Hilarious

This section is called “Hilarious” and has a few real-life funny stories. Also included are stories and knowledge bits from my travels. As an example, it is no surprise that some of the most brilliant people I worked with were the rocket scientists and engineers at NASA. But would you believe the second-most brilliant were the engineers at PERDUE CHICKEN FARMS. Their mathematical equations for chicken production, purity, and quality were as sophisticated as any rocket launch equation. We only buy Perdue at the market.

At Gammaflux Electronics, where I was the president and founder, we had 72 manufacturer’s representative salesmen in 13 sales agencies. Most of the agents were signed up by phone, so we did not know them personally. All the salesmen were professional technical salesmen.

It was my turn to go to California to check out a Gammaflux panel startup at a Ford Motor plant in Monterey, Mexico, on the way back. I planned to arrive at LAX, so I called my guy Larry Miller to let him know my schedule and ask if he would pick me up at the airport. He said he would, and I should look for a blue van with an eagle on the side.

Wow, this guy was definitely not from the East Coast. When he picked me up, he was like a laid-back surfer dude. We made a couple of sales calls, and he invited me to dinner at his house. He had a nice house with a fenced-in backyard that was about 50 feet on each side. The fence was made of solid boards that were 6 feet tall. He had lived there for five years, and I asked him how his neighbors were. He said he had never met them. That blew my mind.

I stayed at the Airport Marriott, and my flight to Monterey was in the afternoon. So, I went for a morning swim. While I was swimming, something grabbed my leg and then let go. It was a long plastic tentacle with chrome rings. I asked the lifeguard what it was, and he said it was an automatic pool sweep. I had never seen one before, but I planned to get one for my pool as soon as possible. My kids hated to clean our pool.

In business, millions of dollars can be made through the understanding and application of first and second derivative equations. An example is the development of the plastic soda bottle.

Gammaflux, a business I developed in the mid-1960s, had an excellent reputation as the best technical company in temperature control for the hot side of the injection mold used to make plastic parts. In the early days of the development of the plastic soda bottle, there were two companies competing for the business: DuPont and Monsanto.

Monsanto had developed the styrene bottle, but it had a bad feature: some of the styrene would be dissolved by the “coke syrup” and ingested by the drinker. It was obvious to DuPont that the Monsanto bottle would never be approved by the FDA. DuPont quietly decided to go for the plastic bottle business.

I got a call from an engineer at DuPont who said they needed one of our Hot Runner Control systems and wanted to meet with me. I drove to Wilmington, DE, to meet him and came to a large, forbidding, dark warehouse in the worst neighborhood of Wilmington. We met, I signed a number of confidentiality documents, and was led into the building. The building was three stories tall and totally open in the center. To my disbelief, they had covered all the walls on the entire inside of the building with black plastic for security purposes.
They showed me a preform for a plastic bottle made out of PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate). It looked like a test tube from a chemistry lab. The preform was molded using an injection molding machine. The preform would then be blown up like a balloon to make the bottle.
However, they had a problem. They injection molded at 270°C (518°F), but if the temperature went up one degree, they had acid aldehyde in the bottle, and if the temperature dropped one degree, the material became crystalline and would break their machine. DuPont asked if I could provide a temperature control system that would control to plus or minus one degree. Our temperature control systems at that time would control only to five degrees.

I said I would look for a solution. I went back to our engineering team and Charles Talbot, our brilliant (non-degreed) chief engineer, played with the circuits and after one day added a single capacitor to the circuit, which added a second derivative feature to our controller. We were successful and delivered a control system to DuPont.

They were able to mold the bottles successfully and gained FDA approval. They captured the bottle market with their PET material and captured a HUNDRED BILLION BOTTLES a year business. And we captured equipping all the PET bottle hot runner control business.

The next time you drink a Coke from a plastic bottle, you can say I know a guy that made that bottle possible.

One of my trips was with my German supplier, Rudiger. He and I traveled to Asheville, North Carolina. When we were checking into the hotel, he said he heard beautiful music coming from the piano. He walked over to the pianist and asked where she had learned the music. He said that it was a German lullaby that his mother had sung to him as a child. So how did she learn music? Did she go to Germany? The piano player leaned back and, in a strong Southern accent, said, “Nope, I’ve never been to Germany. I just like the music.”

That evening, we went to dinner at the hotel. As Rudiger was studying the menu, he jerked back and, with wide eyes, pointed to the menu and said, “Where do we get ‘baby back ribs’?” I said that they are not “baby” ribs, but that in the South, we have pork ribs called baby back ribs.

