By: Velvet Spicer May 20, 2021
As a young child, Bruce Ha looked up at the moon and thought, how do we get there?
Next month, a 30 million page library of Earth’s cultures, customs, languages and memories — using a technology Ha invented — will be aboard Spacex, headed to the moon. It’s a heady feeling, Ha acknowledged.
“We’re on our way to creating the very first galactic library. The first installment is on the moon, the second installment on the moon is coming soon. Mars is in the works,” said Ha, founder and inventor of NanoRosetta and founder of the Rochester firm Stamper Technologies. “My goal is to improve the quality of life. I want to present gifts, my contribution in my short life on earth. I’ve been blessed with so much and I want to give back.”
Humble beginnings
Ha immigrated to the United States from Vietnam during the tumultuous 1970s. His father was a dignitary, married with seven children. In 1975, when it became clear that the family must leave their home in order to survive the war, Ha’s father obtained four tickets on a flight to America. The family decided to send Ha, who was then 10, his father, his sister and his older brother to the U.S., with the hope of returning when it was safe for the rest of the family.
“The risk we knew is if we left anyone behind and if you were an educator or you were working in the government, they would kill you. We took that risk because we had no other choice,” Ha said. “On the day before we were supposed to go, the main airport in Saigon was bombed. We had to go back.”
Ha’s father reached out to a friend who was the ambassador to Thailand at the time. The two had bought a small boat together some months prior and it was decided that Ha’s family of nine would get to the boat and travel down the Saigon River to freedom.
“The morning we were leaving, my mom had basic food for my brother, who was just a year old and she took all the photo albums because those things are precious. Those are things that we can
never get back. My dad took some gold, jewelry and money,” Ha recalled. “On the way we were trying to get food, but no one would take the money. So we actually gave them gold and jewelry, probably hundreds of thousands of dollars in today’s currency. We gave a lot of precious stuff away. But what’s most precious to us were the photos.”
That sentiment would play a large role in Ha’s life during the following decades.
“By the time we got there it was a little late, and (my father’s) partner was about to take off because people were jumping into the water and getting onto the boat. That boat had a capacity of about 20 people. There were 100 people on that boat by the time we took off on the Saigon River,” Ha said. “As we were leaving, the tanks and troops were coming in and occupying Saigon. We got out just in time.”
They radioed ahead and the U.S. Seventh Fleet, which would help the boatload of people escape Vietnam, was parked by the mouth of the river. When they arrived, officials told them to stay on the boat until the next morning, at which time they would be taken aboard and rescued.
“We slept and in the morning heard a commotion and people were saying the whole fleet was gone. Indeed, this huge ship was gone,” Ha said. “There were some empty boats, so we took two other boats, took the 100 people and divided them up onto the three boats and decided to go toward Thailand.”
The refugees were concerned about traveling too close to land and being found out, as well as being boarded by pirates. Either scenario could have been deadly for the 100 souls.
“At one point my dad and my mom were so distraught by the situation and said we may not survive, we should just go back. But my mom said if we go back the best we could hope for is concentration camps and the kids won’t survive it,” Ha explained. “The partner who was the captain of the boat said you have a better chance going to Thailand than going back. After a while they decided to stay and continued the course.”
The group of refugees spent 10 or more days on the treacherous ocean.
“I can remember some of those days where I was so hungry but so seasick and throwing up. They were rationing food but I couldn’t even eat the rationed food. It was a bad trip,” Ha recalled. “On the ninth day there was a typhoon coming. Two boats ran out of fuel, and without fuel if you have water you can’t pump, so the men were pumping water out. The water was getting rough. We thought we were not going to survive the night.”
The group signaled a Japanese boat that they saw but it didn’t stop to help. Finally, a Thai boat stopped and said it would send help the next day.
“That night was really rough for all of us; none of us slept, men had to bail the water. We survived that night and in the morning three Thai boats came out and towed us back into Thailand. That night the full storm came in and wiped out everything,” Ha said. “We were so lucky to survive.”
Ha’s family stayed in a refugee camp for several months, homeless and without jobs to sustain themselves. As a dignitary, Ha’s father was embarrassed to beg for food, but to keep his family alive he did what he had to.
“After a few months we were able to transfer to a better camp that was run by the United States. In that camp my dad volunteered for different positions to see if he could get a sponsor to go to the United States because he had papers,” Ha said. “He was working for the government, so he was able to convince them to bring us over to Camp Pendleton.”
Camp Pendleton, a Marine Corps base in California, was like paradise, Ha recalled.
