Joseph F. Keithley Dies at 84 : Founder of Keithley Instruments was active in business until recent years

Electronic News, Oct 11, 1999 by Jeff Dorsch

Services were held Saturday for Joseph Faber Keithley, the founder of Keithley Instruments Inc., who died Oct. 1 from complications of pneumonia, after having a stroke in 1997. He was 84 years old.

Among the men who built America's biggest test and measurement companies after World War II - William Hewlett and David Packard of Hewlett-Packard Co., Howard Vollum of Tektronix Inc., John Fluke Sr. of John Fluke Manufacturing Co. Inc. and Joseph F. Keithley - only Hewlett, who is now 86, remains alive. Among many other honors, Joseph F. Keithley received the John Fluke Sr. Memorial Award in 1985.

Although Keithley started to wind down his involvement in the company that bears his name 11 years ago, he didn't step down as chairman of the board until 1991 and he continued to serve on the board through 1997.

Joseph P. Keithley, a son of Joseph F. Keithley, became chairman in 1991 under a management succession plan and now is the chairman, president and chief executive officer of Keithley Instruments. Joseph F. Keithley is survived by his wife, Nancy, and their three children, Joseph P. Keithley of Cleveland; Elizabeth Margaret Keithley of San Diego; and Roy Faber Keithley of Austin. The family is asking for any memorial contributions to be directed to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Joseph F. Keithley 1937 Memorial Fund, MIT Alumni Fund, Room 12-090, 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA 02139.

Keithley was born in 1915 in Peoria, Ill. He earned his bachelor of science degree from MIT in 1937 and a master of science degree a year later from the same institution. He served as a member of the technical staff of Bell Telephone Laboratories in New York City from 1938 to 1940. In 1940, he became an engineer at the Naval Ordnance Lab in Washington, D.C., earning the U.S. Navy's Distinguished Civilian Service Award in 1945 for work on underwater mine firing devices and developing a patented station selecting system. After the war, he moved to the Cleveland area, where he was employed by Massa Labs until opening his own business in 1946.

The founder of Keithley Instruments, a business that grew to $117.8 million in revenues for fiscal 1998, liked to recall that the first home of the company was a small workshop, renting for $8.50 a month, at the end of an alley in Cleveland. To use the bathroom, he had to go through a bar next door.

The company's first product was an amplifier for low-level electrical signals, dubbed the Phantom Repeater. The product enjoyed some success in sales, but it was the next product, an electrometer, that clinched the future for Keithley's fledgling company. Fifty-three years later, Keithley Instruments annually produces thousands of electrometers and other instruments and over the years it has expanded into such products as parametric semiconductor test systems. Now based in Solon, Ohio, the company employs more than 500 people.

In a 1991 interview with Electronic News, Keithley recalled that it was difficult to recruit engineers to work in the Cleveland area, as the center of activity in the U.S. electronics industry shifted from the Northeast to the West Coast and elsewhere over the decades. But Cleveland has proved to be a resilient community in recent years, building up its own high-tech base and bearing out Keithley's preference for the city by Lake Erie.

Keithley, coincidentally, died on the first day of Keithley Instruments' fiscal 2000 year.

His long list of honors includes election to the National Academy of Engineering in 1992 and an IEEE Centennial Medal in 1984.