National Technical Laboratories Comes Into Its Own

By 1939, the four-year-old company was so successful that its board of directors created the new position of “President” for Beckman.  This new acknowledgement of Beckman’s role required that he leave his old position as professor at Caltech.  Not only were the demands placed on him mutually exclusive in terms of time, Beckman sensed an ethical conflict as well.  At Caltech in the 1930s, it was no light thing to mix pure science with the workbenches of business.  Despite Beckman’s fear that he was sacrificing his scientific training by using it for profit, he ultimately found peace with the decision through rigorously ethical conduct of his affairs and through the pleasure that he got from solving practical problems.  Beckman stepped into his new role of head of a successful company brimming with confidence.  Ever since his years at the University of Illinois he had constantly been creating ideas for of new inventions; finally he was going to have a chance to try some of them out.  And the business could only benefit now that he was giving it his full attention.

Chemical instrumentation was profitable in 1939, so much so that Beckman began looking for a new home for NTL.  Such was his optimism that he did not look for another rental; rather, he sought a loan to build according to his own plan.  NTL moved into their new 12,000-square-foot facility at 820 Mission St. in South Pasadena in 1940.  Beckman was initially dismayed at the enormous amount of space that his company had to fill, but soon the outbreak of the Second World War filled it faster than he could imagine. 

The competition did not stand still for long, and by 1940 Coleman Instruments had offered a pH meter that was just different enough to stand up to direct patent infringement attacks.  Even worse, Coleman developed the instrument one step further with an add-on component that allowed the pH meter to be used for ultraviolet spectrophotometry.  This assembly of optics and phototube developed a weak electrical signal based on the absorption of the sample, which the user could then feed into the pH meter for amplification and readout.  Even though this was a cumbersome and less than ideally accurate system, it was better than the earlier options.  Before the Coleman system, a chemist had to assemble a huge, complex, and expensive network of individual components if he wanted to read absorption from the ultraviolet spectrum.  Beckman, needless to say, was immediately intrigued, and immediately began work on a solution that would best Coleman’s.  The eagerness of many chemists to work with ultraviolet-absorption spectrophotometry guaranteed a market, so Beckman put his vice president for development, Howard Cary, in charge of the project.

NTL initially approached Bausch and Lomb, a renowned maker of optical instruments, to make the optics required for the spectrophotometer.  Bausch and Lomb was not interested, because their factories were facing a capacity crisis due to their role as supplier to the armed forces for the war effort.  They did not realize how crucial Beckman’s spectrophotometer would later be in maintaining the armed forces’ competitive edge.  With characteristic confidence, Beckman decided to manufacture the optics himself.  After much trial and error, the company developed a superior design based on a quartz prism and a highly accurate control mechanism.  The beauty of Beckman’s design as it evolved was that it all but eliminated the need for a skilled operator through its precision engineering.  Beckman continued to follow Coleman’s scheme, however, with a separate optical unit that could be attached to the electronics of the pH meter.

The real breakthrough came in 1941, when Beckman decided that housing the optics and the electronics in separate cases was technically and economically unfeasible.  In July 1941, the Beckman Model D, which integrated a complete spectrophotometer into a single case, was introduced to the scientific community.  Problems remained in the supply of the ultraviolet lamps and phototubes necessary for the instruments.  In keeping with his earlier habits, Beckman engineered new and improved replacements when his commercial supply of parts proved insufficient.  The Model D with the newly enhanced components was dubbed the Model DU, which began its 22-year commercial success in 1942.  Beckman’s spectrophotometer was called “probably the most important instrument ever developed towards the advancement of bioscience” by Bruce Merrifield, a Nobel laureate in chemistry.

Even though the spectrophotometer had important long-term effects on the rate of scientific progress, its effect on the war effort was large and immediate.  Scientists had already discovered the importance of vitamins to proper nutrition, but methods for determining the presence of vitamins in food remained elementary.  For example, the presence of vitamin A in foods was determined by feeding rats on the test substance and then analyzing the strength of their tailbones.  This method was imprecise, tedious, and extremely time-consuming.  Since vitamins have unique absorption patterns in ultraviolet light, however, Beckman’s spectrophotometer could determine their presence quickly and with a high degree of reliability.  This instrument became the standard so quickly that the National Bureau of Standards stipulated its use in large and important projects that required measurements to be absolutely interchangeable between labs.  This official government endorsement of Beckman’s invention sealed NTL’s reputations for reliability and excellence.

Beckman’s invention helped the war effort in other critical ways.  It assisted in the mass production of penicillin, the miracle drug that decisively assisted an Anglo-American victory.  Once penicillin had been discovered, the challenge of mass production remained.  In order to synthesize the chemical, its structure had to be analyzed.  The spectrophotometer played a crucial role in the research that led to this “miracle.”  The Model DU also assisted in the analysis of crude oil for two new substances crucial to the war effort.  In addition to gasoline, oil, kerosene, and other traditional products, Beckman’s instrument helped researchers find benzene and toluene in crude oil.  Benzene is an important ingredient of synthetic rubber, and toluene is the second T in the critical explosive TNT.  The orders that poured in from petrochemical companies for the Model DU opened a whole new market that Beckman had never considered.

