Part IThe Story
The wheelchair was the problem. Its arms sat a little too high for the keyboard of the baby grand, and the footrests kept catching on the pedals. For a few awkward moments in the ballroom of the Four Seasons in Newport Beach, at an invitation-only dinner on a Tuesday evening in September 1998, the guest of honor was simply an old man being fitted to a machine. Then the fitting was done. Arnold Orville Beckman, ninety-eight years old, put his hands on the keys and played "Yankee Doodle." Then "Jingle Bells." No one had announced a recital and nobody would have called it repertoire. These were tunes a boy might play to fill the silence in a small-town movie house while the film reel was being changed. That boy, eighty-some years earlier, had been the paid pianist in exactly that kind of room, improvising in the dark under the flicker of silent pictures.
The audience that night was not a movie-house crowd. Seven present and former university presidents had come, along with a few dozen Orange County executives. The week before, Beckman had announced a $14.4 million program to put hands-on science into the county's elementary schools: teacher training, district grants of up to $200,000, hundreds of experiment kits for children. During dinner a slide show of aphorisms, some of them his, ran on large screens. Change is inevitable except from a vending machine. Be nice to your kids. They'll choose your nursing home. The man in the wheelchair had made, by one reported estimate, about $500 million when he sold his company in 1982. Over the previous twenty years his foundation had given away more than $300 million. He had already been given most of the medals the United States awards for science and technology, and an asteroid, 3737 Beckman, carried his name.
None of that showed in the music, which was the right effect. A piano is a simple device. A small mechanical input, the press of a finger, is converted and enlarged until it fills a room. The instruments that made Beckman rich, and that let twentieth-century biology measure its own subject for the first time, worked the same way. They took signals too faint for a human to perceive, such as the voltage across a glass bulb dipped in lemon juice or the fraction of ultraviolet light swallowed by a vial of DNA, and made them large enough to read off a meter. The trick, he understood early, was not to make the listener more sensitive. It was to make the signal louder.
He was playing songs he had learned before the First World War. The hands still knew them. Within eighteen months, a reporter would find a man whose memory flickered and failed to connect, and whose son said the frustration was unbearable to watch. But that was later. In September 1998 the music came out more or less correct, the room applauded, and the oldest person in it had, for the length of two children's songs, no need of any instrument but the one in front of him.
By the Numbers
The Instrumental Century
$195Price of the first pH meter, 1935, about a chemistry professor's starting monthly wage
$723Price of the DU spectrophotometer in 1941, versus $6,400 for GE's Hardy instrument in 1943
~30,000DU spectrophotometers sold between 1941 and the last unit on July 6, 1976
40%Share of company income from the Helipot within its first year of production
14Patents held by Beckman
$400M+Given by the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation by the time of his death
104Years lived, April 10, 1900 to May 18, 2004
One Space in Line
Almost every account of Arnold Beckman's life eventually comes to a barracks at the Brooklyn Navy Yard in late 1918, and to a count.
He had turned eighteen in August and enlisted in the Marines the same month. After three months of boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, he was sent north to Brooklyn to ship out for Europe. A train ran late, and another unit took his unit's place on the transport. Then the men in the barracks were counted off into groups, and the group bound for Russia was filled one man before it reached him. One space. He never went anywhere. The war ended. On Thanksgiving he went to a dinner at the local YMCA, where a seventeen-year-old named Mabel Stone Meinzer was helping to serve the meal. He married her six and a half years later and stayed married to her for sixty-four.
— Arnold O. Beckman, as quoted in Kauffman and Kauffman, 'A Legend in His Own Time,' 2001Luck has played a big role in my life—finding a chemistry textbook and meeting my wife through lucky circumstance.
What stands out is that he named the textbook first. The book was Joel Dorman Steele's Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry, published in 1868 and long out of date by the time a nine-year-old found it in the family house in Cullom, Illinois. Cullom was a farming village of about five hundred people. It had no telephones, and at night it was lit by a few arc lamps that burned carbon rods. Arnold and his friends collected the spent stubs of those rods, paired them with scrap zinc, and tried to make batteries. His father, George, was one of the town's blacksmiths. He took his son's hobby seriously enough to turn a toolshed into a laboratory, which accounts say was ready by the boy's tenth birthday. The drugstore supplied the reagents. Relatives supplied whatever apparatus Arnold could not make himself.
"In Cullom, we were forced to improvise," Beckman said much later. "I think it was a good thing." His grandson put it more simply: "When Grandpa wanted a toy, he made it himself."
His mother, Elizabeth Ellen Jewkes, died of diabetes in 1912, when he was twelve. George sold the forge and became a traveling salesman of blacksmithing supplies. A housekeeper, Hattie Lange, was hired to keep the household running. Arnold earned money in two ways that a novelist would hesitate to invent. He played practice piano for a local band, and he was the "official cream tester" at a general store, where he ran a centrifuge to separate butterfat. Forty-two years later, the company bearing his name bought the ultracentrifuge maker Spinco and made centrifuges a division.
In 1914 the family moved to Normal, Illinois, and the next year to Bloomington, so the children could attend University High School, the laboratory school attached to the state normal college. Bloomington had indoor plumbing, his first. Beckman talked his way out of Latin and into college chemistry. The chemistry professor there was Howard W. Adams, and he became the first of several men in this story whose role was to take a faint signal and make it carry. Adams took the teenager through six college chemistry courses. On Saturdays he drove him the fifty miles to Urbana so he could use the better-equipped laboratories at the University of Illinois. When Beckman showed an interest in metallography, Adams signed up for a correspondence course in it alongside him, although, as Beckman remembered decades later, Adams had no particular interest in metallography himself. That is how a good mentor behaves: he serves the student's inclination, not his own.
Before graduating, the boy had printed business cards for a company called Bloomington Research Laboratories. He was its "Chief Scientist," and he did analytical work for the local gas company. At night he played piano at the movie house. He finished as valedictorian with a four-year average of 89.41, the highest the school had recorded. In early 1918 he was allowed to leave a few months early for war work at Keystone Steel and Iron. There he sampled molten iron and tested it for carbon, sulfur, manganese and phosphorus to decide whether a heat was fit to pour as steel. He was a measurer before he was anything else, and the first thing he measured was whether something was ready.
