ELECTRONICS: The New Age

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So much of R-W's current work is military that the company's product line, like an iceberg, is 90% invisible. Eventually R-W hopes that almost everything will have a peacetime application. On its production line last week was what R-W claims is the most versatile airborne computer for its size ever built. Weighing only 175 Ibs., the transistorized brain can multiply as rapidly (4,000 calculations per second) and remember as many instructions (2,000) as a room-sized computer of 19 tons. Late this summer R-W will put on the market a civilian cousin, which it hopes will completely automate such industries as oil refining, chemicals, metals, drugs, paper, soap and beer. Price of the computer: $50,000.

Ideas into Gold. R-W's type of success can be found again and again in the industry. Among the new successes: ¶Varian Associates was founded in 1948 in Palo Alto, Calif, by Physicist Russell and Engineer Sigurd Varian as a company that had "nothing to offer but advanced technology and ideas." Today, as the biggest producer of the klystron tube, which guides Air Force missiles and irradiates Army food, Varian has grown from seven employees to 1,230, did an annual business of $11 million in 1956. Estimated 1957 sales: up another 27% to $14 million.

¶ Litton Industries was started in 1953 by Charles B. ("Tex") Thornton, a onetime Hughes Aircraft Co. executive who left with Ramo and Wooldridge. Backed by Lehman Bros, and other investment bankers, he bought going companies for their products and talent. Today, with 16 small firms in its fold, Litton makes radar tubes, printed circuits, high-quality transformers (780 models), typewriter-sized computers selling for $12,000, dozens of other electronic gizmos. Sales in 1954: $3,000,000. In 1956: $15 million, with $25 million estimated for 1957. Litton's stock, which sold for $10.50 two years ago, now trades on the American Stock Exchange at $38 a share.

¶Hycon-Eastern was started two years ago in Boston by M.I.T. Professors J. R. Zacharias and J. B. Wiesner as a consultant firm in long-range microwave communications. Now Hycon-Eastern is a contractor as well, has a $14 million contract to build a complete radio, telephone and TV communications network for Libya, is surveying a similar job in Thailand, dickering for contracts in Iran and the French Cameroons. The company has a crystal lattice filter for radios that will handle much higher frequencies at one-thousandth the cost of previous crystal lattice filters, has also developed an electronic time standard that varies but one second in 30 years. With first-year sales of $3,000,000, it expects to top $10 million by 1959.

¶ Magnetics Inc. was started in a Butler, (Pa.) garage in 1949 by Engineer Arthur O. Black, who had an idea for magnetic nickel-iron amplifiers to take over some vacuum-tube functions. The first year Black had seven customers, sales of $15,000. This year, with more than 800 customers clamoring for "magamps" for radar, sonar and computer systems, Magnetics Inc. employs 320 people, will see its sales soar to $5,000,000. Says Black: "It never crossed my mind that we'd fail, but I never expected this."