My goal was to sell as many hot runner control systems into the plastics industry as possible. The primary target markets were the automotive industry, especially those providing plastic parts to Ford and General Motors.

One of the trips to Detroit, our salesman Dick Shute set up a visit to Detroit Molded Plastics. The owner of Detroit Molded Plastics was a guy by the name of Rudy Totten. I thought to myself, “Can you imagine how he was ridiculed as a kid with a name like Rudy Totten?”

We arrived at Detroit Molded Plastic, and it was a one-story building. The company was a respected supplier. We made our way to the front door and walked into the reception area. Immediately to our right as we walked in was a grizzly bear standing up in an attack pose. The grizzly was at least twelve feet tall and so large that they had to cut out a hole in the ceiling to accommodate it.

We met Rudy Totten for the first time, and I asked him about the grizzly. He said, “Yeah, I shot the bear.” We thought to ourselves that with a name like Rudy Totten, he probably learned how to defend himself growing up and as a result developed into a man’s man.

Rudy did not put up with much guff. We heard a story later that when he was going on a trip, the taxi driver taking him to Detroit Metro Airport tried to rip him off. The story goes that the cabby charged him for the ride and insisted that Rudy pay extra for his briefcase in the trunk. Rudy said the briefcase was with him and he was not going to pay extra for it.

They got out of the cab, walked to the back, and the cabby opened the trunk. Rudy paid the fare and the cabby continued to argue for the fare for the briefcase. Rudy said he was not going to pay extra for the briefcase, whereupon Rudy paid the fare. The cabby kept arguing for the fare.

Rudy had had enough. He then picked up his briefcase out of the trunk, then picked up the cabby and threw him in the trunk, then slammed the trunk lid shut. He started walking to his gate when a nearby policeman called out to Rudy, saying he agreed with Rudy because the taxicab companies have been ripping off customers and needed to be taught a lesson.

Our travels often took us to two locations that we would not normally visit, but there was business to be conducted. One of these travels was to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, at the request of Allen-Bradley. They are a very large electrical company that manufactures electrical panels and uses a few plastic parts. They had a need for our Instruments System to control their tools. Of course, they requested a visit in the middle of winter, at the worst possible time.

Reluctantly, we got on the plane, arranged a visit, and drove up to their plant. Their plant was downtown Milwaukee in a large gray brick building. The building looked like it was built at the turn of the century, and the company had been in business for many years. We found the front door and, as we were walking into the lobby, we were tremendously impressed. The lobby had cold marble walls and marble floors, and there was an oak desk at the other end of the 40-foot reception area with an attendant. As I walked to her desk, there was a very large six-foot by six-foot fireplace with a grate in the middle and a glowing warm fire. It was like taking your five-foot barbecue, turning it so the coals were five feet tall, and you could see the coals glowing red. I asked what those coals were. The receptionist said that they were oiled coke coals.

Thinking about it, I was in steel country. There were steel furnaces that require coal, and so Allen-Bradley had found the source of coke to put in their fireplace to welcome visitors. If I lived in the north, I would have a fireplace in my home.

At Gammaflux, we had a well-oiled production operation with 14 people. We were at about $1 million per year in sales, or about $20,000 per week. Everyone was happy with $20,000 in weekly shipments. We said that if we hit $20,000 per week, that would meet our sales and profit goals. We thought, “Why don’t we give that as a weekly shipment goal to the crew, and once we hit that number, we’re done for the week?”

This worked out beautifully. It took stress out of the company, it was a known goal, and everyone worked as a team together. The entire company would work together and usually by noon on Friday, we would complete the week’s production. When we met the goal, the crew would bring in beer and a couple of the guys who were in a bluegrass band would bring in their instruments, and everyone would have a great time. Some of the women would go to the mall, but everyone had done their hard week’s work and could go home with a full week’s pay.

We had a one-man sheet metal shop operated by a man named Paul. He would produce the metal plates for the electronic controllers, the main cases, and all the various metal bits and pieces for the control systems. Paul had become a good friend of ours, and one day he came to us and said, “You know, if I could get high on pot, I could increase production many times over.” He kept pushing this idea, and finally, one day we said yes. We arranged a test day. He would produce a certain metal part all morning, then at noon, he would get high on pot and produce the same metal part all afternoon. At the end of the day, after counting the parts, we were surprised to find that the pot production in the afternoon was 25% less than the morning production.