After the Marines and before college, there was a summer drifting West. He rode freight trains, according to one telling, and played piano at a theater in Ashton, Idaho, lodging in the owner's house. That trip started a lasting attachment to the western United States. Then he went back home, and to Urbana.
The Detour Through West Street
The University of Illinois nearly killed him, or at least the mercury did.
In his freshman year he worked with Carl Shipp Marvel, called "Speed," on synthesizing organic mercury compounds, and both men were poisoned. A career in organic chemistry ended there. Beckman moved to physical chemistry under Worth Rodebush, T. A. White and Gerhard Dietrichson, and took a bachelor's in chemical engineering in 1922 and a master's in physical chemistry in 1923. His thesis was on the thermodynamics of aqueous ammonia. He joined Delta Upsilon, whose members called themselves "DU"s. Keep that in mind for later.
He was admitted for the doctorate at Chicago, MIT and Caltech, and chose Caltech partly because Richard Tolman had gone there from Illinois. He spent one year in Pasadena and then left, for the oldest reason there is. Mabel was in New York working as a secretary at the Equitable Life Assurance Society, and Beckman could not stand the distance. He found a job in Western Electric's engineering department on West Street in Manhattan, the group that was soon to become Bell Telephone Laboratories.
There he became the first technical employee of Walter A. Shewhart. Shewhart was not yet called the father of statistical quality control, though he soon would be. He was working out how to control the quality of manufactured goods through sampling and statistics instead of by inspecting every item. Beckman helped build quality-control programs for vacuum tube production. He learned circuit design. He learned how a large organization ran research and development, and he learned the vacuum tube in detail. A chemist was being taught electronics by the people who were inventing modern electronics, in a job he had taken only to be near his fiancée. Later he said that without the Bell Labs years he might never have become interested in electronics at all. A detour taken for love turned out to be his technical education.
They married on June 10, 1925. In 1926 Arthur Amos Noyes, Caltech's head of chemistry, pushed him to come back and finish his degree, and the Beckmans drove west in a Model T. On one day in the Badlands it had nineteen flat tires. The Model T had a design flaw: the gas tank sat lower than the carburetor, so on steep grades fuel would not flow and drivers often turned around and climbed hills in reverse. Beckman thought that was silly and dangerous. He fitted a bicycle valve into the gas cap, pressurized the tank with a bicycle pump, and drove uphill facing forward. "That's the kind of thinker he was," said Gerald Gallwas, a Beckman chemist and his friend for more than thirty years. The fix was the pattern in miniature. Don't redesign the car. Add a little pressure where it is lacking.
His dissertation under Roscoe G. Dickinson, finished in 1928, was on the photochemical decomposition of hydrogen azide. To do it he built an instrument that aimed ultraviolet light at a thermocouple, turned the heat into an electrical current, and used that current to move a galvanometer. In other words, he made light into a needle you could read. Caltech kept him on as an instructor and later a professor. It also kept another Dickinson student, Linus Pauling.
At Caltech, Beckman became the man you went to with an apparatus problem. He taught glassblowing in the machine shop. He taught the design and use of research instruments. He ran the chemistry department's instrument shop, which meant he saw firsthand how much research time was lost to equipment that broke, drifted, or required a physicist to operate. The department was moving away from applied chemistry toward pure science, and Beckman, with his practical bent, might have been left behind. The institution protected him instead. Noyes encouraged him and the chemical engineer William Lacey to stay in contact with working engineers. Robert Andrews Millikan, Caltech's president, passed along technical questions from government agencies and businesses, and with their approval Beckman took outside consulting work and testified as an expert witness. In practice, Millikan was sending him customers.
A Smell No One Would Manufacture
In 1934 Millikan sent him I. H. Lyons.
Lyons ran the National Postal Meter Company and wanted ink that would not clog postage meters, so that machines could print postage and clerks could stop licking stamps. Beckman's solution used butyric acid. The ink worked, but butyric acid smells like rancid butter and worse, and no manufacturer would make it. So Beckman made it himself. He set up the National Inking Appliance Company in a garage owned by an instrument maker named Fred Henson and hired two Caltech students, Robert Barton and Henry Fracker. He patented a couple of devices for re-inking typewriter ribbons. They did not sell. His first business was a failure, and its main product was a smell.
He kept the company, though, along with the garage, the two students and the habit of making things himself. The next request came through an old friend.
Glen Joseph had been at Illinois with Beckman and now worked as a chemist for Sunkist, the California Fruit Growers Exchange. Joseph's job involved the lemons that were too ugly to sell. These were processed into pectin and citric acid, with sulfur dioxide added as a preservative, and Sunkist needed to know the acidity of the product at every stage. Litmus paper and other color tests failed because sulfur dioxide interfered with the colors. Electrochemical methods ran into the same chemical: it ruined hydrogen electrodes, and the glass electrodes that resisted it gave signals too faint and were too fragile to use. Joseph had been trying to make his measurement more sensitive.
Beckman suggested the opposite approach. Leave the measurement as it is and amplify its output. He knew glassblowing from his teaching, electricity from Bell Labs, and chemistry from his training, and he designed a vacuum-tube amplifier with the glass electrode in the grid circuit. The faint voltage from the lemon juice drove a tube, and the tube drove a meter. He built a working unit and gave it to Joseph. Joseph asked for a second one.
That second request is the point at which Beckman saw a business. He described it later as necessity:
— Arnold O. Beckman, quoted by The Scripps Research Institute, 2004When you're faced with the necessity to do something, that's a stimulus to invention. If (my classmate) hadn't come in with his lemon juice problem, chances are I never in the world would have thought about making a pH meter.
He undersold himself. Plenty of people get asked for a second unit and build one. Beckman reconsidered the whole device. He decided it should be a complete, portable chemical instrument that someone who was not a specialist could use, rather than a bench full of glassware and wiring that only its builder understood. By October 1934 he had filed the patent application that became U.S. Patent No. 2,058,761, for what he called an "acidimeter." His letters from June 1935 to Lyons, who remained involved in the company, cover production, personnel, patents and what to name the device. The name became "pH meter."
