General Radio Story
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THE GENERAL RADIO STORY Frederick Van Veen ISBN 978-0-6151-7665-9 Copyright 2006 by Frederick Van Veen All rights reserved. The General Radio Story Foreword ost company histories are works in progress. They are written, often to mark some anniversary M or other milestone, as a celebration of what has happened so far and as a promise of an even better future. This history is different. General Radio, which was renamed GenRad in 1975, ceased to exist in 2001. Its stock-trading symbol GEN disappeared from the New York Stock Exchange, its 1300 employees were swallowed by a larger company, and its many retirees were suddenly the alumni of an institution that no longer existed. General Radio was not the first company to disappear amid the frequent upheavals of the world of high tech. The Massachusetts business landscape is filled with ghosts: Digital Equipment, Data General, Prime, Computervision, GCA, Wang Labs, and many other once- renowned companies came and went, in many cases after only 15 or 20 years of life. In Silicon Valley, few start-ups lasted even that long. High tech was a pot of gold for many, but it could also be unforgiving to a company that missed a turn in the technology roadmap or that failed to translate a successful product (and every company had one, for a while) into a successful business model. General Radio was no one-trick pony. It lasted for 86 years, an eternity in high tech (and in baseball, as every Red Sox fan knows). But what makes “GR” worth our time is not its longevity, but what it did during those 86 years. It produced measuring instruments without which the pioneers could not have given us electronics as we know it. The first commercial signal generators, oscillators, wavemeters, oscilloscopes, and impedance bridges wore the General Radio monogram, as did sound-level meters, stroboscopes, and variable autotransformers (“Variacs”). As the test and measurement industry morphed into “ATE” (automatic test equipment), GR was first off the mark with automatic circuit board testers and the software to make them hum. General Radio never became a really big company – its annual sales never hit $350 million – but in terms of its contributions to the growth of electronics in the twentieth century, it was a juggernaut. My association with General Radio began in 1955, when I joined the Company’s Publicity Department, headed by Charlie Worthen. Charlie, who joined GR on graduating from MIT in 1928, headed a small group responsible for the Company’s catalogs, instruction manuals, and the General Radio Experimenter, a monthly journal bringing news of new products and measurement techniques to an audience of more than 100,000 readers. Charlie wrote and edited virtually the entire output of the Department, and Martin Gilman, his assistant (and another MIT alumnus) supervised production and printing. Early that year, Charlie decided that he needed another writer to take instruction manuals off his hands. Calls were made, interviews were held, and I was hired. I knew next to nothing about the Company at the outset, except that it had a good reputation for quality products and that the people I met in the interviewing process were impressive. My first assignment was to overhaul the Company’s instruction manuals, and, since the first draft of each manual was written by the instrument designer, I found myself working closely with the Company’s engineers, and I soon began to appreciate that I was in the company of giants. It was not just that they were the world’s leading authorities on electronic measurement; they all seemed to be renaissance men, as comfortable discussing music and literature as they were discussing signal generators and sound level meters. As a liberal arts graduate, I found it unsettling to learn that my boss Charlie ii Worthen, MIT ’28, knew more about the essays of Orwell and the novels of Tolken than I did. Lunch times were a special treat at General Radio. Worthen, Gilman, and I would usually join a group of engineers, usually including Arnold Peterson, Jim Faran, Charlie Burke, and Horatio Lamson, for a spirited discussion that rarely had anything to do with General Radio business or General Radio products. Years later, I would look back and wonder whether this was a telltale sign of a company flaw, but at the time those wide-ranging lunch-table conversations were the days’ highlights. No faculty club offered a richer menu of intellectual stimulation. My tenure at GR lasted 13 years. I enjoyed those years immensely, and I treasure the friendships I made while working there. I left GR to join another company in 1968, and the two