Paul said that when he was on pot, he thought his production was skyrocketing and that he was making much more than he had in the morning, but the reality was totally different. He said that he had learned his lesson, and that if it had been anyone else, he would not have believed them.

Ford Motor is one of the best-managed companies in the world. Gammaflux had grown to 50 people, and our production was fully engaged. We were doing great.

The second week of December 1979 was the worst day in my business life. We got a telephone call from Ford Motor. They said that we were to immediately stop our production of their control systems, render a bill, and we could keep the production in process since they could not use it. The order was to go into effect immediately.

We asked if we had done something wrong, and they said no, that we were a good supplier and would be called upon sometime in the future. Here we were, near Christmas, with 50 people working on Ford Motor control systems, and suddenly there was no work. That was a terrible Christmas.

It was not a decision of who had to be laid off, but who we were going to keep. We let go of 32 people just before Christmas because we had no work. But if you hire, as unpleasant as it is, you must also fire.

This was the beginning of the early 1980 recession. We found out later what had happened. Ford monitors the sales of the lowest-cost delivery vans. These are the cheap vans, like a “flower-delivery” van, that have no options, no radio, no AC, just the bare-bones small company van. It turns out that this is an early warning signal of a recession. This is the “canary in the coal mine.” When small businesses stop purchasing the cheapest, bare-bones van, it foretells that a recession is coming.

Ford was right. The country went into a steep recession. Gammaflux dropped from 30 employees to 7 people. We were looking to book any business to stay alive. We obtained a contract to make highway lane closures. These are the signs you see on a highway with a trailer having a flashing arrow to direct traffic to another lane. We had well-educated electrical engineers designing and building signs with a flashing arrow.

We survived as a company, and in the process, the recession bankrupted all of our competitors. When business started up again, we absorbed all of the competitors’ business as if there had been no recession.

I went to the Stihl chainsaw plant in Virginia Beach, Virginia in 1985 and saw approximately 200 assembly people assembling the chainsaws. I provided quality control equipment so that the two halves of the chainsaw housings would match, as each half was being produced by two different suppliers. This ensured that when the chainsaw housings were snapped together, they had the same color and appearance, making for a quality product.

The company was German-owned, and when I drove up to the plant, I saw a German flag. There was a guard shack with a crossing bar that blocked the road. I checked in with the guard shack, and they opened the gate and let me in the front door to meet with the engineering department.

I went back to the same plant about five years later, and it was a totally different story. They still had a guard shack, but instead of going into the front door, I was directed to go to the back of the plant and into the cafeteria. I went into the cafeteria, and there was the president of the company, who was smoking heavily at one of the tables. He was German, and he needed a new instrument to calibrate the one that they were currently using.

We walked out into the plant, and the first thing I saw was dozens of robots. There were also special walkways for humans to walk on so that they wouldn’t get in the way of the machines. We walked to the quality control room, where I found out the model number that he needed. I later provided him with a quotation, and he purchased the instrument.

I noted that all the people were missing. There was only one person at the end of the chainsaw line. He would take 100 chainsaws off the line, fill them up with oil and gas, start them up to make sure they worked, and then put them back on the line. There couldn’t have been more than five people in the entire plant. You couldn’t turn the lights off in the plant, and the machines would continue to work, producing chainsaws.

I went to the Pepperidge Farm bakery in Denver, Pennsylvania. It is a huge bakery that produces bread, cookies, bagels, and all of the other products for Pepperidge Farm. The building is probably a million square feet in size. I walked in the front door, and the lobby was very comfortable and homey, similar to a grandmother’s house. There were pictures of bakery products on the walls and clean, antique-looking furniture. It gave you the impression that you were at Grandma’s house.

My contact met me in the lobby and took me up a flight of stairs from the lobby. We entered a pressurized door onto a walkway at the top of the building. The walkway went through the plant and had large windows on each side so you could look down on the production areas. The quality control department was at the back of the plant, so we walked through the plant, and I had a view of all of the production operations.

As I walked through, looking down on the production areas, there were no grandmothers and in fact, there were no people except for a janitor sweeping up the floor, which was squeaky clean. All the baking lines were running automatically. They had electronic controls at a central control station monitoring the lines.

The quality control department had most of the people in the plant. There were two employees. They would go out on the lines to obtain samples for testing. They tested for color and moisture. They had some questions about the equipment. We showed them how to use the equipment, and after about two hours of training, it was lunchtime.