People advised him against it, reasonably. The country was in the Depression, laboratories were short of money, and the instrument would cost $195, about a month's starting pay for a chemistry professor. The other side of the calculation was that building an equivalent from parts would cost about $500 and take a skilled person days of work. The Arthur H. Thomas Company of Philadelphia, a national dealer in scientific instruments, agreed to try selling it. The first models came in polished walnut cases and weighed nearly seven kilograms. The earliest version had a flaw: the reading changed depending on how deep the electrodes were dipped. Beckman fixed it by sealing the glass bulb of the electrode. On April 8, 1935, the ink company was renamed National Technical Laboratories. It moved to larger rented space at 3330 Colorado Street.
The archive in Philadelphia preserves how the business actually felt day to day. A letter of April 30, 1935, to a Dr. L. H. Duschak answers whether the acidimeter would work for vegetable juices and describes changes made just before the instrument went to market. A letter of December 7, 1937, in Box 14, Folder 9 of the Beckman Historical Collection, is to a salesman named Thomas Herring, and the archivists' catalogue describes it as a "scathing critique" of his performance selling pH meters. In an undated manuscript history of the company, Beckman named the early people one by one, among them Glen Joseph, Henry Fracker, Robert Barton, Fred Henson and Thomas F. Herring. He recorded meetings with distributors and discount schedules. He wrote about Mabel's part in the business. He also wrote about the harm done to the company by a sales manager whose prejudice, according to the collection's catalogue, drove away customers. The professor had become an owner who kept accounts and noticed when someone was hurting them.
On May 11, 1939, sales were strong enough that Beckman left the Caltech faculty to run National Technical Laboratories full-time. In 1940 he borrowed money to build a 12,000-square-foot factory in South Pasadena. The garage period was over.
Why the Black Box Won
Before 1940, analyzing what a substance contained was slow, skilled work done by hand in a wet laboratory: precipitations, filtrations, dissolutions, and a great deal of waiting. Measuring how a sample absorbed light was possible, but the equipment for wavelengths toward the ultraviolet could cost a lab $3,000. The results came out on photographic plates that someone had to develop correctly and then compare by eye against known spectra. Spectroscopy was a physicist's tool, and most chemists had never been taught it. The English firm Adam Hilger had spent decades trying to sell spectroscopic instruments to chemists and mostly ended up selling to physicists.
The biochemistry of the 1940s needed the ultraviolet. Proteins and nucleic acids absorb there, and vitamin A cannot be properly examined in visible light alone. Beckman's plan was the same one he had used on the pH meter: take a bench full of awkward equipment and turn it into one integrated box with a dial and a needle. He gave the project to a young researcher, Howard Cary. Cary is an example of a pattern Beckman would see again: the talented employee who becomes a competitor. He later co-founded Applied Physics Corporation, which became Cary Instruments and one of Beckman's toughest rivals. Roland Hawes and Kenyon George worked on the team as well.
The Model A prototype of 1940 used a tungsten lamp, chosen in part because tungsten lamps were cheap and easy to get as automobile headlamps, with a glass prism and an external amplifier borrowed from the pH meter. Glass absorbs ultraviolet light instead of dispersing it, so Model B switched to quartz. Only two Model Bs were built. One was sold in February 1941 to the chemistry department at the University of California in Los Angeles. Model C replaced a finicky tangent-bar adjustment with a scroll drive, so the instrument no longer required a highly skilled operator, and that set the pattern for every quartz-prism instrument the company made afterward. Model D put the optics and the pH meter's direct-coupled amplifier into one housing.
Then the suppliers began to say no. Bausch and Lomb declined to make the quartz prisms, so the company designed its own optics. Large optical-quality quartz came from Brazil and was also in demand for military radio oscillators, so Beckman had to win a wartime priority listing to get it. The available hydrogen lamps did not satisfy him, so the company designed its own, with an anode inside a thin blown-glass window, and had it in production by December 1941. RCA provided small batches of an experimental phototube for the first Model Ds and then could not keep up with demand, so the company designed its own phototubes, one sensitive to red and one to blue. With those tubes the Model D became the DU. The name most likely meant D for the model and U for ultraviolet. Some have suggested it also referred to Delta Upsilon, the college fraternity. Nobody has proven that, and it seems like something he would have enjoyed leaving unresolved.
The DU went on sale in 1941 for $723. GE's Hardy spectrophotometer cost $6,400 two years later. Using the DU, a chemist put in a sample, turned to a wavelength, checked a blank, and read the absorption from a meter. The National Bureau of Standards tested it, certified that its results were accurate and repeatable, and recommended it.
The effects showed up in biochemistry. The standard assay for vitamin A in shark liver oil had been to feed the oil to rats for twenty-one days, cut off their tails, and examine the bone. The DU did it in minutes. MIT later summarized the change as going from weeks of work at 25 percent accuracy to minutes at 99.9 percent. At the Northern Regional Research Laboratory in Peoria, an early DU was among the tools used in the secret wartime program to mass-produce penicillin. By the end of the war American companies were making 650 billion units a month. At New York University, Severo Ochoa had a DU on loan from the American Philosophical Society, which researchers there described as "new and scarce" and constantly in use. A young Arthur Kornberg used it to purify aconitase. Kornberg later called the DU "an instrument that transformed biochemistry." Gerty and Carl Cori's laboratory used it to calculate enzyme concentrations. Erwin Chargaff, measuring the bases of DNA by their absorption near 260 nanometers, used a DU to establish that guanine matched cytosine and adenine matched thymine. In 1952 he described those findings to Watson and Crick.
Bruce Merrifield, a Nobel laureate, called the DU "probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience." The historian Peter J. T. Morris dates a Kuhnian revolution in chemistry to the arrival of instruments like it.
From 1941 until 1976 the DU was built to essentially the same design, and about 30,000 were sold. The last one came off the line on July 6, 1976. A copy of its 1954 instruction manual, now in the Science History Institute's collection, has "A. W. Scholl" written in the upper right corner of the cover. The archivists observed that the stains on the cover show it was also used as a coaster. That is roughly the most an instrument maker can hope for: a device so dependable that the people using it stop thinking about it and set their coffee on its manual.
Secrets He Could Not Tell His Own Board
The war arrived through people asking about specific parts.
