Читать книгу The Bravest Hunter - Michael Newell - Страница 9

Graves’s first electrical engineering job out of college, in 1959, was analyzing flight-test data for a new inertial guidance system for Litton Industries based in Beverly Hills, California. He started there in June. Gordon flew to Los Angeles from Dallas on a Sunday night, his first commercial airline flight.

On the plane, Graves sat beside Dean Smith. Smith had been a star running back at the University of Texas and had been a student of Graves’s Uncle Doyle in Breckenridge, Texas. When he found out about that relationship, Smith took Graves under his wing.

Smith was a stuntman and stand-in for Dale Robertson in his television series Tales of Wells Fargo. When they arrived in LA, the luggage delivery system had broken down, and Smith and Graves had to wait for more than an hour for their baggage. It was before LAX International came to be, and the baggage area at the old airport was outside. While standing around waiting, they met the cast from Gunsmoke, who were friends of Smith’s. Graves said he thought LA was going to be that way all the time—rubbing shoulders with the movie stars every day.

Litton Industries was a conglomerate founded by Tex Thornton. Thornton led General Arnold’s operations research team tasked with building aircraft for World War II, and Graves became part of the Military Systems Division, run by Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky. Graves’s first assignment was to extrapolate flight-test data for an inertial guidance system by plotting the difference in measured position recorded from the inertial guidance system and the actual position determined from simultaneously recorded aerial photographs. Graves’s boss, Sid Shapiro, taught him how to analyze the error curves and postulate the root cause. The error model was known as the Schuler loop, and Gordon used Laplace transforms and old-fashioned intuitive pattern recognition to separate the expected causes. Then he would plan another flight designed to verify his suspicions. After a couple of iterations, Graves could narrow down the possible causes, design another flight test, and predict what the error curve was going to look like. Graves said that when the flight was over, and the results came out as he had predicted, the flight technicians would be in awe while he would be trying to hide his own amazement. He said he could then isolate the error, but not necessarily be able to recommend a fix; that was the hard part. Eventually, Graves found the fix. Graves was twenty-one years old at the time.

Dr. George Kozmetsky’s department designed the digital computer. When the system came off the drawing board, and the prototype finished, Shapiro turned it over to Graves and said, “Go make it work.”

Shapiro taught Graves how to isolate error sources, but Gordon also had to learn about floated gyroscopes, jeweled bearing accelerometers, closed-loop gimbal servomechanisms, analog computers, Coriolis, gyro compassing and a thousand other esoteric things. The analog computer needed was an untested prototype and had lots of design bugs, which allowed Graves to learn it well and do some fundamental redesign. Circuit design, gear train layout, electrical ground plane effects, and temperature impact on resistors and capacitors were all important considerations in designing a good analog computer. Graves was good at making systems work, and people began to recognize his creative intuition in solving technical problems.

Graves said that searching for solutions to design deficiencies was fun. The reason some systems did not function as well as expected was a mystery. He would set up a series of small tests to check out individual elements or subsystems within the overall system. He would stimulate the element and, based on the design specification, predict the response of that element. If the response were different than expected, he would calculate the actual way the element in question functioned and compare it to how it was supposed to work, thus explaining why the overall system did not function properly. When the test demonstrated subpar performance, it put Graves on a path to finding a solution. Gordon said that sometimes, when you are facing a very challenging mystery that has eluded you, and by accident, you see something that doesn’t look quite right, further investigation reveals more about the problem. The logic, mathematics and laws of physics are all confirmed with your discovery—this is the most satisfying type of mystery to solve. It would be as if you had been looking at a mosaic of meaningless patterns that suddenly turned into a beautiful mural masterpiece.

Grave mused that working in such an environment shaped his view of the world and his religious philosophy. It was, in many ways, an addictive situation. Since those days, Graves has understood why many people with powerful brains become scientific nerds. Time after time, Graves would see a system working in a way that seemed to defy the laws of physics. He saw that reconfirmation as a thing of beauty…something to rely on. Each time it happened, it felt for a moment to Gordon that through the fog of uncertainty and ignorance under which we all live our lives, he had caught a brief glimpse of the face of God.

Graves wrote a poem about this experience titled “Words of a Superstitious Scientist”:

God is the force. The force is M times A11,

As the earth gets hotter, man will try to get away,

And once man finds a place where they can stay,

Those selected to make that trip on that glorious day,

Will be those that follow Jesus’ words in every kind way

And once we learn to clone from using man’s DNA

Those selected to be re-created in that complicated way

Will find eternal life at last, just like the prophets always say.

