Below are the first 10 and last 10 pages of uncorrected machine-read text (when available) of this chapter, followed by the top 30 algorithmically extracted key phrases from the chapter as a whole.
Intended to provide our own search engines and external engines with highly rich, chapter-representative searchable text on the opening pages of each chapter.
Because it is UNCORRECTED material, please consider the following text as a useful but insufficient proxy for the authoritative book pages.
Do not use for reproduction, copying, pasting, or reading; exclusively for search engines.
OCR for page 7
Finding the Sweet Spot of Opportunity
By Arnold Thackray, President, Chemical Heritage Foundation
Dr. Thackray (Ph.D., Cambridge University, 1966) has held faculty appointments at Oxford,
Harvard, and the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was founding chair of the Department
of History and Sociology of Science at the University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Thackray's scholar-
ly interests lie in the historiography of science and in understanding technology, medicine, and
science as elements of modern culture. He served as editor of Isis, the official journal of the
History of Science Society, and as editor of Osiris. Dr. Thackray is coauthor of the definitive
biography Arnold O. Beckman: 100 Years of Excellence. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of
Chemistry and of the Royal Historical Society. Dr. Thackray was the founding director of the
Chemical Heritage Foundation.
I t is very special privilege and pleasure to be here on this beautiful day and in this beau-
tiful place. It brings back memories of my first encounter with Dr. Beckman in his
office on Jamboree Road, when this center was just a gleam in his eye. It's also a pleas-
ure to be here because of the wonderful subject that is before us--the future and the prom-
ise of instrumentation. We've already heard that there is much to look forward to. What I
want to do is set the context for you, paint in the background.
There are three important reasons for talking about Arnold Beckman and instrumentation
at this symposium. The first is that instrumentation is a concealed subject; it's not some-
thing that you encounter in your day-to-day life. The second reason is that science looks
toward the future, not the past. The third is that change is shaped by individuals.
Chemistry and instrumentation are both concealed. "Intel inside" is a great phrase. The
Intel inside was put there by chemist Gordon Moore, who achieved what he did because of
the knowledge and experience gained while in Beckman's employ. But when you think of
Intel inside, you don't think of chemistry. Modern biotechnology is similar. Companies
like Biogen and Amgen were conceptualized and created by Ph.D. chemists. The products
of chemistry are everywhere, but chemistry itself is concealed. Instrumentation is even
more concealed. Instrumentation is the tool or enabler with which you shape a product.
But people tend to think about the lemon juice, not the juicer.
Second, science is forward looking. It's about what are you going to publish next week. If
something is in the past, let's forget about it. But that is a terrible cultural loss. If there were
no past associations among the people in this room, this would be a very poor meeting.
Business is also forward looking. People look to tomorrow's bottom line. In addition, for
the last 200 years we've been remorselessly specializing and differentiating, knowing more
INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW 7
OCR for page 8
and more about less and less. That makes it even harder to get a
sense of the larger picture, which is one of the things that history
brings us.
Finally, significant change is shaped by individuals. Change is not
the result of vast, impersonal forces. Individuals intuit, act on, and FIGURE 1 (Above) The Beckman brothers,
exemplify the larger currents and opportunities in our world and Arnold (center), Frederick, and Roland.
catalyze what happens. Think of Russian history without Stalin, (Right) George Beckman's blacksmith
shop in Cullom, Illinois. Courtesy of
German history without Hitler, or U.S. or British history without
the Beckman family.
