Читать книгу The Bravest Hunter - Michael Newell - Страница 10

“When I first went to work at Teledyne, we were all in the old Amelco building, and all the engineers were in one large room. Singleton came by my desk and asked what I was doing. I was trying to design a sin/cosine computer using two vacuum-tube amplifiers with capacitor feedback so that the output of each amplifier was the integral of the input. I was then looping the output of each amplifier back to the input of the other. This created a cyclical sin-wave function. Henry was fascinated by the idea but pointed out that temperature required stringent and tight control because of the capacitor’s high sensitivity to temperature and the possibility of the function drifting off.

“About two months later, Henry called me into his office for a meeting with a young semiconductor engineer who worked for us. We then proceeded to invent the computer that went on most of the helicopters used in Vietnam while sitting there in his office. He would ask us if we understood different things. I would jump in and answer everything he asked. He eventually said, ‘Shut up, Gordon, I know you know the answer. I want to see if he knows the answer.’ The design we came up with used microcircuit flip flops and switches to perform the tasks I had been trying to accomplish with vacuum-tube amplifiers. Taking the value in a register of flip flops (V) and adding that value to another register (B) at some fixed-rate (dt) gave a solution B = the integral of Vdt.

“A few years later, shortly after field-effect transistors came out, Henry came into my office and asked what I was doing. I told him I was trying to figure out how they worked. He said he was interested in that, and sat down. We figured out that it was akin to a vacuum-tube diode except that the blocking accumulation of electrons was in the metal at the junction of the metal with the silicon rather than in the vacuum of a tube. Henry later ended up making most of Teledyne’s semiconductor computer elements out of field-effect transistors.”

It was during this time that Graves learned how to complete a project on time. A good project manager, Graves reasoned, should first identify all the major tasks required to achieve a result and make sure someone accepts the responsibility of accomplishing those assigned tasks, completing them on time and within budget, and then make sure everyone is meeting their goals. The most important job of a project manager is to help people understand that barriers should not become excuses. Graves felt that project management was the best possible work experience for learning how to run a company. The good project manager, Graves believes, learns about contracts, purchasing, budgeting, negotiating, design, production, customer relations and all the other critical disciplines involved in running a corporate operation.

When the Rockwell project ended, Graves became responsible for an airborne navigation computer project called ASN-13A, designed for specialized aircraft used for antisubmarine warfare. Three hundred of the units went to the Naval Avionics Facility (NAFI) in Indianapolis and performed well.

Graves then headed up a project to design and build a shipboard missile-tracking signal converter for the US Navy Bureau of Ships. The project never worked as it should, as the power semiconductors that drove the gear train kept blowing up. Graves, Art Cencel, and Art’s boss, Joe Smead, set up test systems around the factory to find a fix. Graves said when he thought he had found one, and wanted to talk to Art or Joe about it, he would look across the room for wherever smoke was swirling to locate them. The team finally got the system through acceptance testing, but it never worked correctly. Nevertheless, Teledyne eventually made money by selling spare power semiconductors. Graves said he never felt good about the project, but that was the way things worked out sometimes in the military-industrial complex.

That was shortly after Shapiro returned to Litton, and Graves started working for Art Cencel, who Graves said was the most brilliant boss he ever had. Working closely together, Cencel and Graves won a research and development contract from Max Lipscomb to build the smallest gimbaled floating gyroscope inertial system that had ever existed. Gordon took the first test model to Holloman Air Force Base to test it, and it was very successful.

Gordon then started writing proposals with Art, who had a wonderful mind and blessed with the ability to develop simple mental models of complicated physics or engineering processes in a way that was both powerful and effective.

Art had graduated first in his class at Purdue and had been a radar technician in the Navy before going to college to be a radar engineer. Art claimed his mother had enrolled him in Purdue without his knowledge. He had just gotten out of the Navy and had moved back to Colorado, where his parents lived. He was carousing all night and sleeping all day. One day, his mother asked him to take a ride with her. She drove him down to the train depot, told him to get out, opened the trunk, removed his packed luggage, handed him tickets to Indiana, kissed him on the cheek, and told him she had enrolled him at Purdue.

When Art got out of college, he accepted a job with Autonetics, which was part of what is now Rockwell. He was supposed to go to work in the radar division. Art claims that when he got to Downey, all the hundreds of new college graduates Autonetics had hired were reporting for work, and there was a great deal of confusion. Art got in the wrong line and ended up working in the gyroscope lab. That was really a joke because Autonetics had over-hired for the radar division.

The Integrated Helicopter Avionics System (IHAS) came along in 1969. Tech Wilson, the best technical salesman Graves had worked with, said that the Navy was going to design a new avionics system for the CH-53 helicopter, the IHAS, and Teledyne should go after the development contract—and it did. At the time, annual sales for all of Teledyne was $7 million a year, and they were competing against Hughes, Burroughs, CDC, Texas Instruments, Litton, Northrup, IBM, Autonetics, and a few others. Teledyne won the business because they were bolder, worked harder and had the best system. Graves was twenty-eight years old.