Paul Rosenberg worked at MIT's Radiation Laboratory, one of the secret Allied institutions developing radar. Rosenberg had found that the tuning knobs on Beckman's pH meters were about ten times more precise than any other potentiometer available. These were helical potentiometers, trademarked as the "Helipot." Radar consoles needed that precision, but in aircraft, ships and submarines that were shaking or under fire, the existing design could not hold up. Its wire coil and spring-pressed single contact point could be jolted out of place.
Beckman was not allowed to tell his staff why the redesign mattered, and without the reason they were not very interested in the problem. So he solved it himself. He replaced the spring-loaded contact with a continuous groove that held the contact point, so it moved smoothly and could not be jarred loose. The Model A Helipot was in huge military demand. In its first year of production it accounted for 40 percent of the company's income. A component designed to make a lemon-juice meter easier to read had become a significant part of the radar effort.
At about the same time, the Office of Rubber Reserve held a secret meeting in Detroit. Natural rubber from Asia was cut off, and jeeps, aircraft and tanks all needed tires. At the meeting were Robert Brattain of Shell Development, R. Bowling Barnes of American Cyanamid, and Beckman. Brattain had designed a single-beam infrared spectrophotometer, and Beckman was asked to build a hundred of them, secretly, for government scientists working on butadiene and toluene. The first IR-1s shipped in September 1942, and roughly 75 were made through 1945. The researchers using them were not allowed to publish. Meanwhile competitors outside the program published and developed infrared instruments freely, which put Beckman behind. In 1953, facing strong competition, he committed to a radical redesign that became the IR-4, which could run with a single or double beam.
Linus Pauling, Beckman's fellow student under Dickinson, had been asked by the National Defense Research Committee at a meeting on October 3, 1940, for a reliable way to measure oxygen in mixed gases inside submarines and aircraft. Pauling designed the meter. His assistant, Holmes Sturdivant, first approached Beckman only about housing boxes, and then asked him to build the whole instrument. The National Technical Laboratories board would not back a classified project whose details could not be shared with them. They agreed, however, that Beckman could pursue it personally. He formed a separate company, Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., to do it.
The oxygen meter depended on tiny, extremely precise glass dumbbells. Beckman built a small glass-blowing machine that released a measured puff of air to form the glass balls, so the glassblowing he had once taught Caltech students was now done by a machine of his own design. In a letter dated February 14, 1945, stamped "Confidential" and carrying the Espionage Act warning, he reported to J. H. Rushton that the Model G was ready for testing and the Model F was not, that an experimental unit had gone to the SAM Laboratories in New York for the Manhattan Project, and that the work had run over the contract amount, with Beckman personally contributing more than $2,000. On July 2, 1945, he wrote to E. B. Patterson with a different concern: that the secrecy around the oxygen meter would hurt sales in the postwar market he expected. He was already planning for peacetime while the war was still on.
That postwar market included premature infants. After the war, Beckman oxygen analyzers monitored incubators, and doctors at Johns Hopkins used them to set recommended oxygen levels. The same technology ended up guarding against blindness in newborns.
For the Manhattan Project itself, scientists were struggling to read the weak currents from ionization chambers in reactors. Beckman saw that the pH meter could do it with one small change: replace the glass electrode with an input-load resistor. That produced the micro-ammeter. He also built a dosimeter for project personnel, a pocket-sized ionization chamber charged to 170 volts, with a platinum-coated quartz fiber as its needle. Arnold O. Beckman, Inc. manufactured it.
Taken together, the war years show the same approach every time. One amplifier, one disciplined way of making things, applied to lemon juice, then light, then radar, then oxygen in a submarine, then radiation in a reactor. Each time he took something faint and made it readable.
What Gary, Indiana Smelled Like
Los Angeles first experienced smog in 1943 as something closer to an attack. People called the episodes "gas attacks." Suspicion fell on orange growers' smudge pots, on factory smoke, and on car exhaust. Beckman lived in Altadena, in the foothills above Pasadena, in a house he and Mabel had built in 1933. He breathed it like everyone else. He was also active in the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, which worried about smog both as a health problem and as a threat to jobs.
In 1947 Governor Earl Warren signed a law allowing counties to create Air Pollution Control Districts. The Chamber sent Beckman to help set up the Los Angeles district, and the new district appointed him scientific consultant to its control officer, a position he held from 1948 to 1952. The officer, Louis McCabe, was a geologist with chemical engineering training, and he was confident the cause was sulfur dioxide. He proposed an expensive program to capture it and turn it into fertilizer.
Beckman doubted it, and he checked in the most direct way available. He went to Gary, Indiana, where steelmakers were dealing with sulfur dioxide, and he smelled the air. Sulfur has an unmistakable odor. Los Angeles smog did not have it. He came back and persuaded McCabe to look for another cause. The man who made instruments for a living settled the first question with his own nose.
Then he turned to Arie Jan Haagen-Smit, a Caltech professor already working on smog. The two built an apparatus that drew Los Angeles air through tubing cooled at intervals with liquid nitrogen and collected what condensed. Haagen-Smit identified a peroxy organic material and agreed to spend a year on the chemistry. His results, published in 1952, identified ozone and hydrocarbons from smokestacks, refineries and car exhaust as the main ingredients of smog. While Haagen-Smit explained where smog came from, Beckman worked on measuring it. On October 7, 1952, he received a patent for an "oxygen recorder" that used colorimetric methods to measure compounds in the atmosphere. Beckman Instruments later sold air-quality monitoring vans, which were laboratories on wheels. In June 1955 it bought the Liston-Becker Instrument Company, whose founder, Max Liston, had a record of building infrared gas analyzers. Liston went on to build instruments for measuring car exhaust.
Governor Goodwin Knight put Beckman in charge of a Special Committee on Air Pollution. Its report, released at the end of 1953 and nicknamed the "Beckman Bible," called for immediate action: stop vapor leaks at refineries and gas stations, set standards for automobile exhaust, convert diesel trucks and buses to propane, ask polluting industries to cut emissions or move out of cities, ban open burning of trash, and develop regional mass transit. A Chamber of Commerce committee asking industry to leave the city was unusual. He helped establish the Air Pollution Foundation, joined the Chamber's board in 1954 as head of its air pollution committee, pushed for stronger powers for the control district, and helped build a unified system of monitoring and smog alerts.
On January 25, 1956, he became president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce. He named two priorities for his term: fighting smog, and encouraging collaboration among local science, industry and education. Three weeks later he was in San Francisco announcing the formation of a transistor laboratory.