Roosevelt or Churchill. And the significance of the individual is
equally true in science. Think of Newton, Darwin, and Watson and Crick. Think of
He was William Henry Perkin, whose discovery of mauve in the mid-nineteenth century created
modern high-tech, industry-based science. Think of Fritz Haber at the start of the twen-
another tieth century, who personified German high-tech, professional expertise. Haber is the
man who keeps half the world alive through his discovery of ammonia synthesis, which
individual is fundamental to our ability to feed the world using modern fertilizers.
who changed Arnold Beckman also intuited and acted upon the larger current in science and society. He
was another individual who changed the world forever and, unlike some of the people I
mentioned, changed it for the good.
the world
Arnold Orville Beckman was a blacksmith's son, born in 1900 in Cullom, Illinois. He was
forever. simultaneously the baby and the firstborn, an unusual combination. His father's first wife
had died after his two half-brothers were born (see Figure 1). His father remarried, and
Arnold was both the baby of the family and the firstborn--a younger sister followed. Then,
when he was 12, his mother died, which was a tremendous blow in his life. We can only
speculate about the psychological impact of being simultaneously the baby and the first
born and then having his mother die, as we ponder the deep roots of his lifelong drive.
The world of 1900 was fundamentally rural. In 1900, 50 percent of people worked on
farms, compared with 2 percent today. The great change has been not only in manufac-
turing but in the knowledge sector. Today the knowledge sector is the largest growth sec-
tor of our economy. Dr. Beckman recognized this trend very early on. Here in Irvine, for
example, I don't see farms, factories, or smokestacks. I see the knowledge industry exem-
plified. This center itself is a sort of temple to the knowledge industry, and Arnold
Beckman recognized that development.
8 INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
OCR for page 9
Throughout his life he had an eye for the
sweet spot of opportunity. Even as a very
young man, he was able to excel. At the
age of 14, after winning a scholarship
to University High School in nearby
Bloomington, he persuaded his father and
family to move to Bloomington. Most peo-
ple would have said "I'm where I am, and
my education is what it is." But he moved
the family, and in Bloomington he was the
best student in his graduating class, achieving the highest average ever attained in his high
school. And because there was a college in the town, he already had two and a half years of
college chemistry under his belt at the age of 18.
Furthermore, his family was financially constrained, so he had to earn money. If you want-
ed someone to play at a dance on a Saturday night, the Beckman Orchestra would do that.
Pat mentioned that he set up a chemistry consulting business. He played the piano at the
local movie theater. He was a young man with very high energy levels and imagination,
and he was going to seize his opportunities.
In 1918 he joined the Marines. Patriotic fervor was a reality, and Arnold Beckman was set
to head off to Germany. But you needed a boat, and there weren't many boats in Illinois, so
he departed for Brooklyn. There he met Mabel Meinzer of Brooklyn at a Red Cross dinner
for the Marines on Thanksgiving Day in 1918. Mabel brought an enormous set of comple-
mentary talents to their marriage, which lasted for 64 years, until Mabel's death in 1989.
Before Beckman could set sail, the war was over. He moved back to Illinois and began
studying chemistry, though he actually graduated with a degree in chemical engineering in
1922, from the University of Illinois. The University of Illinois at that time was the central
chemical powerhouse of the land, which again reveals his instinct for finding the sweet
spot of opportunity. He was editor of the Illinois Chemist, a very substantial publication.
And he was making a mark on campus. For example, after World War I cut off the supply
of organic chemicals from Germany, students worked in the summer making organic
chemicals for sale, and Beckman participated in this activity. It helped to finance the chem-
istry department and gave the students practical experience--a powerful combination.
INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW 9
OCR for page 10
When he graduated from college, he wrote,"The world had a too cold and forbidding front
when I was thinking of starting into business, so I decided to linger here at the schoolhouse.
This graduate business is the real essence of education." In 1922, opting for graduate school
was an unusual and risky choice, whereas today we are used to it. He was admitted to the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but he decided to go to the California Institute of
Technology. In retrospect Caltech was a great place to go, but Caltech was all of 4 years old
at that time, so this also was a risky decision. The only problem was that Mabel was in
Brooklyn. So after a year he dropped out, went to New York, and found a job at Bell Labs.
There he was part of the founding research group and worked for Walter Shewhart, the
great guru of quality control, whose disciple Edward Deming is more familiar today. So he
was learning not only about electronics but also about quality control.
