Keen Talk . . . or Ketone Talkin'?

Sound and Vibration, Feb 2005 by Lang, George Fox

The hardy pioneer who brings a really new and needed product to market and then evolves himself as he builds a successful business to serve a narrowly defined market has been vanishing from the American scene. We will miss these heroes when the last one expires. The middle-men who will pretend to fill their void will give us only mediocre offerings and lip (instead of) service. We will deserve this fate if we fail to support the small businesses that try to surface to serve our needs or turn our backs on the established ones that have. Our success as a nation is strongly linked to the success of our technical innovators who choose to run the entrepreneurial gauntlet.

Over the last four decades I have taken occasional breaks from sniffing ketones to actually indulge in the industrial process. It has been my good fortune to wear the harness of several good enterprises and that of a couple of real losers. Without doubt, the high point of my career was my years with Federalcum-Nicolet Scientific Corporation and the reason for this was the character of its founder, Henry Bickel. Henry is the quintessential American technical entrepreneur. He is a gentleman in the truest sense of that word and a man of quiet courage. I am very proud to have been associated with him and the products his genius begat.

I became enamored of signal processing while working at the General Motors Proving Ground in the (old) Noise & Vibration Laboratory. I took some interviews in the industry with the strong expectation of joining Spectral Dynamics in sunny San Diego. I visited Federal Scientific in their "nondescript Harlem loft" (as the New York Times called it in 1973 when the Watergate tapes were analyzed there) strictly as a salary data point. What I found there in the shadow of Columbia University was so exciting that the horrid location became irrelevant; I had to become part of their effort. I came home and told my wife. "I just took an interview in the worst hell-hole factory I've ever seen . . . and I'm going to go to work there." It proved to be a sound life decision, one of the best I have ever made and one of the few I have never regretted.

The move from Ann Arbor, Michigan to a New Jersey suburb proved a domestic disaster. Somewhere in the months between accepting the offer and buying a new home (remember when proper notice was more than two weeks?), the mortgage rate in NJ hit the usury ceiling at 8.5%. Banks responded to this by requiring a 40% down payment for a home in an already expensive market. We bought a miniscule 3-bedroom ranch house (read formerly two bedroom with usable closets) and paid more in property taxes than our total cost of Michigan housing in the prior year. That enticing salary increase rapidly evaporated into the litigious NJ mists and I became an embattled NYC commuter.

However, the job proved to be excellent. I had joined forces with some of the most talented people I have ever known and found myself welcomed by the best friends a fellow could ask for. Our small company was really quite family-like and we were guided by a "good Papa" (and three skilled 'uncles' - Dick Rothschild, Reinhold Volgel and Harold Klipper). Federal's products were innovative and quality was a watchword, long before American industry was choking on the ISO 9000 red herring.