“We were still homeless, but it was paradise. I remember I found one stick of Wrigley’s mint gum and it was intact. And I saved that piece and I nibbled on it every day,” Ha said with a laugh. “We were eventually sponsored by a Baptist church in California. They rented a home so my mom and dad could work and pay the rent for that house. It was a 1,200-square-foot, three bedroom home that housed nine of us.”
But they finally had a home. And they were safe in America.
Path of learning
The family settled in the small town of Newbury Park. Ha learned to speak English by watching “Get Smart” and the “Love Boat.”
“We had to catch up. We were a year homeless with no education, so we were behind. We studied really hard,” Ha said. “My brother went to USC, got his medical degree from UCLA, then went to Columbia. I followed his footsteps because he inspired me to be a smart guy.”
Ha considered a medical career as well, but he discovered science, a field that enthralled him.
“I got my master’s in optical communications for building satellites,” Ha said. “That’s what I was interested in. It’s important to have skills to communicate, but also to have the technology to broadcast that skill.”
Ha went to work for Hughes Aircraft, a major American aerospace and defense contractor founded in 1932 by Howard Hughes in Glendale, Calif. The company was acquired by Raytheon Co. in 1997.
While working on radar systems for the military, Ha learned that Pioneer was looking for someone to develop laserdiscs, the precursor to DVDs. So Ha packed up his things and went to Japan for two years to learn the technology that he would bring back to the United States.
“I spent two years doing R&D in Japan. What a fantastic experience, learning the culture, business techniques,” he said. “I came back and we transferred a lot of the technology. We built a laserdisc facility in Carson, Calif. I spent five years there.”
Ha then went to Technicolor SA, a company that at one time was making 1 million VHS tapes per day. The company was looking ahead to optical.
“We started a CD facility because you could also contain movies on CD media. Storage information was what I was really interested in,” Ha said. “They put me into the DVD consortium to work out the specifications for DVD.”
Coming to Rochester
Meanwhile, one of the managers at Technicolor had left the company for a job at Eastman Kodak Co.
“He asked if I wanted to go to Kodak because they had a vexing problem there, to develop a picture CD. Picture CD was kind of a joint project between Intel and Kodak,” Ha explained. “Intel was developing Pentium 3 and they needed something to run on it. Kodak’s responsibility was to create this new format called picture CD.”
Before Ha arrived at Kodak, the company’s solution was to burn each disc, which took roughly 20 minutes because the drives were extremely slow.
“I came in and created a new process and a lot of the inventions that I made at Kodak were to change the process from 20 minutes to five seconds,” Ha said. “So now we were able to make millions of disks per month, and we could change a version on a dime.”
Initially, Ha traveled between California and New York on a regular basis. He agreed to move to Rochester on the condition that he could have control over his resources and people.
“I took everyone to the Riverside facility and retrained everybody to a new way of thinking, where we no longer are siloed into you only do this task,” Ha recalled. “We’re all going to be multitasking. We’re all going to understand how everybody else works and your pay raises are dependent on how much you understand about the other processes. That was the only way to move in parallel instead of a serial process.”
As a result of Ha’s work, Kodak was able to commercialize the picture disc in eight months. His work got him noticed by then-CEO George Fisher, who transferred him to the film manufacturing group.
“But it was a different world; I didn’t have any control. So I couldn’t really help there,” Ha lamented. “When they were divesting — Kodak was going down — I said I’d like to continue my work in the optical disk. I said there’s a lot of good equipment here, a lot of good people that I trained, I’d like to retain them. Otherwise they would have been let go.”
So Ha partnered with an individual who was manufacturing VHS tapes in Canada. They bought out the Kodak division and Ha ran it, turning it around from a $3 million deficit to a $3 million profit.
But VHS was on the decline, and when Walmart decided not to carry the tapes anymore, everyone else jumped ship. Ha’s partner’s VHS firm went downhill and took their joint venture with it.
“He pledged the assets of our joint company to the bank,” Ha explained. “I tried to fight them in court. I spent so much money and it was a losing cause. I had to leave and start my own business, and that’s when I started my current business, Stamper Technology.”
To the moon and beyond
Stamper Technology Inc. is one of a handful of projects Ha has his hands — and seemingly endless knowledge — in. Through the company, Ha developed NanoFiche and NanoRosetta technology with four U.S. patents he earned related to the high-speed creation of 300,000 dpi printing used in the fast creation of high-density security holograms and nano-features.