He moved back to Caltech in 1926, a year after his marriage to Mabel, and received his
Ph.D. in 1928. Then he was asked to join the faculty--a great honor given the faculty's
small size. He specialized in glass blowing and apparatus building. He was active in the
hands-on aspect of chemistry, and of course chemistry is a very hands-on science.
But if you look at Arnold Beckman in this period, he was very restless. He was engaged in
various ventures, but he did not entirely know where he was going. Where he ended up, of
course, was with the pH meter.
That story, which I'll discuss in
a moment, is very well known.
But there were always many
other facets to his life. He had
a growing family. As his busi-
ness grew, so did the responsi-
bility of being a local, national,
and global citizen. He partici-
pated in charity campaigns
and was a key player in the
smog understanding and elim-
ination program. He was
Orange County man of the
year and on the Caltech board.
He met with three different
U.S. presidents and in the later
10 INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
OCR for page 11
stages of his life became very active in
philanthropy. He had an extraordinari-
ly full and diverse life at every moment.
There are four aspects of Dr. Beckman's
life and work that I would like to discuss
this morning. First is his inventive rest-
lessness. Second, his contributions to
chemists' tools. Third, the new biology.
And, fourth, the electronic future.
Prototype 1938 television from GE. Courtesy of Darryl Hock.
While he was in graduate school at Caltech he kept a journal of patentable ideas. Some of
you know that he was something of an infamous speeder in cars during his life. His first
patent, in 1927, was for a device that would sound a buzzer and alert the driver when the
car reached a preset speed. It's an early version of cruise control. Chrysler was interested
enough in it to talk with him about a license, though the talks didn't go anywhere.
Other potentially patentable ideas from his graduate school journal were an alarm for a
typewriter to signal when it is nearing the bottom of a piece of paper, the use of electron
beams to record sound on motion picture film, an electronic organ, a system for maintain-
ing butter at optimal spreading temperature, whitening toothpaste that uses dyes instead of
bleaches, and a self-sharpening pencil. He was not your average Caltech graduate student;
he was someone with a remarkable inventive restlessness.
At the same time he was working on his Ph.D., on the photochemistry of hydrogen azide,
with Roscoe Dickinson. To conduct his experiments, Arnold Beckman needed some very
precise measurements and found that commonly available thermometers weren't sufficient.
This led to his first publication, which described a new piece of apparatus, a quartz-fiber
manometer. Meanwhile, he was working with A.A. Noyes, one of the great luminaries of
Caltech, on a new periodic table. It was based on ions and energy groups and represented
nothing less than an attempt to rewrite the periodic table. This work was presented at the
Pacific Division of the American Association for the Advancement of Science and appeared
in 1927 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
In the 1930s Dr. Beckman met Lee De Forest, the inventor of the vacuum tube, who was
inaugurating the electronic age. De Forest was living in Hollywood and trying to develop tel-
INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW 11
OCR for page 12
evision. His concept was to use metal-coated film to reproduce sound and pictures, and to
produce the required film in the needed volume he turned to Dr. Beckman, who developed
a film-coating machine that he patented. De Forest's system didn't go anywhere, but it gave
Dr. Beckman an opportunity to interact with probably the leading inventor of the period.
During this period, Dr. Beckman also was an expert witness. His consulting activities
added about $150 a month to his assistant professor's salary. That doesn't sound like a lot,
but it was 50 percent of his salary. As he oversaw the design and construction of the fam-
ily house in Altadena, this was very welcome. And speaking of the sweet spot of opportu-
nity, one of the most important cases he worked on was brought by a young district
attorney named Earl Warren, later chief justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, involving an
outrageous scam in the oil industry.