The Man Who Got Out of the Way
First, some background on control.
John J. Murdock owned a large block of National Technical Laboratories stock. He and Beckman had signed an option agreement under which Beckman could buy Murdock's shares from his estate when he died. Murdock died in 1948, and Beckman exercised the option and took control. On April 27, 1950, the company was renamed Beckman Instruments, Incorporated. In 1952 it listed on the New York Curb Exchange and raised capital to expand, including overseas. The Helipot Corporation, spun off when the board doubted electronics, came back as a division in 1958 and started experimenting with cermets, ceramic-metal composites that let potentiometers withstand extreme heat. In 1954 the company bought Spinco, founded by Edward Greydon Pickels in 1946, and entered the ultracentrifuge business, which brought the former cream tester back to centrifuges. It bought Berkeley Scientific and formed a Systems Division that built the EASE analog computers. By 1959 it had contracts with Boeing, Lockheed, North American Aviation and Lear Siegler. Two EASE machines were later used to simulate the Apollo Guidance Computer, and Beckman systems processed the Moon photographs sent back by NASA's Ranger probes.
A new factory went up in Fullerton on land that had been citrus groves, the groves that gave Orange County its name. A company that began by measuring lemons now stood where the lemons had grown.
In 1955 the company was chosen for an episode of Success Story, a television program sponsored by Richfield Oil. Each episode toured a local factory admiringly, and the company's real purpose was to win bulk petroleum orders from the industrialists it flattered. The broadcast was set for February 18, 1955. Heavy rain in Fullerton caused repeated power outages and the broadcast was cut off partway through. The company mailed 25,000 "rainchecks," each with a red string loop to hang on a TV tuner, announcing the new date: Friday, May 13, "flying in the face of fate," as the cards said. They did not appear to be worried about it.
Also in 1955, a former student called.
William Shockley grew up in Palo Alto, in a Craftsman house on Waverley Street a short distance from what would become the Hewlett-Packard garage. One account describes him as a child who was "ill-tempered, spoiled, almost uncontrollable." He studied at Caltech, earned a doctorate at MIT, and at Bell Labs led the group in which John Bardeen and Walter Brattain demonstrated the point-contact transistor in 1947. Unhappy at not being more closely credited, Shockley worked privately and invented the junction transistor in January 1948. Bell Labs had given Beckman his electronics education. Now one of the most brilliant and difficult people Bell Labs ever produced wanted Beckman's money.
Shockley first asked Beckman only to join a board. After long discussions, Beckman agreed to more: Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory would be a subsidiary of Beckman Instruments under Shockley's direction, and it would begin with automated production of diffused-base transistors. Beckman thought better silicon transistors would help his own company's move into automation. Shockley's mother was getting old and lived in Palo Alto, so the lab went to nearby Mountain View, with Frederick Terman, Stanford's provost, offering space in the university's new industrial park. On February 14, 1956, at a lunch for scientists, educators and press at the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco, Beckman announced an agreement, signed the day before, for "the establishment in the Stanford community of the Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory to develop and produce transistors and other semiconductor devices." Later that year Shockley shared the Nobel Prize in Physics.
Then Shockley did what he wanted. He moved the lab off the diffused silicon transistor he had agreed to build and onto a device of his own invention, the four-layer diode. He had never run a business, and the people who worked for him found him hard to work for. Beckman's engineers told him the science behind the four-layer diode was sound. When members of the lab came to Beckman directly and asked him to step in, he declined to interfere with Shockley's management.
A set of rules for living later circulated under Beckman's name, and one of them reads: Hire the best people, and then get out of the way. In 1957 he followed it, at a cost. Eight of Shockley's scientists, including Gordon Moore and Robert Noyce, left and founded Fairchild Semiconductor. Fairchild built the silicon transistors Beckman had been promised, and from Fairchild came the companies that made the region into Silicon Valley. In 1960 Beckman sold the Shockley subsidiary to Clevite Transistor and ended his formal involvement with semiconductors. One later writer described his role in creating Silicon Valley as "unintentional," which is accurate and also a little harsh. He provided the funding, and other people built the industry.
He did not appear to dwell on it publicly. In his 1985 oral history he discussed Shockley Laboratories alongside air pollution and the future of instrumentation, as one part of a long career among many. Shockley went on to promote racial theories that destroyed his reputation and died disgraced in 1989. That was also the year Beckman lost Mabel.
Harder to Give Away
In 1965 Beckman stepped down as president of Beckman Instruments and became chairman. In 1964 he had become chairman of Caltech's Board of Trustees, where he had served since 1953, and he held that post until 1974. In 1962 he helped found the Lincoln Club of Orange County, a political organization, which reflects the side of him that was a Republican industrialist as well as a scientist. The Beckmans' first major gift to Caltech, in 1962, was a concert hall. Beckman Auditorium was designed by Edward Durell Stone, seats about 1,200, and has a ceiling shaped for its acoustics. The first major gift from the former silent-film pianist paid for a place to hear music.
The Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation was incorporated in September 1977. On November 23, 1981, Beckman agreed to sell his company to SmithKline, and the 1982 merger, reported at $1.1 billion, formed SmithKline Beckman, with Beckman as vice chairman. The sale did not go well for him. By February 1989 he was openly angry about it. "I hate to see Beckman Instruments' welfare be dependent upon SmithKline," he told the Los Angeles Times, at eighty-eight. SmithKline had sold off 16 percent of the subsidiary and was hinting it would sell more. Beckman said the two companies would separate, and they did that same year when SmithKline merged with Beecham. Beckman Instruments was independent again. In 1998 it acquired Coulter Corporation, founded by Wallace Coulter, inventor of the Coulter counter, and became Beckman Coulter. On June 30, 2011, Danaher completed its purchase of Beckman Coulter for $6.8 billion, or $83.50 a share. It is now a subsidiary in Brea, California, part of a conglomerate built by two brothers who had no connection to the lemon groves.
The money went to science, and he explained the reason as matter-of-factly as he might explain a circuit:
— Arnold O. Beckman, quoted in the San Diego Union-Tribune, 2004I accumulated my wealth by selling instruments to scientists ... so I thought it would be appropriate to make contributions to science, and that's been my number one guideline for charity.
