ELECTRONICS: The New Age

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To analyze a single missile test, R-W must check over an entire planeload of complex data that would ordinarily take years to digest. By using a $500,000 computer that it built specially for the job, R-W boils down the information in a matter of hours, can tell exactly how the thousands of parts worked—or failed to work. R-W's taskmaster role does not make it universally popular with the many contractors over whom it sits in technical judgment. The arguments are long, the complaints bitter. R-W is criticized for being highhanded, for spurring contractors too hard. Another complaint is that R-W's role as technical boss gives it free access to electronic secrets of everyone in the program—secrets that may later have valuable commercial use. R-W vehemently denies that it plans to use its position to steal a march on the competition, points out that other companies benefit greatly from its technical help. Despite the complaints. General Schriever sturdily backs RW, holds that it is one of the big reasons why the program is solidly on schedule so far. Says Westinghouse Vice President John A. Hutcheson: "Sure they're tough. They've got to be. They're the glue that sticks all the pieces together."

The Payoff. The payoff for supplying the glue is growth and profits. The first headquarters of R-W was a one-room office in Los Angeles (now a barbershop), with a card table, a chair, a telephone, a rented typewriter. "When we started," says Si Ramo, "we thought that maybe, if we were greatly successful, we might eventually have a staff of 150 people." By last week R-W's security guards alone numbered 162, its total staff 3,040. From the original room the plant has expanded to 450,000 sq. ft. of modern buildings. This year a 140,000-sq-ft. manufacturing plant will be completed in Denver; two years from now a new $15 million headquarters in Los Angeles will give it another 900,000 sq. ft. of space. Its physical assets already amount to $16 million, and on sales of $28.9 million last year, R-W netted a healthy $2,716,600. Three more years should see R-W at the $100 million mark. R-W common stock, much of it sold at $2 a share to scientists as an inducement to join the new company, is estimated now to be worth several hundred dollars a share.

Unlikely Pair. On the surface a more unlikely pair of big businessmen could hardly be found than Wooldridge and Ramo. A trim (5 ft. 9¾ in., 155 Ibs.) man who looks out at the world through gold-rimmed spectacles, President Dean Wooldridge, 43, looks and acts the part of a professor; he is calm, introspective, plays the organ for relaxation. Vice President Simon Ramo is a striking opposite. Though equally trim (5 ft. 10½ in., 158 Ibs.), he is flamboyant and mercurial, takes mambo lessons for relaxation. Wooldridge marshals his thoughts carefully, is all business and lucidity, can make abstruse technical problems easily understandable to a layman; Ramo speaks impulsively, lets his thoughts bounce around like an errant light beam.