that sometimes, when you are facing a very challenging mystery that has eluded you, and by accident, you see something that doesn’t look quite right, further investigation reveals more about the problem. The logic, mathematics and laws of physics are all confirmed with your discovery—this is the most satisfying type of mystery to solve. It would be as if you had been looking at a mosaic of meaningless patterns that suddenly turned into a beautiful mural masterpiece.
Grave mused that working in such an environment shaped his view of the world and his religious philosophy. It was, in many ways, an addictive situation. Since those days, Graves has understood why many people with powerful brains become scientific nerds. Time after time, Graves would see a system working in a way that seemed to defy the laws of physics. He saw that reconfirmation as a thing of beauty…something to rely on. Each time it happened, it felt for a moment to Gordon that through the fog of uncertainty and ignorance under which we all live our lives, he had caught a brief glimpse of the face of God.
Graves wrote a poem about this experience titled “Words of a Superstitious Scientist”:
God is the force. The force is M times A11,
As the earth gets hotter, man will try to get away,
And once man finds a place where they can stay,
Those selected to make that trip on that glorious day,
Will be those that follow Jesus’ words in every kind way
And once we learn to clone from using man’s DNA
Those selected to be re-created in that complicated way
Will find eternal life at last, just like the prophets always say.
Litton’s customers for the research system Graves was working with were Tom Sanders and Ron Vaughn of the US Naval Air Development Center (NADC) in Horsham, Pennsylvania. Once the system was working in the lab, Gordon took it to Pennsylvania to direct the field support of the system. Shortly after NADC had accepted delivery of the system and Graves returned to California, NADC called and asked him to come back because the technicians, Sanders and Vaughn, said when they installed the system in a test aircraft, it started to malfunction. When Graves arrived at NADC, he had them take the unit off the test plane. Gordon set up the unit in the lab and fired it up. The gyroscopic platform was supposed to level itself with respect to the earth automatically, but it didn’t. The observers at NADC said it would list to one side like a wounded duck, and that was precisely what it had been doing for an entire week.
Graves had Sanders and Vaughn pull the whole system out of the test aircraft, unhook all the aircraft wiring cables, and hook it back up in the lab. When he fired it up, it aligned as it should have. Gordon turned it off, let it cool down, and tested it again after reconnecting the aircraft cables. And again, it aligned perfectly. Graves scratched his chin and said, “Yep, just what I thought.” At that moment, he had no idea why it had happened, but he packed his bags and told the NADC to call him if they had any more problems, and went home. The problem never recurred.
Later, Graves said it was probably a corroded connector pin in the aircraft cabling that caused the issue. Disconnecting and reconnecting those aircraft cables likely cleaned the pins and solved the problem.
On the way back to Los Angeles, Gordon flew out of Philadelphia. Dick Clark, having finished a series of American Bandstand shows, was on the same flight. The stewardess asked Graves and Clark to come to the forward cabin and play Spades with them at a little snack table. Everyone had a good time.
Years later, MGAM had a consultant who lived next door to Clark in Malibu. He set up a breakfast meeting for Skip Leonard and Graves at Clark’s home to discuss his investing in MGAM. Graves said, “I was expecting something like eggs Benedict because, after all, we were at Dick Clark’s home. Instead, his wife Cari served us fruit cocktail right out of the can. Needless to say, Clark never invested.”
Graves’s boss, Sid Shapiro, left Litton and went to work with Henry Singleton and George Kozmetsky, who had resigned from Litton and were starting Teledyne. Graves had begun working for Charley Bridge by then. Charley had come to Litton from Autonetics and brought with him a bunch of new ideas on how to control inertial instruments. He assigned Gordon to work with Pete Mesquita. Pete taught Gordon how to generate a computer-flow diagram and write simple programs. At the time, Graves was twenty-four.
A few months later, Gordon received a call from Teledyne, and they asked him to join them. Graves was excited about the opportunity and knowing he’d be among the first five Litton employees Teledyne recruited. Gordon was, in fact, the youngest among the group of brilliant peddler-scientists. Graves was involved in building new systems and innovations, and, according to him, everything worked well enough that he thought they had the smartest team of people in the world.
Graves was in awe of both Dr. Singleton and Dr. Kozmetsky.
“Our culture has changed a lot in the past forty years,” said Graves, “since I was working for Henry. When I learned Henry Singleton had died, I was sad. What follows is the obituary published in the LA Times on September 2, 1999.
Henry Singleton, Co-Founder of Teledyne, Dies Obituary: Man who led the conglomerate for three decades was known for his technical skills and prowess on Wall Street.
By STUART SILVERSTEIN, TIMES STAFF WRITER. COPYRIGHT © 1999. Used with Permission
Henry E. Singleton, the pioneering co-founder of Teledyne Inc. and leader of the Los Angeles-based conglomerate for more than three decades, died Tuesday of brain cancer at his West Los Angeles home. He was 82.
Singleton, known as soft-spoken and extremely private, gained a mystique on Wall Street as one of the nation’s leading corporate merger whizzes from the 1960s through the 1980s.
He launched Teledyne in 1960 as a semiconductor maker but turned the company into one of America’s biggest and, for a time, one of its fastest-growing business empires. It controlled billions of dollars in assets and owned big stakes in many other companies.
Singleton specialized in finding companies whose stocks were undervalued, gobbling them up and turning them into big profit-makers for Teledyne shareholders. Eventually, Singleton amassed a fortune, estimated last year by Forbes magazine at $750 million--ranking him as one of the nation’s 400 richest people.
“He was way, way ahead of his time in lots of things, both technically and in business,” said Marvin H. Fink, president of Teledyne Electronic Technologies, a Marina del Rey subsidiary of Singleton’s old business empire and an executive acquainted with Singleton since the late 1950s.
Fink pointed out that Singleton designed what for years was a leading missile and aircraft guidance system. In addition, he said, Singleton was quick to embrace such corporate financial maneuvers as spinning off businesses and using extra cash to buy back stock.
“He was the first one I knew who used his own cash to buy back his stock and, for a while, people laughed at him. They thought he should do other things [with his cash]. Nowadays, just about every company understands the value of that,” Fink said.
At the same time, Singleton was reserved both in his personal and professional life. “He had very few interviews,” Fink said. “He was not the kind of guy who would talk a lot to analysts about his company’s stock. He was not the kind of guy who would tout his stock on TV.”
In 1960, Singleton launched Teledyne with his partner George Kozmetsky. Their first venture was building digital computers for
