[Collins] mcn numbers

[Dr. Gerald N. Johnson]

On Tue, 2008-01-01 at 10:15 -0800, Glen Zook wrote:
> I believe that it was in the 2nd half of 1967 but it
> could have been early in 1968 that the Wall Street
> Journal had an article on Collins Radio.  In the
> article it was said that Collins Radio "survived in
> spite of Art Collins and not because of Art Collins".

The last half of '67 and all of '68, I didn't think much about Collins.
That third draft notice caught me and I was wearing new (but lowest bid)
green clothes and being paid worse than a graduate student.

Art did inspire projects, but he kept his fingers in every project in
the place. Like I have done, he "mother henned" the engineers to death,
second guessing and approving or disapproving of every design (seemed
like to the details of the choice of resistors, but his reviews weren't
that close, but did include the choice of tube vendors and sometimes
circuits). With 20,000 employees he still tried to run the place as if
it was still him and a helper in his garage the way it was more than 30
years before.

At one point, to better characterize large vacuum variables, (he
thought) he had his HF slotted line brought to our transmitter lab, kept
a company VP to attend to the coffee pot, and one of our mechanical
engineers to work as his lab tech setting up the hardware. I never did
see any results from that effort, but he spent a couple weeks at it.
Probably snapped his slide rule.

One day in the lab where I was working on a pet project of his,
researching coils, shields, and variable coils he found me measuring Q
of a big coil by measuring the 3dB bandwidth, then using an abacus to
compute the delta F before computing Q with my fanciest possible
Dietzgen log-log duplex vector slide rule. He asked why I didn't do the
whole computation on the slide rule. I just handed him my slide rule and
asked to be show how to take the small difference of large numbers
(bandwidth on the order of 3 KHz at 3 MHz) on the slide rule. Within an
hour there was a computer programmer there setting up an input form so I
could slow the work by computing manually and also putting the raw data
into the forms so the computer could plot nice curlicues. Since the
unused turns caused suckouts I still had to compute Q to plan my next
test frequency. But the report did have nice curves.

Didn't have pocket calculators in those days and I didn't want the RF of
a Friden because I had lots of insertion loss between the generator and
the RF VTVM to keep the coupling from affecting coil Q. Also had a
copper topped workbench and a huge Sola to improve the equipment
stability and used a magnifier on a mirrored scale RF VTVM for better
precision.

Besides, a practiced abacus user can outrun a calculator user every time
doing addition or subtraction because entering numbers in the abacus
does the computation, no + or = key to punch.

That was in building 409, I think.
> 
> The "people" in Building 407 here in the Richardson,
> Texas, Collins Radio facility, were not "happy" with
> this.  Now Building 407 was known locally as "Camelot"
> ("King Arthur's palace").  It was the location of the
> "new" corporate headquarters (having been moved from
> Cedar Rapids to Richardson).

I suspect Art never heard it called "Camelot!" He'd have chewed many
posteriors if he had and understood the implication.
> 
> Glen, K9STH
> 
> 
Though it must be said that he must have laid a decent foundation for
the company with the infusion of Rockwell money and management
techniques has continued to exist and now on its own for another 35
years since Art lost control and sold out.

I've heard that most of middle management blossomed under Rockwell where
I'd have expected that since Art didn't let them make decisions without
his tight overview that they would have lacked that needed skill.

-- 
73, Jerry, K0CQ, Technical Advisor to the CRA
All content copyright Dr. Gerald N. Johnson, electrical engineer