The gifts of the 1980s were large and arrived quickly: $12 million for the Beckman Research Institute at City of Hope in Duarte; $12 million for a biochemistry laboratory at Stanford; $40 million to the University of Illinois for an Institute for Advanced Science and Technology, developed with the chemist Theodore L. Brown and designed to put researchers from different fields in the same building; $20 million to establish the western headquarters of the National Academies in Irvine; $2.5 million for the Beckman Laser Institute at UC Irvine, followed in 1990 by $6.2 million, at the time the largest gift in UC Irvine's history; and a $2 million challenge grant in 1987 for the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry in Philadelphia. That Center would later hold the scathing letter to Thomas Herring, and it stood in the same city as the Arthur H. Thomas Company, which had first agreed to sell a $195 meter. In June 1986 the foundation pledged $50 million to Caltech for a Beckman Institute. "There will be no place quite like it in the country," said Caltech's president, Marvin Goldberger.
Beckman was candid that some of the hurry had to do with taxes. He wanted to give away a large share of the fortune, he said, before "it gets handed over to our estate and the government gets it." In 1985, before the National Academies grant, he made the remark that newspapers kept repeating for the rest of his life:
— Arnold O. Beckman, 1985, as reported in the Los Angeles TimesIt's harder to give money away than it is to make it.
By the mid-1980s he was the largest private funder of scientific research in the United States. David Baltimore, president emeritus of Caltech, said he "has shaped the destiny of Caltech."
His home life had its own quiet history. When Mabel learned she could not have children, the couple adopted. Gloria Patricia came in 1936 at age three, and an infant son, whom they named Arnold Stone, came the next year. They lived in Altadena for more than twenty-seven years. In 1960 Mabel fell in love with a house on the water in Corona del Mar, and they bought it, renovated it, and lived there together until she died in 1989. Then Beckman, at eighty-nine, changed the foundation's purpose. Instead of spending itself out in his lifetime, it would continue in perpetuity. Its new programs addressed what Howard Adams had once done for him on those Saturday drives. The Beckman Young Investigators program funded early-career chemists and life scientists, especially those developing new methods, instruments and materials. The Beckman Scholars program supported undergraduates. By 1998 the foundation had made 112 young-investigator awards totaling $21 million. Then came the elementary schools: K-6 science kits and the $14.4 million announced the week of the ballroom dinner. The man who had been taught electronics by Bell Labs and taken to Urbana on Saturdays was paying, in his last years, to give younger people the same kind of push.
The chronology does carry one dry irony. Irvine has an Arnold O. Beckman High School with a science focus, named in his honor. He did not pay for it.
Signal Decay
By his hundredth birthday, April 10, 2000, the problem was one his own laboratories could have charted. His memory had become unreliable. He would catch brief pieces of a recollection that did not connect to anything else. A reporter visited, and Beckman's son Arnold described it plainly. "He's so frustrated," he said. "His mind was so active and so intelligent. It just frustrates the hell out of him."
The official celebrations went on that year. The Chemical Heritage Foundation published a biography by Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers Jr., Arnold O. Beckman: One Hundred Years of Excellence. It runs 379 pages and weighs over four pounds, and it came with a CD-ROM so readers could hear him discuss inventing, education and Mabel. One reviewer's only complaint was that it was too heavy to carry through airports. Thackray called him "a prince of a man." In 1999 the National Academy of Sciences had given him its Public Welfare Medal. In 2000 he received a special millennium edition of the Othmer Gold Medal. In 1989 President George H. W. Bush had presented the National Medal of Science "for his leadership in the development of analytical instrumentation and for his deep and abiding concern for the vitality of the nation's scientific enterprise." The aphorisms continued to be quoted: There's no satisfactory substitute for excellence. Do the right thing and apologize later. If you're not taking risks, you're not doing very much. Also: Practice moderation in all things—including moderation.
He died in his sleep on the morning of May 18, 2004, at Scripps Hospital in La Jolla, after a long illness. He was 104. "Arnold Beckman started an instrumentation revolution," said Harry Gray, the Beckman Professor of Chemistry at Caltech, "that completely changed the course of chemistry and biology not only at Caltech, but all over the world." He was survived by his daughter, G. Patricia, his son, and two grandsons.
He did not stay in California. He was buried with Mabel under a simple headstone in West Lawn Cemetery in Cullom, Illinois, the village of five hundred where, when he was a boy, the streets were lit at night by a few arc lamps burning carbon rods, and where he picked the spent stubs up from the ground, paired them with scrap zinc, and tried to make a current.
Part IIThe Playbook
Beckman's career covered seventy years and four distinct roles: professor, manufacturer, civic leader and philanthropist. Underneath them, the same habits of mind show up repeatedly. The principles below come from the decisions described above: the lemon-juice amplifier, the suppliers who said no, the board that could not be told about secret work, the smell of Gary, Indiana, and the scientist he declined to rein in. Several of them cut against conventional startup advice. At least one comes from a failure.
The principles
- 1.Amplify the signal instead of sharpening the sensor.
- 2.Treat the second order as the founding moment.
- 3.Sell the black box, not the bench.
- 4.When suppliers refuse, become the supplier.
- 5.Inspect your own components for hidden products.
- 6.Build a separate vessel for the bet your board can't see.
- 7.Secure control years before you need it.
- 8.Check the cheapest evidence before the expensive theory.
- 9.Getting out of the way is a decision, not a virtue.
- 10.Import a discipline your field hasn't met.
- 11.Make your institution a referral engine.
- 12.Give back in the currency you earned.
Principle 1
Amplify the signal instead of sharpening the sensor
Glen Joseph had spent his effort trying to make his measurement more sensitive. His glass electrodes survived sulfur dioxide but produced voltages too small to read, so he worked on the electrode. Beckman moved the problem one step further along the chain. He left the electrode alone and put a vacuum-tube amplifier behind it. The sensor no longer had to be heroic, because the system after it did the work.
This is the central idea of Beckman's career and it kept paying off. The same amplifier, with a resistor in place of the glass electrode, became a micro-ammeter for Manhattan Project ionization chambers. A version of it sat inside the DU. The general lesson is that when a capability is weak at its source, the best fix is often somewhere else in the system: in how a weak input is processed, combined or enlarged after it arrives. Teams often keep polishing the sensor, whether that is a sales lead, a data source or a prototype, when the leverage lies in what follows it.