companies became competitors. Thus I stayed reasonably familiar with events at my former employer. In the late 1990s, as the world started to unravel for GR, I had distinctly mixed feelings – a vindication of my decision to move on in 1968 and regret that a Company that had been such an important part of the history of electronics (and of my own career) seemed headed for oblivion. This history is an attempt to thwart oblivion. General Radio, the General Radio I knew, should not be allowed to vanish without a trace. When future historians try to identify the people and the companies that gave us the electronics miracles of the twentieth century, I want them to know about General Radio. iii The General Radio Story Acknowledgments This is not the first history of General Radio. In 1965, when GR was celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, Arthur Thiessen, the Company’s Chairman, produced a history of the Company to that point. At about the same time, Donald Sinclair, GR’s President, wrote a shorter version of GR’s history, which he presented at a meeting of the Newcomen Society. The Sinclair version was basically a condensation of the Thiessen book, plus a few of Sinclair’s own observations. I worked closely with Thiessen on his history, editing copy and helping with the layout, but the writing was all his. Arthur was a highly intelligent, literate, and dynamic executive, and his history is valuable not only for its factual contents but also as a window on management’s thinking in 1965. I am deeply indebted to Arthur Thiessen for leaving such an authoritative record of the Company’s first half century. Without it, I wouldn’t have dared to embark on this project. Because relatively few readers of this history will have read Thiessen’s, and because I felt this book should stand on its own as a one-volume history, I decided to include much of the Thiessen material, adding other material from that era that I was able to find and omitting whatever seemed to be of marginal importance. In preparing this history I had access to a formidable volume of printed material. For much of this I am indebted to Gus Lahanas, Bob Fulks, and especially Henry Hall, who worked conscientiously over the years to catalog the archives at the GR museum now taking shape. Henry has also scanned every copy of the General Radio Experimenter as well as many other valuable documents and has burned this material onto CD-ROMs, which are available from him (http://www.teradyne.com/corp/grhs/). iv The full Thiessen history and other historical material are accessible on the same site. Others were also generous with their time and assistance. Harold McAleer responded to countless questions regarding the events that occurred during his many years as an employee and officer. CEOs Bill Thurston, Bob Anderson, Bob Dutkowski and long-time directors Jim Wright and Bill Scheerer submitted to long interviews and responded fully to follow-up questions via phone and e-mail. A great many other former employees helped me piece together the story, and I am grateful to them all, as well as to several Teradyne colleagues for sharing their reminiscences of GR as seen from across the competitive divide. Finally, I want to thank my wife Jill for her considerable help in proofreading and debugging the copy. Kennebunkport, Maine November 2006 v The General Radio Story Contents 1 A Meeting in Waltham 1 2 The Birth of a Company 4 3. Setting a Course 13 4. Creating a Technology Powerhouse 16 5. The Great Depression 22 6. Filling the GR Catalog 25 7. An Engineer’s Company 30 8. World War 2 35 9. The Golden Age 44 10. Rumbles of Thunder 50 11. Concord 55 12. The Young Turks 64 13. The Sinclair Years 68 14. Tensions at the Top 80 15. GR Enters the Systems Business 84 16. The Acquisition Bug Bites 88 17. The Fulks Manifestos 97 18. The Thurston Era Begins 110 19. The Turnaround 124 20. GenRad 128 21. All Systems Go 135 22. GR Goes Public 141 23. The Money Keeps Rolling In 144 24. GenRad Goes for Broke 151 25. Doug Hajjar Arrives 163 26. Thurston’s Last Hurrah 174 27. The Wheels Come Off 178 28. The Anderson Years 193 29. Hard Times 205 30. Jim Lyons Takes Over 215 31. The Last Climb 225 32. Boom 234 33. Bust 237 Afterthoughts 243 Appendix: Sales, Net, 1915-2001 245 vi The General Radio Story Chapter 1 A Meeting in Waltham une 5, 2001: Bob Dutkowsky maneuvered his Audi up the ramp from Route 128 to Totten Pond Road, swung J right, and pulled into the Westin Hotel parking lot. A GenRad meeting was underway at the hotel, but Dutkowsky’s mind was elsewhere. George Chamillard, CEO at Teradyne, had called him a few days earlier to suggest a meeting, and it was not hard to guess what was on his mind.