ELECTRONICS: The New Age

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The dissimilarities mask a pair of brilliant, happily meshed minds that operate effortlessly with talk that often runs to truncated sentences, single words, esoteric expressions. Ramo spends most of his time on missile work while Wooldridge handles the rest, but both decide company policy. So well tuned are the two, says one R-W executive, "that they seem almost twins. Working together, they are not the equivalent of two men, but something a little closer to ten."

The Ramo-Wooldridge intellectual parallelism is matched by their careers. Both were born in the same month of the same year—Wooldridge on May 30, 1913, at Chickasha, Okla., the son of an independent oil broker, Ramo on May 7, 1913, the son of a Salt Lake City store owner. Both skipped grades in grammar school, peddied magazines for pocket money and excelled in their classes. Wooldridge graduated from high school at 14 and with honors from the University of Oklahoma; Ramo graduated from the University of Utah. Both went on to Caltech, where they won Ph.D.s at 23.

Fiddles v. Physics. Heading east with his doctorate in 1936, Dean Wooldridge went to work for Bell Telephone Laboratories in Manhattan, helping to explore new frontiers in electronics. When World War II began, he was put in charge of work on the first crude airborne fire-control systems, later headed an Army Ordnance study that led to the development of the first Nike guided missile. By 1946 Wooldridge was chief of Bell's physical electronics department. Yet life in an ivory tower began to chafe. Says Wooldridge: "I began to realize that I was not cut out to be a scholar. I was much more interested in work that would lead to a practical application."

Simon Ramo had already come to the same conclusion. After Caltech he tried for a job with General Electric. Ramo was finally hired, but not because of his brain. The G.E. man chanced to hear him play the violin, hired him (at $28 a week) in the interests of the "very fine symphony orchestra'' in Schenectady, N.Y. Alternating between fiddling and physics, Ramo eventually became a section chief in the company's electronics lab. But, like Wooldridge, he yearned to apply science to the construction of products.

The Falconers. Both found what they were looking for in California's fledgling electronics industry. On a trip west in 1946, Ramo hired on as research director of a ten-man electronics section at Hughes

Aircraft Co.; a few months later Wooldridge left Bell to join the fun. In short order, Ramo and Wooldridge developed an electronic fire-control system for the U.S. Air Force which was so good that it became standard equipment on every first-line interceptor. Another spectacular coup was the air-to-air Falcon guided missile to track and destroy enemy planes. When the Korean war sent orders surging through the industry, Hughes was transformed into an electronics giant with sales of $200 million annually.