Masters of manufacturing: Richard Morley

Manufacturing Engineering, Jul 2003 by Waurzyniak, Patrick

In the late 1960s, most manufacturing plants still relied on control systems consisting of hundreds of cumbersome, hard-wired banks of relays and switches that governed the production equipment on the factory floor. Before Richard E. Morley dreamed up the architecture for building a programmable control with the PLC in 1968, factory engineers faced the laborious task of designing, over and over, custom relay-based controls.

Who is Dick Morley, an engineer, machinist, and architect of arguably one of the most important innovations in modern factory automation? In an exclusive interview with Manufacturing Engineering, Morley discusses his life and the events surrounding the creation of the PLC.

Manufacturing Engineering: You're fascinated with gadgets and technology. When did you first know you wanted to study physics?

Dick Morley: Very, very early. I was 6. I had a lot of questions in my head. My first memory of a book was One, Two, Three, Infinity by George Ganov. And that's my first memory of a book. I didn't have a plan. I just built things in high school. Most of the classes, I didn't have to go to. They just cut me loose. I went to Highland Park High School [Highland Park, NJ] class of '50. I didn't graduate ahead of time; my grades weren't that good. I never went to class. I remember when my English teacher gave me bad grades one time, I said 'Why, I passed all the tests?' She answered, 'People like you deserve a lesson.' I liked erector sets and read magazines like Popular Science and Scientific American. In the extracurricular activities at high school, I was always the technician who'd fix the stage lighting. We even did wireless transmission onto the stage.

ME: Why did you pick MIT? Did you have a plan laid out?

Morley: No, not really. The only reason I went to MIT was that it was the last one on the list someone wrote on a blackboard in my high school English class. My professor said 'If you get in there, I'll eat my hat.' I didn't know what MIT was. I'd never heard of the school.

ME: What was your first impression of MIT?

Morley: The first year I didn't know I'd have to work, and I still didn't have to work. I could speed-read the course, take the course, and go back home. Second year was not like that, and I had never learned how to study, so I got in trouble, and I got bad grades. I'd say 'I'll read the quiz tomorrow,' and there were a lot of us like that in the first year. I just did radios and electronics. We did a lot of pranks, and we built a bootleg radio station, an AM radio station coming out of Boston. But in my second year, it became very challenging because I was getting really bad grades. I learned to study. It took about a year to do that.

ME: You never finished your degree. Has that ever held you back?

Morley: In the third year, about halfway through, I had bad migraines so I took some time off, and when I went back, they said 'don't bother coming back.' So I don't have a degree. I went to see my friend Professor Hardy, and he said 'what are you doing?' and when I told him what I was doing for the military, and that I was running a division in a company, and he said 'you don't have to come back, you're all set. Don't worry about it.' So I took his advice to heart, because I had to go back for a full term, full-time. He said don't worry about it, you'll do fine. I did. But later I felt I was missing math, so I went to Northeastern University [Boston]. I went about a year, just to learn something, not to get degrees.

ME: What was your first job while at MIT?

Morley: I was a machinist. That's where I got a lot of background, when I worked my way through school being a machinist, a union member, running lathes and a lot of other equipment.

ME: What happened after you were drafted for the Korean War?

Morley: I was drafted right away, and I had my orders to do atomic research, but they found out my eyesight was over 6.00 diopters in both eyes. Without my glasses, I'm pretty blind, so they pulled me. I ended up working on bombs with a company called Lab for Electronics. That's where we made the first floppy disk. This was at the Lab for Electronics' Computer Products Division in Boston, while I was living in Cambridge. I worked on radar, atomic bombs, packet switching, packet radio, communications theory, disk recording, and time compression. Time compression, where you compress a signal so it happens faster in real-time, for radar. I worked on radar sets, and built radar sets, and shaft encoders.

ME: Where'd you go after Lab for Electronics?

Morley: I quit working. I retired in 1964, after about 10 years. They wouldn't let me ski during the week. I was a total nerd-NERD stands for 'New England R&D'-and one of the guys, Jonas Landau, convinced me I should do something else other than write on blank pieces of paper, fill them up, and give them to other people. I never went to the meetings, wasn't involved in management, and he got me hooked on skiing. There were no lines on weekdays so I wanted to work Saturdays and Sundays, ski Thursdays and Fridays, but the pointy-head guys said I couldn't do that, it's against policy. We had no money in the bank, we had kids and a mortgage, so after six months, I quit. Went down to my cellar, and the same guy that I used to work for hired me back three days a week for the same pay I was getting for five. And I said 'this makes sense.' I learned all about economics.