The next thing Dr. Beckman pursued
was postal meters. A local company,
grandly called the National Postal
Meter Company, had a problem with its
inks, and Dr. Beckman developed a
nonclogging formulation for the com-
pany. Then he decided to go into busi-
ness to produce the ink himself, because
people were having difficulties with the
composition of the ink. He set up a sub-
sidiary, the National Inking Appliance
Company, in which he was vice presi-
dent and general manager. Of course,
FIGURE 2 Arnold Beckman's first integrated pH meter, the acidimeter, circa 1934. he began thinking of other options. He
Courtesy of Beckman Coulter, Inc. developed a typewriter ribbon that is
continuously reinked, an ink-loaded ribbon bobbin, and an ink-soaked sponge. But this was
in 1936, and his work in inking was interrupted by the pH meter.
Dr. Beckman invented the pH meter, which was first called the acidimeter, in 1934 (see
Figure 2). A friend on the Illinois Chemist, Glen Joseph, came to his old colleague with a
problem. Joseph, a chemist working with the citrus industry, needed to find a way to meas-
ure the acidity of lemon juice. He tried using a hydrogen electrode, but it quickly fouled
because of the sulfur dioxide preservative in the juice. A glass electrode would work better,
but it produced a very weak signal.
12 INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
OCR for page 13
Dr. Beckman's knowledge of
electronics allowed him to
make an electronic amplifier
so that the rugged glass elec-
trode method could be used
to measure pH. Then he
again began looking for the
sweet spot of opportunity. The difference
He traveled the country
seeking buyers for the pH between
meter, though he did not
meet with much enthusiasm.
innovation and
But in Philadelphia Arthur
Courtesy of Beckman Coulter, Inc.
H. Thomas, a big instrument
supplier, told him that maybe 600 meters could be sold over several years. There's my invention is that
business, Dr. Beckman said. But the business grew much faster than expected. By the late
1930s he was stepping out from Caltech and going full-time into business. an invention is
This was just as the storm clouds of World War II were gathering. During the war his firm an idea, whereas
developed the first spectrophotometer produced in large quantities, the DU spectrometer.
By now the company making these instruments was called National Technical an innovation is
Laboratories, but Dr. Beckman did not own the company, which raises interesting issues
about inventors, entrepreneurs, and financiers. Dr. Beckman was simultaneously a very
an idea out in
small shareholder and the major producer of ideas for this company.
By 1941 and 1942, National Technical Laboratories was becoming a large firm, and the the world.
directors were saying, Don't rock the boat. But Dr. Beckman saw opportunities, and he
found a way to pursue them. By the end of World War II he had founded and was the boss
of two other companies. One was Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., which made oxygen analyzers,
and the other was Helipot Corporation, which made the Helipot variable potentiometer.
These devices were coming into their own.
The development of chemists' tools was a theme throughout Dr. Beckman's life. An impor-
tant aspect of innovation is whether you can get society to adopt an idea. The difference
between innovation and invention is that an invention is an idea, whereas an innovation is
an idea out in the world. There's a crucial difference between those two things.
INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW 13
OCR for page 14
The development of chemists' tools would
be enough for one life. That, however, was
only the beginning, because the DU spec-
trometer marked the beginnings of Dr.
Beckman's move toward the new biology
(see Figure 3). The Nobel laureate Bruce
Merrifield said many years later that the
most important instrument ever developed
in the advancement of the biosciences was
the DU. A different form of testimony
comes from Carl Djerassi, an inventor of
the birth control pill. He once said that the
reason he went to work for the Mexico-
based firm Syntex was because when he vis-
ited the company, to his amazement it had
a DU. Syntex, by the way, in many ways was
the first biotech company. As early as 1960
it had started an Institute for Molecular
FIGURE 3 Dr. Beckman shown with an early Beckman DU spectrophotome- Biology in Palo Alto.
ter, circa 1953. Courtesy of Beckman Coulter, Inc.
