A Business Born in a Basement and a Garage

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!”

Fortunately the Feed Service Corporation in Crete, Nebraska, had heard about the apparatus and contacted Allington to inquire as to whether Isco could build another one for them in a hurry. As Allington tells it, “I managed to catch my breath, and I told him, ‘Why, yes, indeedy. We can probably supply you with one of those systems in just a couple of months, and how much is it worth to you?’ ” They settled on $10,000—and this time he was sure to get a contract.

Up until that time Allington was still planning on earning a Ph.D. and having an academic career like his father had. He thought of his involvement with Isco as temporary, part-time. He had been promised an offer from UNL when he finished his doctorate, and he had been contacted by other universities and industrial firms. But, at the same time, he could see that there was going to be tremendous growth in medical and agricultural research in the 1960s, and he believed that the existing markets were underserved. Allington realized that “a company starting out then could just ride the wave up, even if it made a lot of mistakes.”

By the spring of 1960 Allington had decided to devote himself to Isco fulltime. With $12,000 in retained earnings (mostly from the Feed Service Project) and a $10,000 loan from his father, Allington and Schafer built a steel facility in an industrial area in Lincoln, bought a milling machine and some sheet metal equipment, and hired a few employees. Sales reached $100,000 within the first year, and by 1963 the company was turning a profit, Allington’s father had been repaid, and the building had been expanded to double its original size. When Jacob Schafer decided to leave the company a year later, Allington arranged a private sale of stock in the company to some of his friends and relatives to raise the funds to buy out his partner. In that same year Robert’s younger brother John joined Isco and took charge of sales, thus taking some of the workload off of his brother.

By 1966 the number of employees in the company had mushroomed to about 50. Allington had realized that one-of-a-kind orders were “disruptive to monkey around with” and diluted their product line, so Isco left the custom business. Even so, the resulting product line was, in Allington’s words, “not coherent.” Besides separation products, the company sold light measurement devices, spectroradiometers, calibration instruments, insecticide application devices, and, of course, plant growth chambers. Allington recalled, “It was becoming apparent that every expenditure on agricultural research products such as growth chambers diluted our efforts in the biochemical separation market, the area in which we were a more efficient producer.” Moreover, Isco needed more space, and there was no more land available. Allington’s solution was to split the company into two divisions: a small “environmental chambers” division, consisting of three employees; and a separation instruments division, which included everyone else.

For a while it looked as if the new corporate organization would cure Isco’s growing pains. In 1968 Isco issued nearly half a million dollars’ worth of tax-free bonds to fund construction of the initial part of the company’s present quarters at 48th and Superior Streets in Lincoln. But then something unexpected happened: federal funding for agricultural research dried up, a casualty of the rising costs of the Vietnam War and Johnson’s Great Society programs. Isco’s plant chambers were “absolutely useless for any purpose other than agricultural research,” so Allington faced a choice of either laying off the division’s three employees or finding something else for them to do. Rather than shutting the division down, Allington decided to turn the “environmental chamber division” into an “environmental instrument division” tasked with developing and manufacturing pollution sampling devices.

The new environmental instrument division was headed by Frank Lederer, an old classmate of Allington’s with impressive managerial and entrepreneurial instincts. Lederer started with a primitive, first-generation sampler for monitoring the pollution of water. Looking at the burgeoning environmental movement, Allington felt “the time was right . . . It was apparent that the U.S. was finally going to clean up its water pollution problems instead of just talking about it in Congress.” Lederer completed the first reliable automatic sampler for sewage and polluted water in the new division’s first year. A flow meter for sewage systems was next, followed by other products. Within a few years Isco’s environmental division had become the dominant force in the wastewater-monitoring market.

Meanwhile, the separation instrumentation division was playing catch-up. Largely because of the “distraction of unrelated products,” Isco had been slow to jump on the high-performance liquid chromatography bandwagon. Isco remained largely on the sidelines of this market throughout the 1970s, producing only fraction collectors, sample changers, UV detectors, and digital integrators. Instead, Isco continued to produce classical low-pressure liquid chromatography equipment and identified a niche market for microliquid chromatography equipment.

