Building the enterprise

By the end of June 1960, with Mansel Ramsey's preliminary assurances of June 1 to the effect that we were OK with Oak Ridge National Laboratory policy, we were deep into the business of setting up the company. Enthusiasm had developed in our group -- far beyond what I might have expected.

As I worked on it and looked at it, I got more and more excited about the effort, as did the others involved. Everyone was not only working on his part of the operation -- we were supporting each other and enthusiastically supporting the overall effort. That mutual support, enthusiasm, and the mutual trust we practiced and built increasingly strongly as we went along were without doubt major keys to the ultimate success of the enterprise.

There was a lot to do and we needed to keep track carefully. During capitalization we talked with Joe Guarneri, who had accounting experience and was a member of (I believe) the Finance Division, which assigned and managed the administrative assistants in ORNL's major divisions .

Joe was assigned to the Instrumentation and Controls Division (Cas Borkowski's division), but did not report to Cas. He was enthusiastic to join in with ORTEC and was glad not to be affected by Cas's "blanket ban" on I&C division members' association with ORTEC. Joe agreed to be secretary-treasurer and to keep the books.

ORTEC's first budget was simply a budget for the cash outlays required to get started. Joe was to make the distinctions between expense and balance sheet items and keep the records in accordance with good accounting practices and IRS rules.

We had divided the various areas of work among us, but now we had to deal with actual purchases, work and budgets. We thought it best, for reasons of efficiency, initiative, and accountability, to set up so the guys in charge of an area also had budget responsibility for that area.

We were a group of independent personalities and knew everyone would want to make his own decisions about expenditures. Everyone agreed.

We also agreed if any major account items in the budget were going to be overrun, we would bring it to the board as soon as we knew, discuss it, and decide jointly how to handle it. It was clear budget overruns were serious matters, not to be regarded lightly. We all took budgetary matters as a challenge, and our approach here seemed to add greatly to the rapport we had in setting up the company.

The immediate tasks facing us were practical and each task had its own difficulty. We had a lot to do in the next two to three months in our evening-and-weekend activities.

We needed an attorney to draw up corporate documents, including charter, bylaws, state filing forms, stock subscription agreement, etc. Attorney Elliott Adams did the legal work, but only after we had selected a name and had a corporate address. Recall, the name Oak Ridge Technical Enterprises Corp. (ORTEC) was selected June 15, 1960.

Immediately after we had a company name, we rented a post office box, obtained a telephone number, initial letterhead, and began stationery and brochure design, etc. Jim Johnson was our designer and graphic artist; he came up with a logo.

After we found and arranged for a location (July 7), we needed to clean the rooms and physically set up the facility. This included installing the telephones, lab benches, shelves, cabinets, proper electrical and plumbing connections, painting the walls and surfaces, and insuring cleanliness throughout.

The phones and the electrical and plumbing parts were done by professionals; the rest was done by crews of shareholders who came to the new facility and pitched in with enthusiastic help. A fun atmosphere prevailed while this was going on. Leaders were John Walter and John Neiler, with 10 to 15 shareholders participating at various times.

Probably the single most expensive equipment item we would need was a vacuum evaporator. We would try for a lease-purchase arrangement, but also compare that with outright purchase. A deal was arranged with Consolidated Electrodynamics Corp.

Machined parts for our specific purposes added about another $300 to the purchase price of $1,700. Detector mounts and other machined parts, jigs, etc., had to be designed and made; Jim Johnson and Al Lynch did this.

We needed a multi-channel analyzer for alpha-particle testing of detectors. Dallas Yeager, an instrument sales representative who had joined in as an investor, arranged an agreement with Vern Hartzer, president of RIDL (Radiation Instrument Development Laboratories Inc., an instrumentation company), whereby RIDL furnished us an analyzer as a demonstration unit at no charge.

They required only that we place on each detector test spectrum a label stating that it was taken with an RIDL analyzer. No problem there! This saved us a capital expenditure of $5000 or more. Tom Emmer led this effort along with John Neiler and John Walter.

Yeager also agreed that he and his secretary could answer the ORTEC telephone during workdays while we were at work at ORNL. We arranged with AT&T to install an extension in Yeager's office, several blocks away. This was an enormous help in that they could call any of us if a really urgent call came in. Mostly they would take messages.

We also had to negotiate a supply of n-type, single-crystal silicon. John Walter made sure the specifications were right and talked with the technical people at MERCK & Co., which was known to us as a quality supplier. The quoted price was $1.89 per gram and we needed an ingot section of about 300 grams to start.

We were convinced the technical person at MERCK understood our requirements, but of course his instructions (to ship) came from the sales and/or credit department. The sales/credit guys had a hard time understanding our special requirements and also didn't readily understand who we were or what we were doing.

Finally, I ended up talking with the sales manager for specialty items who said, after being sure that his technical guy understood, "Oh, well, I'll give you a $500 line of credit and we'll ship it to you, whatever it is." They did, and we of course paid the invoice immediately after it arrived.

That started a good relationship through which they provided for our regular needs and provided, as well, ingot sections of rarer high-resistivity silicon as they became available, which was needed later for a number of our customers' applications.

The ingots we received from MERCK had to be sliced, and the slices had to be cut and shaped into the detector shapes we needed. The saw cuts would cause the loss of useful material of course, so we searched for a firm that could cut the ingots with minimum-thickness cuts. We used the firm MERCK technical people recommended, which was Semiconductor Specialties Corp. in New Jersey, which did an excellent job.

We applied for and received a license from the Atomic Energy Commission for handling radioactive materials, so we could procure alpha-particle sources and use them for testing the detectors. We had to work out and understand the procedure for purchasing the sources from ORNL, where we knew good sources, especially 241Am, would be made by Al Chetham-Strode and his group, who had made excellent sources for my work at ORNL. Phil Baker, in the isotopes group at ORNL, helped us, smoothing out the procedural wrinkles.