The success of ultraviolet spectroscopy in the war effort convinced the government to make the development of infrared spectroscopy one of its wartime campaigns.  Infrared spectroscopy had existed since the early twentieth century, but these measurements were qualitative rather than quantitative.  It was only in the late 1930s that chemical scientists made infrared spectroscopy quantitative as well as qualitative.  Norman Wright, a researcher at Dow Chemical, was the first to make a delicate electronic instrument out of a tablefull of equipment, in much the same way that electronic pH measurements and ultraviolet spectroscopy were conducted before Beckman’s innovations. 

In early 1942, the government held a top-secret meeting in Detroit to facilitate the production of reliable infrared spectrophotometers that had been deemed crucial to the mass production of synthetic rubber for the war effort.  Robert Brattain, from Shell Development Company, had developed a working prototype based on a single-beam design.  The Office of Rubber Reserve asked Beckman to manufacture a hundred instruments on Brattain’s design.  By September 1942, less than half a year after the Detroit meeting, NTL shipped the first infrared spectrophotometers, dubbed the Model IR-1.  It worked, but Beckman and his colleagues could not help seeing many ways to improve it.

It was clear that the use of rugged vacuum-tube amplifiers instead of the testy galvanometer specified by Brattain would be a significant improvement.  Therefore once production had begun on the promised one hundred IR-1s Beckman began work on an instrument of his own design, the IR-2.  It was based on the design of the DU ultraviolet spectrophotometer, and it was endowed with a similarly substantial housing and similarly simple controls.  Beckman’s team developed a new, highly responsible device for detecting infrared light, just as it had developed its own phototube for the Model DU.  The IR-2 went into production in 1945.  Despite its advanced design, the IR-2 was never as easy to use as the DU due to the inherent difficulty of infrared spectroscopy.  It sold for upwards of four thousand dollars, and NTL sold over four hundred of them in the next eleven years.  This was an unqualified success by the standards of the NTL of 1935, but it was modest at best compared to what was to come.

The war left NTL with a mixed bag of advantages in infrared spectrophotometry.  They had gained much experience and become a much larger company thanks to their involvement in the Office of Rubber Reserve project.  Indeed, they had made more infrared spectrophotometers by the end of the war than any other American firm.  However, they were forbidden to publicize this fact, and research conducted on their instruments could not be published.  Bowling Barnes, a scientist from American Cyanamid who had been to the fateful meeting in Detroit in 1942, launched a commercial instrument with Perkin-Elmer based on a more sophisticated double-beam design.  It was launched around the same time as the IR-2, and no one in the scientific community knew anything about Beckman’s wartime experience with infrared spectroscopy.  Beckman was not content with an inferior product; he still had that old Caltech spirit in him.  He did not want to be involved in something unless he was going to be the best.  He posed himself a direct question in 1953: would his company be involved in infrared spectroscopy or not?  He decided that yes, the field was important and sufficiently cutting-edge for his company, and so he poured massive resources into the development of the instrument that would regain NTL’s position as a leader in its field: the IR-4.

The IR-4 was introduced in 1956, and it became the archetype of an evolutionary family of spectrophotometers that ultimately spanned some seventeen years of production.  It was radically redesigned and had many advanced features.  Users could switch between single- and double-beam scanning modes with a simple switch, and in either mode it was a sophisticated, high-performance instrument.  Once again, Beckman’s commitment to excellence played a significant role in furthering the progress of chemical and life sciences research.

Immediately after the 1942 meeting in Detroit, Beckman received an urgent and puzzling call from Paul Rosenberg at MIT’s Radiation Laboratory.  Rosenberg arranged for Beckman to fly directly from Detroit and then back to Pasadena; to Beckman, this kind of arrangement could only mean another secret meeting for military purposes.  Sure enough, once at MIT Beckman was initiated into the top-secret world of microwave radar, the real purpose behind MIT’s Radiation Lab.  The radar project had a desperate need for strong, reliable, and accurate potentiometers, otherwise known as control knobs.  The best they had been able to find had been those on Beckman’s pH meter.  Early pH meters had used of-the-shelf components that were used by their manufacturer as volume and tuning controls for commercial radios, but Beckman’s precision instruments soon outstripped their accuracy level.  In typical style, NTL developed their own potentiometer, called the Helipot (for “helical potentiometer”), with a radical new design that made them the most accurate and reliable on the market.  Rosenberg asked him if he could create a new class of Helipot that would live up to military specifications.  Beckman remembers answering an enthusiastic “of course,” despite, as he admitted forty-three years later, “not realizing what I was getting into.”