Life Beyond the Boardroom

More than just a CEO or scientist, Allington became deeply immersed in community service during this time. Besides the predictable involvement with business-oriented service groups such as the Kiwanis and the Jaycees, Allington served as the chair of the Lincoln City–Lancaster County Planning Commission for several years. In 1972 he was named Handicapped Nebraskan of the Year in honor of his community service as well as his business success. Between recovering from polio, overseeing a rapidly growing business, and serving his community, Allington “didn’t have much of a personal life” throughout the 1960s and early 1970s. His life changed dramatically in 1972 when his parents moved out of the family home, leaving him “pretty much living alone except for the company of a very intelligent dog, Metz, who doted on me.” Metz (named after the famous physicist and engineer Charles Preston Steinmetz) was an unusually smart dog who could fetch books and pillows—and enjoyed the occasional martini.

In April 1976 Allington got to know his future wife, Mary Kaylor, a widow with six children from a previous marriage. The romance developed quickly, and the two were married by September. Allington delighted in the change in perspective offered by Mary’s dynamic, caring, and expressive family. The Allingtons became fixtures of the Lincoln community, eventually purchasing and restoring Maple Lodge, a landmark property on the National Register of Historic Places.

At Mary’s urging, Allington also finally learned to drive, something his father had opposed his doing because of his polio. He had hand controls put on a big, silver Mercedes that he had owned for years but had always had driven by others. This was no ordinary Mercedes—only about 50 of the specialized Model 600s were produced each year, and this particular car had been driven in the James Bond film On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. Perhaps because of the freedom they represented, high-performance cars became a passion for Allington.

Growth of Isco

Isco’s new organizational structure allowed it to continue to expand, adding additional facilities, staff members, and new products. But, as always, growth brings complexity. To oversee the company’s vast array of instruments and components, Allington and his colleagues created one of the first computerized inventory management systems for a small, diversified, manufacturing business. The turnaround was dramatic—within two years, the new system had saved Isco over $1.5 million in inventory costs. Delivery times improved, and warehouse expediters were moved to more productive jobs within the company.

As CEO, Allington continued to spend a significant amount of time on research and development. He was “deeply involved,” for example, in Isco’s development of supercritical fluid extractors that used carbon dioxide at high pressure and temperature as a solvent for removing contaminants or minor constituents from solid material. More recently Allington worked closely with his research chemists in finding ways to get back into the chromatography market. Rather than trying to break into high-performance liquid chromatography, Allington wanted “an area where we’d be more on a footing with competitors.” One of his chemists, Vikas Padhye, found it in a flash chromatography apparatus for use in combinational chemistry in drug development. In just a couple of years, Isco’s chromatography sales skyrocketed from about $4 million to $12 million.

During the 1990s the environmental instrument division similarly broadened its product line beyond water samplers and open flow meters. In Europe they were particularly successful with a total organic carbon analyzer designed to monitor factories’ compliance with organic compounds discharge to waterways and sewers.

Although the original decision to split the company into two divisions had allowed each the flexibility it needed to secure a foothold in the marketplace, by 1996 it had become clear that it was no longer efficient to maintain two separate operating divisions that, as Allington put it, “independently designed, manufactured, and sold two product lines with considerable functional similarity.” By 1999 the divisions were fully consolidated into a greatly enlarged corporate headquarters on Superior Street.

Around his 65th birthday, Allington began to think about retiring. After entertaining several offers, in 2004 he sold his controlling interest in Isco to Teledyne Technologies, which currently operates as Teledyne Isco. While this should have been a time for celebration, Mary was diagnosed with an advanced and incurable form of cancer just a few days after the agreement was signed. She died at their home on 16 May 2004.

Allington considered himself lucky to have reached his 60s, but polio’s long-term effects eventually caught up with him. As a scientific innovator, entrepreneur, and community leader, he commanded respect rather than pity. As Allington declared upon receipt of his Pittcon Heritage Award, “If there is any quality that made it possible to receive a lifetime achievement award, it is determination. Without determination, I would have been just another TV repairman in a wheelchair.”

For Further Reading

Allington, Robert W. Oral history interview by Arnold Thackray and John R. Van Ness in Lincoln, Nebraska, 13 November 2001. Transcript with subsequent corrections and additions. Chemical Heritage Foundation, Philadelphia. For more information on CHF’s oral history program, go to www.chemheritage.org and click on “Collections & Exhibits.”

“Founder of Isco Dies.” [Lincoln] JournalStar.com, www.journalstar.com/articles/2006/03/26/local/doc44276b841881a068455508.txt

“Pittcon Hall of Fame: Robert W. Allington.” Chemical Heritage Foundation, www.chemheritage.org/exhibits/pittcon/allington.html

John Parascandola is a historical consultant and teaches the history of modern biology at the University of Maryland Shady Grove. He was formerly on the faculty at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, chief of the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine, and Public Health Service Historian.