quick culture run amok. (Does the world really need Wi-Fi-enabled diapers?) As for Alexander, his musings led him to start Ember, a new company that plans on using thermal science to make our kitchen devices smarter and our food better.
Dispatches From The Front 