He developed Electrical Porcelain with transmission engineers at GE. His family continued to work at Building 68 in Schenectady for decades. William's son Frank Cermak advanced insulator design into the mid 20th century.
When Rex Harrison accepted his Academy Award for My Fair Lady (1964), he dedicated it to his two fair ladies, Audrey Hepburn and Julie Andrews both who had played Eliza Doolittle with him.
My Fair Lady is a musical based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion, with book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner and music by Frederick Loewe. The story concerns Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phoneticist, so that she may pass as a lady. The original Broadway, London and film versions all starred Rex Harrison.