Tactic: When a key input is too weak, map the full chain from that input to a decision and ask where a cheap amplifier could go downstream before spending more on the source.
Principle 2
Treat the second order as the founding moment
The first pH meter was a favor to a friend. The second was market research. When Joseph asked for another unit, Beckman did not just build a copy. He reconsidered the whole device as a portable instrument that a nonspecialist could operate, filed a patent by October 1934, and renamed his company within six months.
A single unit can be explained by friendship or by the customer's specific circumstances. A request for a second one means the device is solving a problem the customer will pay to keep solved. Founders tend to over-read first sales and under-read repeat orders. Beckman read the repeat order correctly, and he read it from a citrus processor and not from a prestigious lab. The customers who could not do without the device were the evidence.
Tactic: Track which customers ask for a second unit, seat or renewal without being prompted, and redesign the product around their problem, not the first buyer's.
Principle 3
Sell the black box, not the bench
The pH meter cost $195 when a professor earned about that much in a month, which seems impossible to sell in the Depression. But building the equivalent from parts cost about $500 plus days of skilled labor. The DU at $723 replaced equipment worth up to $3,000 and a process that depended on photographic plates and a trained eye. It also undercut GE's Hardy instrument, which cost $6,400. In both cases Beckman was selling the removal of expertise as a requirement. Model C's scroll drive, which ended the need for a highly skilled operator, mattered as much as the quartz prism.
The pattern is to take a capability currently put together by experts from scattered parts and integrate it into one dependable device a nonexpert can operate. The price is then measured against the cost of the expert, not against the cost of the parts.
β
The Black Box Economics
How Beckman priced integration against the cost of expertise, not components.
| Instrument | What it replaced | Beckman price | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| pH meter (1935) | Bench of fragile equipment, ~$500 to assemble | $195 | Scaled |
| DU spectrophotometer (1941) | Photographic plates and up to $3,000 in apparatus; GE Hardy at $6,400 | $723 | Scaled |
| Re-inking ink (1934) | Licking stamps | n/a | Failed |
| Oxygen analyzer (1940s) | No reliable field method | Military contract | Pivoted to incubators |
| Shockley Semiconductor (1956) | Germanium, hand-built transistors | Subsidiary funding | Sold 1960 |
Tactic: Price your product against the fully loaded cost of the expert labor it eliminates, and put your engineering effort into whatever still requires a skilled operator.
Principle 4
When suppliers refuse, become the supplier
The DU nearly failed several times because of other companies. Bausch and Lomb would not make the quartz prisms. Commercial hydrogen lamps fell short. RCA could not deliver enough experimental phototubes. Each time, National Technical Laboratories designed the part itself: the optics, then the lamp, then the phototubes. The ink company had begun the same way, when no manufacturer would make a product that smelled of butyric acid.
Beckman did not integrate vertically as a matter of strategy. He did it when he had to and when the part was critical. The result was nonetheless a defensible position. A competitor could buy a quartz prism, but it could not easily duplicate in-house lamps, tubes and optics that had been tuned to work together. Every refusal from a supplier became something the company now knew how to do.
Tactic: When a supplier refuses or fails on a component that is critical to your product, consider building it yourself, since that refusal may be telling you where your competitors will also be blocked.
The Helipot was originally just the knob on a pH meter. Beckman trademarked it, and that was all, until Paul Rosenberg of the MIT Radiation Laboratory measured it as ten times more precise than anything else available. Once redesigned to withstand vibration, it produced 40 percent of company income within a year. The oxygen meter's tiny glass dumbbells required a custom glass-blowing machine, which was itself a capability. Helipot's later work on cermets led toward the materials science that brought Shockley to Beckman.
Companies seldom take inventory of the parts they built to support their main product. Some of those parts may be better than anything sold commercially, and an outsider will sometimes notice before the company does. Beckman's advantage was that he listened when Rosenberg told him.
Tactic: Once a year, list every component, tool or internal process your team built because nothing on the market was good enough, and ask who outside your industry might pay for it.
Principle 6
Build a separate vessel for the bet your board can't see
The National Technical Laboratories board could not approve a classified oxygen-meter contract it could not be told about, and it doubted electronics in general. Beckman did not argue the point or override the board. He set up Arnold O. Beckman, Inc. for the secret work and the Helipot Corporation for components. The board kept its caution and he kept his options. In 1958, once the bet had paid off, Helipot was brought back into the company as a division.
Separating the entities let both sides behave reasonably. Fiduciaries were not forced to approve something they could not evaluate, and the founder did not have to give up an opportunity. The risk sat where it could be borne. There was a personal cost: the confidential February 1945 letter shows Beckman putting more than $2,000 of his own money into overruns. The separate vehicle does not make the risk disappear. It makes clear who is carrying it.
Tactic: When your governance structure cannot assess a promising bet, give the bet its own legal entity and your own capital, with a defined path to bring it back into the main company if it works.
Principle 7
Secure control years before you need it
John J. Murdock's stock could have ended up with heirs who had no interest in electronics, or worse. Beckman had arranged an option to buy it from Murdock's estate. When Murdock died in 1948, the option gave Beckman control, and two years later the company carried his name. In 1952 he took it public, from a position of control and not of need.
The Murdock option was a dull piece of paper signed long before it mattered. Founders usually think about control only when there is a dispute, and by then the terms have already been set. Beckman took care of succession in the cap table while relations were friendly.
⏱
From Garage to Danaher
Key decisions in the life of Beckman's company.
1934
Ink company in Fred Henson's garage; acidimeter patent application filed by October.
1935
Renamed National Technical Laboratories on April 8; pH meter sells for $195.
1939
Beckman leaves Caltech faculty on May 11 to run the company full-time.
1941
DU spectrophotometer launches at $723.
1942
First secret IR-1 infrared instruments ship in September.
1948
Murdock option gives Beckman controlling interest.
1950
Renamed Beckman Instruments, Inc. on April 27.
1952
Lists on the New York Curb Exchange.
1954
Acquires Spinco, entering ultracentrifuges.
1956
Shockley Semiconductor Laboratory announced February 14.
1960
Shockley subsidiary sold to Clevite.