Another very early purchaser of the DU was Erwin Chargaff, the legendary biochemist and
perhaps the world's leading expert on DNA at that time. With the DU, Chargaff was able
to measure the relative abundance of the different bases in DNA. This resulted in
Chargaff's rules, which established that the pairs of bases in DNA almost always occurred
in equal amounts. This key insight led directly to Watson and Crick's determination of the
structure of DNA. James Watson himself wrote:
I can see . . . that our pursuit of the chemical underpinnings of biology has depended
as much on the invention of new instrumentation and experimental procedures as on the
generation of new experimental results and new ideas. Arnold Beckman's contribution to
science and to society came, in part, from his rare talent for creating these new instruments
and his decision to make them available to industry and science alike.
The new biology also extended into the clinic. In the 1960s, Arnold Beckman led the
charge for his firm's entry into clinical instrumental markets, where laboratory scientists
used instruments to put modern medical information into the hands of clinical practi-
14 INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
OCR for page 15
tioners. And Beckman Coulter continues along this path today with such products as the
automated DNA synthesizer and other instrumental platforms for genomics.
Even with the new biology, Dr. Beckman was just getting started. Beginning in the 1930s
and especially in the 1950s, he led his firm in profoundly important new directions con-
nected with the emergence of the modern electronic age. Initially, the guts of the pH meter
became products in themselves. Dr. Beckman realized that he had a powerful measuring
device in the amplification circuits used in the meter, which made it a superb microam-
meter. He began producing the microammeter as a product in itself. For example, it found
considerable service in monitoring the performance of early nuclear reactors. This led him
to other kinds of electronic devices. The helical potentiometer was a component of the pH
meter for which Dr. Beckman had a patent. During World War II, engineers developing
radar discovered that the available variable potentiometers were not accurate enough. So
Dr. Beckman set up a new company, the Helipot Company, to produce helical poten-
tiometers during the war and after and began serving a booming market.
In the 1950s, Dr. Beckman was creating electronic measuring devices, advanced electronic
components, laboratory and industrial automation, digital computing, and semiconduc-
tor technologies. In all of these areas, he was ahead of his time, but he had seen the sweet
spot of opportunity. If you follow this thread out, in the 1970s, Beckman Instruments was,
for instance, the global leader in the production of liquid crystal displays. The systems divi-
sion of Beckman Instruments produced both analog and digital computers serving a vari-
ety of customers, including oil refineries, NASA, the Air Force, and aerospace companies.
INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW 15
OCR for page 16
Even with all of this, we haven't touched
upon the birth of Silicon Valley. Next year
is the fiftieth anniversary of William
Shockley's momentous phone call to
Arnold Beckman, along with the fortieth
anniversary of Moore's law. In 1955,
Shockley, who was trying to develop the
transistor, called Dr. Beckman and said,
"I'm leaving Bell Labs. I need someone to
back me." Arnold Beckman became the
100 percent funder of Shockley's semi-
conductor laboratories. Shockley also
said, "There are only going to be about a
dozen of us, and I don't really want to be
in Pasadena. I'm awfully attached to my
mother, who lives in Palo Alto. Do you
mind if I set up there?" Another company
acquired by Dr. Beckman, the centrifuge
manufacturer Spinco, was already in Palo
Alto, so Dr. Beckman said, "I suppose so."
That's how the silicon got to Silicon
Valley. Shockley went in a direction that did not have commercial utility, but under the
influence of Arnold Beckman he hired the best people. These individuals went from
Shockley to Fairchild to Intel and into all the rest of what became Silicon Valley. These were
the people who understood where to go with this technology, and Dr. Beckman made this
history possible.
A Beckman ad from 1960 read like this: "Since the year one there has been no change in
the scientific method. Only the tools are different. Our job--providing them. . . . One day
the present science of electronics will be supplemented or replaced. Still newer technolo-
gies will need even more advanced instruments to implement them. Our catalog for the
future? We're working on it now." That's a wonderful text for our discussions today. Our
task is to take up the challenge that Dr. Beckman laid out more than 40 years ago.
16 INSTRUMENTATION FOR A BETTER TOMORROW
Representative terms from entire chapter:
sweet spot