They invited me to the plant cafeteria for lunch, and I was amazed that there were only eight people in the lunchroom, including the two quality control people and myself. So, the plant was probably being run by maybe ten to twelve people, including the receptionist.

Southeastern Container in Winchester, Virginia was one of my customers. They produced PET bottles for Coca-Cola. One of the models was Dasani water, which had a light blue color. In general, the Coke bottles were clear and did not need color measurement. However, the Dasani bottle was light blue and the color needed to be measured on a regular basis. If they produced any miscolored bottles, they would be scrapped.

A Gaylord is a cardboard box that is six feet wide by six feet long by six feet high. Southeastern Container had six injection molding machines producing preforms. The preforms look like a test tube with a thread at the top. These preforms would exit the injection molding facility and travel to the blow molding machines. The blow molding machines, also known as “huff and puff” machines, would grab the bottle, heat it up, put pressure inside, and blow it up to the size of the plastic bottle that you see on the shelf.

It is incredible, but the one facility at Southeastern Container in Winchester, Virginia produces one billion bottles per year. All the bottles are manufactured by machine, and there are only a few humans walking around making sure that the machines are running properly.

To enter a food processing plant, you must sign a non-disclosure agreement and agree not to take any photographs. Then you put on personal protective equipment (PPE), which includes a hair net, eye protection, ear plugs, removal of watches and jewelry, a helmet, and a lab coat. With chicken processors, you also wear rubber boots.

As you enter a food processing area, you dip your hands in a disinfectant solution, then wash with soap and water. You walk in a pedestrian walkway behind the yellow line and watch out for forklift trucks. There is typically a lot of production noise from the machinery.

In our case, we normally end up in the quality control lab, which is full of test instruments and is air conditioned and quieter than the production area. We can then go over their testing protocol and make recommendations on how to apply the instruments correctly to their application.

When I visited Perdue, the engineers sat back in their chairs and said they were just a bunch of “dumb farmers” and to please, as a “city boy,” tell them about the color measurement instruments. After my presentation, I never saw any bunch of “dumb farmers” use such sophisticated mathematics to figure out how to adapt the instruments into their plant. These guys were not a bunch of dumb farmers, but the most brilliant engineers I have ever come across.

As a result of our visit, they installed my sophisticated color measurement instruments on the chicken processing line. They process 250,000 chickens per day. They took 2,500 measurements of the chickens on the pin feather line and calculated how much marigold seed needed to be added to the feed to turn the chickens yellow, which is what consumers prefer.

Each individual chicken coop farm consists of three large coops. It takes 90 days to grow a bird from a chick to a full-grown bird. Then, after 90 days, the entire coop farm is harvested for the 250,000 birds that will be processed that day at the plant. The feed is adjusted based on the color readings of the spectrophotometer. The whole operation is sophisticated and runs like clockwork.

Yes, I know some people advocate “free range” chicken. They can have them because a free-range bird is fed in the open and, in my book, is exposed to flying birds that may have bird flu. As these birds fly over, they may drop droppings on the free-range chickens. Yum. Not my choice. I buy Perdue birds, which live in coops with roofs to keep them protected.

Another thing I discovered was that Purdue chickens’ taste 7% better than other producers. You see, I discovered a way to measure flavor using a spectrophotometer and have tested many foods, including Perdue chicken. To my amazement, while testing the Perdue bird being roasted, there was a flavor spike of 7% when roasting the birds. I did not believe my tests, so I repeated the test many times, with the same results.

After analysis, I think I figured out what causes this spike and, if it is what I think, the engineers at Perdue are brilliant. The spike is caused by a natural additive. I believe I know what it is, but I am not going to reveal it. It is clever, safe, and natural and gives great flavor.

I had the fortunate opportunity to travel all over the United States. During my travels, I had a number of what we called learning experiences.

While traveling through Pennsylvania, I noted that in the north central part of the state, people would landscape their gardens using coal instead of mulch. I found this to be an interesting and impressive landscaping statement.

I traveled through Pennsylvania on a regular basis. On one of my trips, I visited a pretzel factory. They were interested in measuring the color of their pretzels. They had a baking line that was about four feet wide and twenty feet long. Dough was put in one end of the line, and pretzels came out the other end.

This was my opportunity to taste a fresh-made pretzel, so I asked if I could sample one. They said yes, go ahead. With much anticipation, I took a bite of the fresh-baked pretzel. To my great surprise, it tasted exactly like one that came from a bag of pretzels you would buy at the grocery store. No better, no worse. I was terribly disappointed. I thought it would have been much better.