1982
Merger with SmithKline, reported at $1.1 billion.
1989
Regains independence after SmithKline–Beecham merger.
1998
Acquires Coulter Corporation; becomes Beckman Coulter.
2011
Danaher completes $6.8 billion acquisition on June 30.
Tactic: While relationships with your major shareholders are friendly, put in place written rights of first refusal or purchase options on their stakes.
Principle 8
Check the cheapest evidence before the expensive theory
Louis McCabe was prepared to spend public money turning sulfur dioxide into fertilizer. Beckman traveled to Gary, Indiana, where sulfur dioxide was known to be the problem, and smelled the air. Gary smelled of sulfur and Los Angeles did not. A plane ticket and a sense of smell stopped an expensive program. Only after that did the sophisticated work start: the liquid-nitrogen tubing, Haagen-Smit's year of chemistry, and the 1952 patent.
The instrument maker started with the crudest available test, which shows he understood what instruments are for. Measurement exists to rule out wrong hypotheses quickly. The best first experiment is often a comparison with a known case: find a place where the suspected cause is certainly present and see whether it looks like your problem.
Tactic: Before committing to a costly hypothesis, find a reference case where that cause is known to be present and compare its symptoms directly with yours.
Principle 9
Getting out of the way is a decision, not a virtue
A list of rules attributed to Beckman includes "Hire the best people, and then get out of the way." With Shockley, he did exactly that. Shockley abandoned the agreed diffused silicon transistor for his four-layer diode. Beckman's engineers said the science was sound, and when Shockley's staff asked for help, Beckman did not step in. Eight of them left and founded Fairchild, and Beckman Instruments ended up with nothing from the industry it had funded.
The lesson is not to micromanage. It is that staying out of the way is appropriate only while the person you hired is still pursuing what you agreed on. Once the mission changes, deferring to them is no longer trust. It is choosing not to act. The engineers had answered whether Shockley's idea was scientifically sound, but the real question was whether it was the business the two men had agreed to build. Beckman had the authority and a direct appeal from Shockley's staff. A strong founder's principle had become a blind spot.
Tactic: Write down the specific objective you agreed on with a high-autonomy leader, and treat any unilateral change to it as the point where you step in, however brilliant the leader is.
Principle 10
Import a discipline your field hasn't met
Beckman's real advantage was something he brought into chemistry from outside it. From Shewhart at Western Electric he learned statistical quality control and the vacuum tube, two things chemists of the 1920s did not have. The pH meter put electronics at the center of a chemical instrument, possibly for the first time. The DU combined optics, which had been the physicists' domain, with electronics and sold the result to chemists. Adam Hilger had spent decades failing to reach that market. Peter Dervan at Caltech summed it up: his instruments "combined electronics with chemistry."
He got this cross-training by accident, through a job taken to be near Mabel. The principle does not depend on luck, though. Large advantages often come from a mature technique in one field that has not yet reached another, and the person who brings it across faces little competition at first.
Tactic: Spend focused time inside an adjacent field's best organization, and then list which of its routine methods your own industry still does by hand.
Principle 11
Make your institution a referral engine
Beckman did not find his early problems on his own. Caltech's leadership sent them to him. Noyes encouraged applied contacts, and Millikan forwarded government and business questions. One such referral, I. H. Lyons, led to the ink company. A college friend, Glen Joseph, led to the pH meter. Later, Linus Pauling's assistant brought the oxygen meter. Beckman's position as the professor who could build anything turned the university's prestige into a steady supply of commercial problems.
Being placed where hard problems naturally arrive is underrated as a founder strategy. Beckman kept the professorship until May 1939, more than four years after starting the company, and kept the referrals coming that whole time. Later, as trustee and chairman at Caltech, he gave back to the institution that had sent him his customers.
Tactic: Take a position, whether advisory, academic or civic, where people with hard technical problems are routinely sent to you, and treat each referral as possible product discovery.
Principle 12
Give back in the currency you earned
"I accumulated my wealth by selling instruments to scientists," Beckman said, so he gave to science. His giving had the same structure as his business. He funded institutes built around shared equipment and collaboration across fields, including Caltech, Illinois, Stanford, City of Hope and UC Irvine. After Mabel's death he made the foundation permanent and focused it on young investigators whose work involved "methods, instruments and materials." He was still funding instrumentation, now for scientists not yet established enough to command it on their own.
Giving back to the field that made you rich is not only sentimental. It is where your knowledge is greatest, so you are best placed to judge which grants will matter. He was also realistic about it: he admitted wanting to give the money away before the government took it, and he called giving harder than earning. Both statements show someone treating philanthropy as a problem to solve carefully.
Tactic: Concentrate your giving in the field where you made your money, and fund the tools and early-career people that the field's established funders overlook.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
— Arnold O. Beckman, quoted in C&EN, 2004In Cullom, we were forced to improvise. I think it was a good thing.
— Arnold O. Beckman, quoted in C&EN, 2004If you're not taking risks, you're not doing very much.
— Arnold O. Beckman, on SmithKline, Los Angeles Times, February 19, 1989I hate to see Beckman Instruments' welfare be dependent upon SmithKline.
— Arnold O. Beckman, as quoted by the Beckman FoundationThe past years have been rewarding for me in many ways. Perhaps the greatest reward is the knowledge that Beckman products have contributed and are contributing to the benefit of mankind.
— Arthur Kornberg, on the Beckman DUAn instrument that transformed biochemistry.
Maxims
- Make the signal louder. When the source is weak, the leverage is usually in what you do with its output.
- The repeat order is the real launch. A customer who asks for a second unit has told you that you have a business.
- Price against the expert. An integrated instrument competes with the skilled labor it replaces, not with the cost of its parts.
- Every "no" from a supplier is a capability to build. Make the critical part yourself and keep the knowledge.
- Audit your own knobs. The component you built for internal use may be better than anything on the market.
- Give unapprovable bets their own vehicle. Put the risk outside the main company and carry it yourself.
- Settle control while everyone is friendly. An option signed in calm times decides what happens later.
- Check the crude test first. Comparing against a known case can save you from an expensive wrong theory.
- Getting out of the way has conditions. Stop deferring once the person you backed changes the mission.
- Give in the currency you earned. Fund the field that made you rich, and especially the young people coming into it.
