By 8, he had built a set of farm machinery, by 10, a threshing machine that husked corn, and by 12 he was making car motors.
[1] In 1971, with partners Norman Nitschke and Frank Larimer,[4] McMaster started another glass company, Glasstech, which he sold in 1987 for $100 million.
After doing little except absorbing $12 million cash, McMaster gave up on the amorphous silicon research, offered to pay back the 57 investors who followed him into solar cells.
He then raised yet another $15 million to create Solar Cells Inc. in Toledo OH to work on a different thin-film technology, cadmium telluride photovoltaics.
According to his obituary in the local paper, the Toledo Blade, "Some believe he will be remembered as the "father" of commercial-scale solar energy, having practically handed the needed technology to society on a platter in the 1990s.
His son Ronald started working on the project in the 1970s, and brother Robert joined in after the sale of Solar Cells Inc. in 1999.
The Harold and Helen McMaster Foundation was founded in 1988, and has made contributions to libraries, colleges, universities, museums, and hospitals in Northwest Ohio and Southeast Michigan.