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A. Verneuil developed flame fusion to grow sapphire and ruby on a commercial scale around 1890. Flame fusion was
further perfected by Popov in the Soviet Union in the 1930s and by Linde Air Products Co. in the U.S. during World
War II. Union Carbide Corp., the successor to Linde, developed Czochralski crystal growth for sapphire laser materials
in the 1960s. Stepanov in the Soviet Union published his sapphire growth method in 1959. Edge-Defined Film-Fed
Growth (EFG), which is similar to the Stepanov method, was developed by H. Labelle in the U. S. in the 1960s and
1970s. The Heat Exchanger Method (HEM), invented by F. Schmid and D. Viechnicki in 1967 was commercialized in
the 1970s. Gradient solidification was invented in Israel in the 1970s by J. Makovsky. The Horizontal Directional
Solidification Method (HDSM) proposed by Kh. S. Bagdasorov in the Soviet Union in the 1960s was further developed
at the Institute for Single Crystals in Ukraine. Kyropoulos growth of sapphire, known as GOI crystal growth in the
Soviet Union, was developed by M. Musatov at the State Optical Institute in St. Petersburg in the 1970s and 1980s. At
the Institute for Single Crystals in Ukraine, E. Dobrovinskaya characterized Verneuil, Czochralsky, Bagdasarov, and
GOI sapphire. In 1995, she emigrated to the United States and joined S&R Rubicon, founded near Chicago by R.
Mogilevsky initially to import sapphire and ruby. Mogilevsky began producing sapphire by the Kyropoulos method in
1999. In 2000 the company name was changed to Rubicon Technology. Today, Dobrovinskaya is Chief Scientist and
Rubicon produces high quality Kyropoulos sapphire substrates for solid-state lighting. In 1995, H. Branover of Ben
Gurion University and a sole investor founded Gavish, which is Hebrew for "crystal." They invited another veteran of
the Ukrainian Institute for Single Crystals, V. Pishchik, to become Chief Scientist. Under Pishchik's technical
leadership and J. Sragowicz's business leadership, Gavish now makes finished products for the semiconductor and
medical industries from HDSM, Stepanov, and Kyropoulos sapphire.
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