about contracts, purchasing, budgeting, negotiating, design, production, customer relations and all the other critical disciplines involved in running a corporate operation.
When the Rockwell project ended, Graves became responsible for an airborne navigation computer project called ASN-13A, designed for specialized aircraft used for antisubmarine warfare. Three hundred of the units went to the Naval Avionics Facility (NAFI) in Indianapolis and performed well.
Graves then headed up a project to design and build a shipboard missile-tracking signal converter for the US Navy Bureau of Ships. The project never worked as it should, as the power semiconductors that drove the gear train kept blowing up. Graves, Art Cencel, and Art’s boss, Joe Smead, set up test systems around the factory to find a fix. Graves said when he thought he had found one, and wanted to talk to Art or Joe about it, he would look across the room for wherever smoke was swirling to locate them. The team finally got the system through acceptance testing, but it never worked correctly. Nevertheless, Teledyne eventually made money by selling spare power semiconductors. Graves said he never felt good about the project, but that was the way things worked out sometimes in the military-industrial complex.
That was shortly after Shapiro returned to Litton, and Graves started working for Art Cencel, who Graves said was the most brilliant boss he ever had. Working closely together, Cencel and Graves won a research and development contract from Max Lipscomb to build the smallest gimbaled floating gyroscope inertial system that had ever existed. Gordon took the first test model to Holloman Air Force Base to test it, and it was very successful.
Gordon then started writing proposals with Art, who had a wonderful mind and blessed with the ability to develop simple mental models of complicated physics or engineering processes in a way that was both powerful and effective.
Art had graduated first in his class at Purdue and had been a radar technician in the Navy before going to college to be a radar engineer. Art claimed his mother had enrolled him in Purdue without his knowledge. He had just gotten out of the Navy and had moved back to Colorado, where his parents lived. He was carousing all night and sleeping all day. One day, his mother asked him to take a ride with her. She drove him down to the train depot, told him to get out, opened the trunk, removed his packed luggage, handed him tickets to Indiana, kissed him on the cheek, and told him she had enrolled him at Purdue.
When Art got out of college, he accepted a job with Autonetics, which was part of what is now Rockwell. He was supposed to go to work in the radar division. Art claims that when he got to Downey, all the hundreds of new college graduates Autonetics had hired were reporting for work, and there was a great deal of confusion. Art got in the wrong line and ended up working in the gyroscope lab. That was really a joke because Autonetics had over-hired for the radar division.
The Integrated Helicopter Avionics System (IHAS) came along in 1969. Tech Wilson, the best technical salesman Graves had worked with, said that the Navy was going to design a new avionics system for the CH-53 helicopter, the IHAS, and Teledyne should go after the development contract—and it did. At the time, annual sales for all of Teledyne was $7 million a year, and they were competing against Hughes, Burroughs, CDC, Texas Instruments, Litton, Northrup, IBM, Autonetics, and a few others. Teledyne won the business because they were bolder, worked harder and had the best system. Graves was twenty-eight years old.
Graves said he believed two primary innovations allowed Teledyne to win business from other companies, many times larger and richer than them. One was as a result of microchip-based redundant, robust computer design and the other was their use of large-scale system design and life-cycle costing techniques that allowed them to select the best system design alternatives. They constructed a math model of the helicopter performing its various missions that allowed them to evaluate the effectiveness of the aircraft in monetary terms. For example, Graves said they looked at the probability of completing a mission in terms of the accuracy of the helicopter’s navigation system. They traded off the cost of an unsuccessful mission due to navigation errors or malfunction versus the incremental cost of buying a more accurate navigation system. Gordon led the effort to develop this type of model at a micro level using processes he learned from Dr. Gafford, Dean of the Electrical Engineering School at the University of Texas while taking a course Gafford taught on engineering economics for electrical utilities. Dr. Kozmetsky took the lead in developing the design technique on a macro level. Kozmetsky hired Abe Charnes and Bill Cooper from Carnegie Mellon to develop linear programming and Monte Carlo techniques to predict theoretical mission success.
Teledyne pitted itself against Texas Instruments and Nortronics in a competitive development contract. George Kozmetsky spent the last month while the Navy was evaluating the results in Washington, DC, roaming the halls of the Bureau of Weapons during daylight hours. At the end of the day, he would call and tell Graves and the team what material he needed for the next day. Then Gordon and his team would spend the rest of the day and the evening preparing it before shipping the components via American Airlines’ counter-to-counter service to Kozmetsky. Those were, of course, in the days before FedEx existed.
George would pick the materials up the next morning and be ready for another day of presentations to the Navy. George was staying at the Madison Hotel and ran out of cash. The rest of the team was rotating back and forth between Washington and their base for a few days at a time. George worked like a Trojan, as always…until in his late eighties before he died. Jay Last, who started Teledyne Semiconductor, said George was the only person he had ever known who made a million dollars at a rate of one dollar per hour of work.
Teledyne won the production contract for the IHAS, which became a multimillion-dollar program and was probably the turning point in the company’s success.
The day Teledyne learned they had won the contract, Dr. Kozmetsky gave Tech Wilson his credit card and told him to take the team to a celebration dinner at an expensive Beverly Hills restaurant. Everyone overindulged. After dinner, a small group decided to go to the home of one of the team members, Lew Elmore, who lived in the Hollywood Hills.
Gordon rode with Wilson in his little Triumph sports car. Tech drove like a maniac and eventually didn’t make a turn. The car went over the cliff rolling over and over for about 200 feet straight down the hill. When the vehicle stopped, it was upside down. Tech said, “Gordy…are you alright?” Graves answered, “Yes, how about you?” Tech said he had torn an ear almost off, but more seriously, he said his leg was pinned between the door and the steering wheel. He couldn’t get out.
Graves was able to crawl out his side of the car and tried to raise the car to free Tech’s leg. He couldn’t do it. He eventually clawed his way back up the cliff to the road and ran to Elmore’s house and told him what happened. Elmore called a wrecker and an ambulance and stayed by the phone. Graves ran back to the accident site.
The wrecker arrived first, and a man asked where the car was. Gordon pointed down the hill. The wrecker driver said, “You mean somebody is alive in that car?” Gordon said, “Yes, but he’s trapped. Let’s go down and try to free him!”
The wrecker driver started down, stumbled, and went head over heels tumbling down about 200 feet. Graves went after him and dragged and carried him back up the hill. He was a mess. His clothes were torn, and he was bleeding from various scrapes, cuts, and scratches. About that time, the ambulance arrived, saw the driver, threw him in the back of the ambulance, and off they went with the wrong victim while Graves screamed, “No, no. You have the wrong man!” Graves ran back to Elmore’s house and called both the wrecker and ambulance again. They were finally able to free Tech and drag the car back to the road.
To say the least, it was an unusual end to the celebration.
Shortly after this, Graves’s work on the navigation and flight control portions neared its end, and Cliff Barker12 stepped in and took over that project. Graves noted Barker did a great job, and