Litton’s customers for the research system Graves was working with were Tom Sanders and Ron Vaughn of the US Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Once the system was working in the lab, Gordon took it to Pennsylvania to direct the field support of the system. Shortly after NADC had accepted delivery of the system and Graves returned to California, NADC called and asked him to come back because the technicians, Sanders and Vaughn, said when they installed the system in a test aircraft, it started to malfunction. When Graves arrived at NADC, he had them take the unit off the test plane. Gordon set up the unit in the lab and fired it up. The gyroscopic platform was supposed to level itself with respect to the earth automatically, but it didn’t. The observers at NADC said it would list to one side like a wounded duck, and that was precisely what it had been doing for an entire week.

Graves had Sanders and Vaughn pull the whole system out of the test aircraft, unhook all the aircraft wiring cables, and hook it back up in the lab. When he fired it up, it aligned as it should have. Gordon turned it off, let it cool down, and tested it again after reconnecting the aircraft cables. And again, it aligned perfectly. Graves scratched his chin and said, “Yep, just what I thought.” At that moment, he had no idea why it had happened, but he packed his bags and told the NADC to call him if they had any more problems, and went home. The problem never recurred.

Later, Graves said it was probably a corroded connector pin in the aircraft cabling that caused the issue. Disconnecting and reconnecting those aircraft cables likely cleaned the pins and solved the problem.

On the way back to Los Angeles, Gordon flew out of Philadelphia. Dick Clark, having finished a series of American Bandstand shows, was on the same flight. The stewardess asked Graves and Clark to come to the forward cabin and play Spades with them at a little snack table. Everyone had a good time.

Years later, MGAM had a consultant who lived next door to Clark in Malibu. He set up a breakfast meeting for Skip Leonard and Graves at Clark’s home to discuss his investing in MGAM. Graves said, “I was expecting something like eggs Benedict because, after all, we were at Dick Clark’s home. Instead, his wife Cari served us fruit cocktail right out of the can. Needless to say, Clark never invested.”

Graves’s boss, Sid Shapiro, left Litton and went to work with Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky, who had resigned from Litton and were starting Teledyne. Graves had begun working for Charley Bridge by then. Charley had come to Litton from Autonetics and brought with him a bunch of new ideas on how to control inertial instruments. He assigned Gordon to work with Pete Mesquita. Pete taught Gordon how to generate a computer-flow diagram and write simple programs. At the time, Graves was twenty-four.

A few months later, Gordon received a call from Teledyne, and they asked him to join them. Graves was excited about the opportunity and knowing he’d be among the first five Litton employees Teledyne recruited. Gordon was, in fact, the youngest among the group of brilliant peddler-scientists. Graves was involved in building new systems and innovations, and, according to him, everything worked well enough that he thought they had the smartest team of people in the world.

Graves was in awe of both Dr. Singleton and Dr. Kozmetsky.

“Our culture has changed a lot in the past forty years,” said Graves, “since I was working for Henry. When I learned Henry Singleton had died, I was sad. What follows is the obituary published in the LA Times on September 2, 1999.

Henry Singleton, Co-Founder of Teledyne, Dies Obituary: Man who led the conglomerate for three decades was known for his technical skills and prowess on Wall Street.

By STUART SILVERSTEIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER. COPYRIGHT © 1999. Used with Permission

Henry E. Singleton, the pioneering co-founder of Teledyne Inc. and leader of the Los Angeles-based conglomerate for more than three decades, died Tuesday of brain cancer at his West Los Angeles home. He was 82.

Singleton, known as soft-spoken and extremely private, gained a mystique on Wall Street as one of the nation’s leading corporate merger whizzes from the 1960s through the 1980s.

He launched Teledyne in 1960 as a semiconductor maker but turned the company into one of America’s biggest and, for a time, one of its fastest-growing business empires. It controlled billions of dollars in assets and owned big stakes in many other companies.

Singleton specialized in finding companies whose stocks were undervalued, gobbling them up and turning them into big profit-makers for Teledyne shareholders. Eventually, Singleton amassed a fortune, estimated last year by Forbes magazine at $750 million--ranking him as one of the nation’s 400 richest people.

“He was way, way ahead of his time in lots of things, both technically and in business,” said Marvin H. Fink, president of Teledyne Electronic Technologies, a Marina del Rey subsidiary of Singleton’s old business empire and an executive acquainted with Singleton since the late 1950s.

Fink pointed out that Singleton designed what for years was a leading missile and aircraft guidance system. In addition, he said, Singleton was quick to embrace such corporate financial maneuvers as spinning off businesses and using extra cash to buy back stock.