When you go into the food section at a Walmart store, you will see name brands such as Kraft, Del Monte, or Stouffers sitting on the shelves. Right next to these brand names is the Walmart Great Value brand, which is about 30% lower in cost. Some people assume that the Great Value brand is not as good as the name brands because it is cheaper. However, I have found a different story with the Walmart Great Value brand.

Several years ago, I received a phone call from a company located on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. The company said that they were a supplier to Walmart and needed some consulting services to make sure that they complied with Walmart’s specifications. One of the specifications was for product color. They asked me to bring a spectrophotometer to their packing plant to measure the color of their corn. They also asked me to bring a copy of the Del Monte color specifications with me.

When I arrived at the company’s quality control lab, they showed me three different crops of corn. They had asked me to measure each crop for yellowness and match it to the Del Monte yellow. I was amazed to learn that Walmart’s standards stated that the corn produced for Walmart and to be sold under the Walmart Great Value brand must be equal to or better than Del Monte.

After that experience, I have purchased the Walmart Great Value brand over the name brand whenever possible. I believe that if Walmart specifies that all of their products must be equal to or better than the name brand, then the Walmart Great Value brand is of the same quality as the name brand or better.

In my physics career, I used what is called the mathematical first and second derivatives. These are tools to model two simple physics processes. The first derivative tells you the rate of change in a process, and the second derivative tells you the change in the rate of change. This may sound like gobbledygook, but the process is simple, and you use it in everyday life.

For example, in plain English, imagine you are driving a car and the traffic light ahead turns red. You push on the brakes. This is the first derivative, which is the change in speed. But let’s say a truck pulls out in front of you as you start to brake. Now you must step on the brake harder. This is the second derivative, or the change in the slowing-down rate of change.

Yes, if you can get your mind around the concept, it is mind-boggling but very useful. It is the job of the physicist to apply mathematics to physical processes. The average person does not understand the mathematics nor grasp what the equations mean, but math is just another language tool. To engineers, physicists, and scientists, these mathematical expressions are applied to a magnitude of everyday applications. It is not that the average person is stupid, it’s just that the average person does not know the language of mathematics nor want to know.

In business, millions of dollars can be made through the understanding and application of the first and second derivative equations. An example is the development of the plastic soda bottle.

Gammaflux, which is a business I developed in the mid-1960s, had an excellent reputation as the best technical company in temperature control for the hot side of the injection mold used to make plastic parts. In the early days of the development of the plastic soda bottle, there were two companies competing for the business: DuPont and Monsanto.

Monsanto had developed the styrene bottle, but it had a bad feature in that some of the styrene would be dissolved by the “coke syrup” and be ingested by the drinker. It was obvious to DuPont that the Monsanto bottle would never be approved by the FDA. DuPont quietly decided to go for the plastic bottle business.

I got a call from an engineer at DuPont who said they needed one of our Hot Runner Control systems and wanted to meet with me. I drove to Wilmington, DE to meet him and came to a large, forbidding, dark warehouse in the worst neighborhood of Wilmington. We met, I signed a number of confidentiality documents, and was led into the building.

The building was three stories tall and totally open in the center. To my disbelief, they had covered all the walls on the entire inside of the building with black plastic for security purposes. They showed me a preform for a plastic bottle made out of PET (Polyethylene Terephthalate). It looked like a test tube from a chemistry lab.

The preform was molded using an injection molding machine. The preform would then be blown up like a balloon to make the bottle. However, they had a problem. They injection molded at 270°C (518°F), but if the temperature went up one degree, they would have acid aldehyde in the bottle, and if the temperature dropped one degree, the material would become crystalline and would break their machine.

DuPont asked if I could provide a temperature control system that would control to plus or minus one degree. Our temperature control systems at that time would control only to five degrees. I said I would look for a solution.

I went back to our engineering team, and Charles Talbot, our brilliant (non-degreed) chief engineer, played with the circuits and after one day added a single capacitor to the circuit, which added a second derivative feature to our controller. We were successful and delivered a control system to DuPont.

They were able to mold the bottles successfully and gained FDA approval. They captured the bottle market with their PET material and captured a HUNDRED BILLION BOTTLES a year business. And we captured the market for equipping all the PET bottle hot runner control systems.

The next time you drink a Coke from a plastic bottle, you can say you know a guy that made that bottle possible.