Stanford R. Ovshinsky, an iconoclastic, largely self-taught and commercially successful scientist who invented the nickel-metal hydride battery and contributed to the development of a host of devices, including solar energy panels, flat-panel displays and rewritable compact discs, died on Wednesday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich. He was 89.

The cause was prostate cancer, his son Harvey said.

Placing Mr. Ovshinsky in “the league of genius inventors,” The Economist magazine once titled an article about him “The Edison of Our Age?”

If not quite that, he was certainly among the 20th century’s most inventive breed of scientists who, like Edison, parlayed their ideas into practical commercial applications.

He gained particular attention for upsetting common wisdom about the nature of semiconductors. Semiconductors, which block or carry electrical current depending on the voltage to which they are exposed, typically consist of crystals in which molecules line up in ordered ranks. But in the late 1950s Mr. Ovshinsky became convinced that less regimented materials could also act as semiconductors.