“He was the first one I knew who used his own cash to buy back his stock and, for a while, people laughed at him. They thought he should do other things [with his cash]. Nowadays, just about every company understands the value of that,” Fink said.

At the same time, Singleton was reserved both in his personal and professional life. “He had very few interviews,” Fink said. “He was not the kind of guy who would talk a lot to analysts about his company’s stock. He was not the kind of guy who would tout his stock on TV.”

In 1960, Singleton launched Teledyne with his partner George Kozmetsky. Their first venture was building digital computers for military and commercial aircraft and space exploration projects.

Later, the company went on its acquisition binge, acquiring everything from other aerospace companies to metals concerns to WaterPik.

But in the mid-1980s, after conglomerates had fallen out of favor on Wall Street and after Teledyne’s stock began slumping, Singleton turned around and began working on slimming down the company. He and his successor as chief executive, George Roberts, eventually spun off two insurance companies, Unitrin Inc. and Argonaut Group.

Singleton then increasingly yielded management control of the company, and finally relinquished the title of chairman in 1991. He continued, however, to keep a close eye on the company as its dominant shareholder.

Meanwhile, the company’s problems mounted as it was investigated for a range of crimes in its defense business. Teledyne settled charges that it submitted inflated bills to the government, and it also pleaded guilty to falsifying tests on electronic components.

Then, in the mid-1990s, Teledyne found itself in the unaccustomed role of corporate prey--it was the target of a hostile takeover attempt by WHX Corp., parent of Wheeling-Pittsburgh Steel. Singleton responded by lining up a deal with a friendly buyer, Allegheny-Ludlum, and a new company was formed, Allegheny-Teledyne.

Singleton was born in 1916 in Haslet, Texas, on a ranch where his father raised cotton and cattle. He attended the Naval Academy in Annapolis, Md., and later went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he majored in electrical engineering and earned his bachelor’s degree, master’s degree and doctorate.

In 1951, a year after finishing his studies at MIT, Singleton moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for Hughes Aircraft, North American Aviation and then Litton Industries, before launching Teledyne.

After stepping down from active management of Teledyne, he pursued diverse interests, including cattle ranching in California and New Mexico. He also was a student of Western folklore and the Pueblo Indian culture, a wine collector and a chess and poetry enthusiast.

Singleton served on various boards, including those of Caltech, Apple Computer and Union Bank.

He is survived by his wife of 57 years, Caroline, and by five children and four grandchildren.

Gordon said, “George Kozmetsky had a more significant impact on my life than Henry. He taught me to work hard and work long. He had a reputation of being the man who made his first million at a dollar an hour. J. Paul Getty said the way to get rich was to get up early, work hard and strike oil. Luck helps, but it is not enough. I always liked what Lee Trevino said: ‘The more I practice, the luckier I get.’”

“George Kozmetsky always stressed the value of working hard and was a living example. He showed me how important it was to really care about other people and learn their lives and try to help them. He helped me to figure out how to measure success on an incremental, consistent basis to quantify abstract goals into dollars by determining the failure rate of a product and evaluating that in terms of the cost, including opportunity and indirect as well as direct cost.”

“He taught me that enthusiasm is essential, and to throw out lots of ideas while realizing that many will be unusable.”

“I learned that when things get bogged down because of indecision…force a decision, even if it creates a crisis, by selecting one of the alternatives as a straw man, but making it clear to others that the matter is open to objections.”

“I also learned that no job is too small, and sweeping a floor when it’s needed shows others that a willingness to do menial work is not above anyone.”

“I learned to do nothing illegal and not to cheat anyone, nor to squander resources.”

“I learned the discipline to make crucial decisions using scientific methods and melding that into a long-term vision to attain goals.”

“I learned to use Moore’s law, the learning curve and price elasticity to set competitive prices and to get the contract at any cost and figure a way to add more bells and whistles to the product and make it profitable.”

“I learned the value of worrying about your customer’s career and of making your customer’s problems your problems as soon as possible, and to deliver lousy news immediately and talk to your customers early in the morning before they get tired or distracted.”

“Converting cash to other resources is very important. People, processes, market position, products and property should be the standard order of resource importance. People’s value on a project changes as the project evolves. Move people off a project where they are no longer suited to the task by getting them excited about a new opportunity.”

“I learned a lot from George.”

Graves’s first project at Teledyne was to write a proposal for an air-to-air radar test station for Rockwell International. Teledyne won the job, and Graves designed, built and delivered the product. It comprised using an analog computer that generated a differential equation-based function. Graves used operational amplifiers, which required 200-volt power supplies that shocked him a few times during the checkout phase of the prototype; despite this, it worked well.