A Business Born in a Basement and a Garage

Allington working on a peak integrator at Isco in the late 1960s. Courtesy of Teledyne Isco, Inc.

By John Parascandola

With the death of Robert W. Allington on 26 March 2006, the analytical chemistry and instrumentation communities lost one of their most creative and inspiring figures. The company that Allington started in his parents’ garage nearly 50 years ago eventually grew into a global enterprise that employed over 400 people and produced annual sales of about $60 million. His roster of more than 200 patents spans a wide range of instrumentation technologies for separation research and environmental monitoring, including fraction collectors, UV absorption detectors, and water flow meters. In 2005 CHF and Pittcon recognized his professional accomplishments with the Pittcon Heritage Award. This award was only the last in a long list of achievements, including an honorary doctorate from the University of Nebraska, the Small Business Administration’s Small Business Person of the Year Award, and R&D Magazine’s Executive of the Year Award.

In 2001 Allington discussed his life and career in an oral history interview with CHF.

Family and Education

Allington was born in Madison,Wisconsin, at the height of the Great Depression. He spent his childhood in university towns while his father, William, completed his professional training and started a career in plant pathology at the University of Wisconsin. After a brief stint in Illinois, an offer from the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) allowed his parents to return to their native plains state.

Allington had always loved to tinker, and by the time he was six, he was regularly taking batteries, lamps, and doorbells apart. Radios soon followed. As a teenager, Allington used electronics as a welcome escape from a surprisingly rough high school plagued with drugs and violence. Although he had dabbled in chemistry (his father had given him a chemistry set as a young child), the dramatic and entertaining power of electronics proved useful to him as a way to “astound the kids in the neighborhood [and] get their admiration.” Had his parents been fully aware of what was going on in their basement, they might have paid attention too: his creations included a potentially lethal 60-hertz power transformer. Allington was “very careful not to come anywhere close to it except when it was unplugged.” The transformer’s discharge looked something like a “burning bush being blown by a turbulent wind” and “sounded like something out of an old science fiction movie.”

Allington entered the UNL electrical engineering program in 1952 at the age of 16. His father had meanwhile rekindled his interest in chemistry, so Allington took as many chemistry courses as the rigid engineering curriculum would allow. He lived at home and worked part-time, first as a television repairman and then as an electronic development technician in the agricultural engineering department, while attending college. “Interestingly,” Allington recalled, “the TV repair job was the more intellectually challenging of the two.”

Allington’s first taste of a more professional engineering work environment came in the form of a summer internship at MIT’s Lincoln Laboratory in Lexington, Massachusetts, in 1955. There he worked on the development of an “absolutely huge” computer for the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment air defense project. The computer and its consoles were so big—nearly 100 feet square by nearly four stories tall—that you could walk around inside it. Allington loved not only the intellectual challenge of working on what was destined to be the world’s first digital computer but also the glamour of being part of a “quintessential secret government laboratory.” This was a “real job,” and he was treated like “a real engineer”—except, of course, for the salary.

The summer internship was cut tragically short when Allington contracted polio in August. The Lincoln Laboratory dispensary doctor who drove Allington to Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston advised him to call his family and say his good-byes. After three days in an iron lung, however, his condition improved first from dangerous to critical, then eventually to fair. He flew home to Nebraska on a National Guard evacuation plane in October but would not be fully discharged from the hospital until June 1958. He returned to college part-time while still officially in the hospital. “The University of Nebraska, at that time, was not at all accessible,” Allington remembered, so he coaxed his friends into pushing and carrying his wheelchair around campus. He graduated with a bachelor of science in electrical engineering in 1959.

Isco’s Unlikely Origins

As if recovering from a near-fatal illness and taking classes were not enough, Allington started a part-time business in 1957 at the suggestion of Robert Feeney, then chairman of the UNL biochemistry department. Feeney introduced Allington to his future business partner, Jacob Schafer, a toolmaker at the Elgin Watch Company in Lincoln. The pair began collaborating on a business to repair and make scientific instruments, mostly for UNL faculty, while Allington was still in the hospital. Schafer repaired microscopes in his basement; Allington worked on most other instruments in his parents’ garage on weekends when he was furloughed from the hospital. Soon they had scraped enough money together to purchase their first machine tool: a 9-inch South Bend engine lathe. (Isco used this machine in its engineering model shop until 1997.) With the lathe installed in Schafer’s basement, the two were on their way to producing “custom, one-of-a-kind pieces of scientific apparatus.”

The partners’ first opportunity to expand beyond the custom market came in the form of an order for a fraction collector for liquid chromatography. Although chromatography had been used for analysis since the 1890s, it was not until the introduction of liquid-liquid chromatography around 1940 that the technique became an important tool for separating and isolating compounds. Because his father was a plant pathologist, and because botanists and biochemists had been among the first to adopt chromatographic separation techniques, Allington was quick to recognize the potential market for a reliable fraction collector device. His father’s copy of the professional staff roster of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Agricultural Research Service formed the basis of a mailing list for marketing the fraction collectors by direct mail. He had a local printer of church bulletins produce “some not very good, but entirely adequate brochures for the product” and mailed a copy to anyone on the staff roster who had a job title that sounded like it had something to do with biochemistry. Suddenly Allington and Schafer had a shoestring manufacturing business, incorporated in 1958 as Instrumentation Specialties Company—later, more simply, Isco.

Although Allington was still in school and would eventually earn a master’s degree in electrical engineering, he devoted a significant amount of time to the work at Isco. Hoping to replicate their early success, he and Schafer began developing other products that they could sell to the same market, such as an even cheaper version of their fraction collector, an instrument for fractionating centrifuge density gradient tubes, and UV line absorbency detectors for use in chromatography, electrophoresis, or centrifuged density gradients. This last category is of particular importance because Isco’s detectors were the first to make use of electronic peak-slope detection to control fraction collectors and data systems —a key innovation in the development of automated analytical separation technologies. For years fraction collectors and UV absorption detectors were Isco’s “cash cows.”

Growing Pains

Isco’s origins as a custom instrumentation company posed challenges to its growth. While Allington and Schafer were making names (and profits) for themselves by manufacturing separation technologies, they continued to fill one-of-a-kind orders. Plant growth chambers designed for agricultural research, for instance, made up a significant part of their contracts. Some of these instruments, such as chilling devices for ultracentrifuges or, most memorably, a stainless steel flame-throwing box designed for weed control, were downright “silly,” in Allington’s estimation. Even so, one of these “marginal” products provided the two entrepreneurs with the funds to take their business full-time.

In 1959 the Department of Veterinary Science at UNL approached Isco with a fairly unusual request. Researchers were investigating a problem unique to ruminant animals such as sheep and cattle: their digestive process sometimes produces so much gas that the animal eventually can die from bloating. Isco was asked to develop a ruminant pressure apparatus to research this problem. Producing the necessary special radio receiver and recorder was no easy task, as the transmitter had to be small enough to be shoved down the animal’s throat and had to float to ensure that the pressure-sensitive end would stay above the stomach contents. The job took almost a year, at which time Allington presented the department with the apparatus and a bill for $3,500. Alas, there had been only a “handshake contract” on the deal, and Allington was now surprised to learn that his customer had neglected to secure the funding to pay for the equipment. The university’s business office offered to settle the matter by paying 10 cents on the dollar, which Allington refused. “I figured my pride was worth more than $350, so I flounced out, or at least flounced as well as somebody in a wheelchair can flounce!”