Ha uses the technology to store writings and photos on nickel plates. The technology has been licensed to be used for all Microsoft discs used for Windows and Xbox games. The ability to print nano-features also has opened up other opportunities in fields such as high-density archival documents, as well as archival jewelry.
“Digital information can be very short-lived. People think you put it in the cloud and it’s forever, but it’s really ephemeral,” Ha cautioned. “Twenty years ago, I can’t even get information from photos that I stored digitally. There are a lot of things we can do now to preserve our memories and history and legacy and I’m doing my part in terms of being able to put history, legacies and individuals’ life stories of countries, education and knowledge on the moon.”
Stamper Technology works with archivists to store knowledge in a readable form. A nickel piece the size of a dime can store thousands of book pages that are readable with optics, unlike digitally produced pieces. It is 1,000 times smaller than the printing on the 100-dollar bill, Ha explained. So small, in fact, that it cannot be replicated or printed.
The first major installation of the Lunar Library is a 30 million page archive that flew on the SpaceIL Beresheet Moon lander, in 2019: It is now believed to be intact on the Moon. (Photo provided by the Arch Mission Foundation)
And that is why the technology was used to put a 30 million page library of earth’s treasures on the moon in 2019. The “Lunar Library,” as the project is known, was aboard Israel’s SpaceIL’s Beresheet Lunar Lander, which failed to stick its landing on the moon, but the library is believed to be intact there.
Now, a second installment is planned. The Lunar Library 2 is an ultra-durable archive of humanity, created by the Arch Mission Foundation and Ha as the foundation’s chief scientist. The Lunar Library 2 will fly as a secondary payload on the Astrobotic Peregrine Mission One lander, expected to land on the lunar surface this year.
The Arch Mission Foundation is delivering the second installment in the Lunar Library, containing additional content, in an upcoming mission with Astrobotic to the lunar surface. (Photo provided by the Arch Mission Foundation)
Ha had contacted the Arch Mission Foundation Founder and Chairman Nova Spivack when he heard about the organization’s partnership with Elon Musk, Spivack said. Ha thought his archival technology could be useful to the organization.
“He told me what he was doing and it’s brilliant,” Spivack said. “It turned out that it was a great technology for what we needed to back up all of these books and Wikipedia and all the other things in a way that will last forever.”
Spivack called Ha the “nanotechnology version of Gutenberg,” referring to Johannes Gutenberg, the inventor of the printing press.
“Bruce is a brilliant, top 1 percent scientist and engineer and inventor who has figured out these brilliant ways to do this,” Spivack said. “It’s the smallest printing ever made in the history of printing. He had a big career at Kodak and then he invented this technology and patented it and so he’s the only guy in the world who can do it.”
In 2018, Stamper Technology made its first Wikipedia book, with each leaflet containing 8,000 pages. (Photo provided)
But another part of his technology is about saving personal memories, Ha said.
“I wanted to help and do something for the memories of my parents. The photo albums (from his trip from Vietnam) were dropped in the ocean, they were degrading. I wanted to have a way to preserve information,” Ha said.
The idea to preserve personal legacies came from his wife, Sarah, who saw what Ha was doing and asked him if he could put a few bible verses on a pendant for her.
“I put 32,000 verses on there. She said what verse did you put and I said I put all of them because I had room,” Ha recalled. “She was blown away.”
Soon after, Ha approached Anthony Paolercio of Michael Anthony Jewelers — a prominent jeweler whose creations were sold on the Home Shopping Network for decades — to partner on a line of jewelry featuring Ha’s technology for verses.
“I did quite a few beautiful pieces and sold them on air (on HSN),” Paolercio said. “They sold pretty well. It’s very amazing that you can make a piece that has the entire bible on it.”
Paolercio said he has enjoyed working with Ha because of his brilliance.
“His capabilities are amazing. The technology that he brings to the table, no one has it,” Paolercio said. “I love working with him. Whatever you talk to him about, he has such a breadth of knowledge that it’s amazing.”
Ha likens his technologies to the Rosetta Stone, an icon founded hundreds of years ago that survived centuries and allowed scientists and archeologists to decipher hieroglyphics. NanoRosetta is designed to do the same thing.
“Imagine if we could have something that would be like the Rosetta Stone, 2,000 years old and you can still read it and you can still uncover the hieroglyphics and understand the civilization that they had. We can understand how they lived, what their civilization was like,” Ha wondered. “So 10,000 years from now we can look back at my invention and the artifacts that I’m creating now to say this is the most complete record we have, and it originated here in Rochester.”
vspicer@bridgetowermedia.com / 585-653-4021 / @Velvet_Spicer