The Helipot from the pH meter was accurate, but it was not able to withstand much shock.  This was understandable, as Beckman’s instruments were made to be used in a relatively peaceful laboratory, but the Helipot that they were to make for aircraft radar needed to be much more robust.  A complete redesign was called for, but back at NTL, not everyone was so enthusiastic.  The firm was just gearing up to make the infrared spectrophotometers for the Office of Rubber Reserve, and some of the engineers seemed to find the task of engineering a mere component distracting or even insulting.  After all, NTL was in the business of making scientific instruments, not electrical components.  What was even worse, Beckman could not inform his staff what the new Helipots were for; radar was so highly classified that the concept and even the word were top secret.  His insistence on the new component seemed a mere whim to them, and he was almost faced with an “in-house mutiny.”  Caught between the demands of the military and the revolution among his staff, Beckman set out to redesign the Helipot himself. 

The new design came to him one sleepless night, and he bypassed his disgruntled engineers to have the machinist make a prototype for him directly.  The new Model A Helipot was exactly what the military ordered, and immediately NTL was deluged with orders.  Within its first year of production the Model A was responsible for 40% of NTL’s total profit.  Its success was troubling, however.  If the military was to declare the Helipots a military priority, they could force NTL to do nothing but produce them for the duration of the war, which would derail all of NTL’s other more interesting projects.  To address this problem, Beckman convinced the directors of NTL to allow him to set up a separate subsidiary corporation, the Helipot Corporation, to produce the components.  The new company leased space in NTL’s Mission Street headquarters, so Beckman was able to simultaneously direct the two companies.  It was an important step for two reasons, however: it gave Beckman his first company of his own, and it allowed him to maintain a dual focus on instruments and components.  When Helipot was reintegrated back into its parent organization in the mid-1950s, its reputation served to maintain for decades Dr. Beckman’s position as an important electronics manufacturer.  The Model A Helipot is still manufactured to Beckman’s design.

Beckman’s instruments played another crucial role in the scientific aspect of the war program. The Manhattan Project, the almost superhuman effort by a broad range of American scientists to develop an atomic bomb, needed a reliable supply of plutonium.  In order to ensure this supply, Dupont’s plutonium works in Hanford, Washington needed to be running at full capacity.  In order to determine full capacity, a micro-microammeter was needed to measure the amount of radiation being produced.  Radiation could produce a weak electrical current in an ionization chamber, but scientists did not have a reliable instrument for measuring this current.  After wasting much time and money trying to develop an instrument, a group of MIT scientists realized that once again Beckman’s pH meter could do the trick.  Beckman instantly adapted his pH meter to develop a whole line of micro-microammeters that were used in the Manhattan Project and beyond.

Beckman established yet another company to manufacture yet another instrument for the Manhattan Project.  Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., made the “dosimeter,” a miniaturized ionization chamber and meter based on a miniscule quartz fiber.  The entire device could fit in the breast pocket.  This allowed researchers to assess the level of radiation that they were being exposed to at any given moment.  Beckman was especially proud of this neat little self-contained instrument.

As one of the nation’s leading scientific and technical universities, Caltech was deeply embroiled in the war effort as well.  The military needed an instrument for measuring the amount of oxygen in a sample of mixed gases; this device was needed on submarines and high-flying aircraft to ensure the safety of the servicemen.  Linus Pauling contracted with the government to design and produce one in 1940.  Pauling’s assistant, Holmes Sturdivant, came to Beckman to ask him to build cases for the one hundred instruments they were manufacturing.  Beckman agreed, but soon after the Caltech faculty came back and asked Beckman to manufacture the instruments in their entirety.  Apparently they had underestimated the difficulty of mass-producing highly accurate instruments.  In March 1942, Beckman agreed to manufacture the Pauling Oxygen Analyzer.

Beckman had already convinced the board of NTL to take on one top-secret project without knowing any of the details, that of the IR-1 infrared spectrophotometer.  He was unable to convince them to produce the classified Pauling Oxygen Analyzer on faith as well.  Instead, he produced it under the auspices of Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., the company he wholly owned that was already producing the dosimeter.  The Pauling Analyzer relied on a set of tiny glass barbells suspended on an almost-microscopic quartz fiber, an arrangement that proved very difficult to manufacture quickly in large quantities as the war effort demanded.  Beckman was forced to make several advances in manufacturing techniques, including what was probably the world’s smallest glassblowing machine.

Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., produced only meters of Pauling’s design during the war, but after the war they branched out with several improved varieties, including recording meters, meant for military, scientific, industrial, and medical use.  By 1955 Beckman Instruments had integrated the oxygen analyzer technology with its infrared analysis and other technologies in the Mark II Atmosphere Analyzer, which was used on the U.S. Navy’s submarine fleet.

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