Graves said he believed two primary innovations allowed Teledyne to win business from other companies, many times larger and richer than them. One was as a result of microchip-based redundant, robust computer design and the other was their use of large-scale system design and life-cycle costing techniques that allowed them to select the best system design alternatives. They constructed a math model of the helicopter performing its various missions that allowed them to evaluate the effectiveness of the aircraft in monetary terms. For example, Graves said they looked at the probability of completing a mission in terms of the accuracy of the helicopter’s navigation system. They traded off the cost of an unsuccessful mission due to navigation errors or malfunction versus the incremental cost of buying a more accurate navigation system. Gordon led the effort to develop this type of model at a micro level using processes he learned from Dr. Gafford, Dean of the Electrical Engineering School at the University of Texas while taking a course Gafford taught on engineering economics for electrical utilities. Dr. Kozmetsky took the lead in developing the design technique on a macro level. Kozmetsky hired Abe Charnes and Bill Cooper from Carnegie Mellon to develop linear programming and Monte Carlo techniques to predict theoretical mission success.

Teledyne pitted itself against Texas Instruments and Nortronics in a competitive development contract. George Kozmetsky spent the last month while the Navy was evaluating the results in Washington, DC, roaming the halls of the Bureau of Weapons during daylight hours. At the end of the day, he would call and tell Graves and the team what material he needed for the next day. Then Gordon and his team would spend the rest of the day and the evening preparing it before shipping the components via American Airlines’ counter-to-counter service to Kozmetsky. Those were, of course, in the days before FedEx existed.

George would pick the materials up the next morning and be ready for another day of presentations to the Navy. George was staying at the Madison Hotel and ran out of cash. The rest of the team was rotating back and forth between Washington and their base for a few days at a time. George worked like a Trojan, as always…until in his late eighties before he died. Jay Last, who started Teledyne Semiconductor, said George was the only person he had ever known who made a million dollars at a rate of one dollar per hour of work.

Teledyne won the production contract for the IHAS, which became a multimillion-dollar program and was probably the turning point in the company’s success.

The day Teledyne learned they had won the contract, Dr. Kozmetsky gave Tech Wilson his credit card and told him to take the team to a celebration dinner at an expensive Beverly Hills restaurant. Everyone overindulged. After dinner, a small group decided to go to the home of one of the team members, Lew Elmore, who lived in the Hollywood Hills.

Gordon rode with Wilson in his little Triumph sports car. Tech drove like a maniac and eventually didn’t make a turn. The car went over the cliff rolling over and over for about 200 feet straight down the hill. When the vehicle stopped, it was upside down. Tech said, “Gordy…are you alright?” Graves answered, “Yes, how about you?” Tech said he had torn an ear almost off, but more seriously, he said his leg was pinned between the door and the steering wheel. He couldn’t get out.

Graves was able to crawl out his side of the car and tried to raise the car to free Tech’s leg. He couldn’t do it. He eventually clawed his way back up the cliff to the road and ran to Elmore’s house and told him what happened. Elmore called a wrecker and an ambulance and stayed by the phone. Graves ran back to the accident site.

The wrecker arrived first, and a man asked where the car was. Gordon pointed down the hill. The wrecker driver said, “You mean somebody is alive in that car?” Gordon said, “Yes, but he’s trapped. Let’s go down and try to free him!”

The wrecker driver started down, stumbled, and went head over heels tumbling down about 200 feet. Graves went after him and dragged and carried him back up the hill. He was a mess. His clothes were torn, and he was bleeding from various scrapes, cuts, and scratches. About that time, the ambulance arrived, saw the driver, threw him in the back of the ambulance, and off they went with the wrong victim while Graves screamed, “No, no. You have the wrong man!” Graves ran back to Elmore’s house and called both the wrecker and ambulance again. They were finally able to free Tech and drag the car back to the road.

To say the least, it was an unusual end to the celebration.

Shortly after this, Graves’s work on the navigation and flight control portions neared its end, and Cliff Barker12 stepped in and took over that project. Graves noted Barker did a great job, and Gordon moved over and became Director of Marketing for Servomechanisms, a manufacturer of air-data computers acquired by Teledyne in 1966. Art Cencel, Gordon’s friend and sponsor, became VP and General Manager of Servomechanisms. The company later decided to expand into recording systems for commercial airlines and changed its name to Teledyne Controls. Within a year, one of the proposals written a couple of years earlier to develop an inertial guidance system got funding through Max Lipscomb at Wright Patterson. Art and Graves started a new navigation division within Teledyne Systems with Graves becoming Director of Engineering.

There, Graves developed a tiny high-precision floated gyroscope with gas spin bearings, electrostatic suspension and capacitive pickoffs. The system used a quartz flexure accelerometer that eliminated one of the classic problems in gyro compassing that had always plagued Litton. The system featured a gimbal system with direct drive motors and microchips for electronic gimbal control—which mounted directly over the gimbal elements to eliminate the need for slip rings—which were the largest failure items on an inertial system. The computer they used was a digital differential analyzer. Graves designed the functional flow diagram for it and developed the algorithms, then hired Larry Drayer from Hughes Aircraft to develop the computer. Drayer had started working for Litton at the same time as Gordon, though he had started in the computer logic design group, he became a top-notch computer designer.