by Teledyne in 1966. Art Cencel, Gordon’s friend and sponsor, became VP and General Manager of Servomechanisms. The company later decided to expand into recording systems for commercial airlines and changed its name to Teledyne Controls. Within a year, one of the proposals written a couple of years earlier to develop an inertial guidance system got funding through Max Lipscomb at Wright Patterson. Art and Graves started a new navigation division within Teledyne Systems with Graves becoming Director of Engineering.
There, Graves developed a tiny high-precision floated gyroscope with gas spin bearings, electrostatic suspension and capacitive pickoffs. The system used a quartz flexure accelerometer that eliminated one of the classic problems in gyro compassing that had always plagued Litton. The system featured a gimbal system with direct drive motors and microchips for electronic gimbal control—which mounted directly over the gimbal elements to eliminate the need for slip rings—which were the largest failure items on an inertial system. The computer they used was a digital differential analyzer. Graves designed the functional flow diagram for it and developed the algorithms, then hired Larry Drayer from Hughes Aircraft to develop the computer. Drayer had started working for Litton at the same time as Gordon, though he had started in the computer logic design group, he became a top-notch computer designer.
The U-2 Project
Russian defensive forces managed to shoot down the U-2 spy plane aloft over Russia and flown by Francis Gary Powers in 1960. They shot down another U-2 on a mission over Cuba in 1963. Both were flying at about 70,000 feet. The US Air Force came to Teledyne for a solution. What they had in mind was a navigation system that would operate at 100,000 feet, or 30,000 feet higher than where the U-2s previously flew.
The U-2 used a Doppler Radar to determine speed. A Doppler Radar bounces radar signals off the ground to determine speed. According to Graves, it works kind of like throwing tennis balls against a wall. If you throw them at once every second, they will come back at once a second. But if you are running toward the wall as you throw, the balls will come back at a higher frequency. That difference in frequency tells you how fast you are moving.
Graves helped design a system that mixed inertial with Doppler Radar, air-data sensors, and a star tracker in a configuration that took advantage of the strengths and ignored the weaknesses of each type of sensor. This led to some pioneering work in the use of Kalman filters, which has become a classic technique used in the navigation industry. Graves designed the computer for the inertial trial-guidance system, a digital differential analyzer using microcircuits.
Edwards Air Force Base in southern California did the flight testing for U-2s, and the new equipment got its shakedown at that base. The Air Force, however, called Art’s boss, Joe Smead, and told him the system was not working. Joe called Graves and said, “You go out to Edwards and don’t come back until it’s working.”
When Graves arrived at Edwards and got an escort to a hangar, Graves saw an airplane with an enormous wingspan. The test pilot was standing beside it, and Graves asked, “What is that?” The pilot said, “That’s the U-2, son.”
Although every Teledyne employee working on the system had top-secret clearance, they didn’t have a “need to know” what the system was for, so the people Graves was working for weren’t aware it was a U-2 project.
On the first flight, the inertial system platform began to wander off from pointing north when it got to approximately 40,000 feet in altitude. Graves called Art Cencel and told him what had happened. Cencel said, “Oh, I bet we have a leak in one of the gyroscopes. When we get to high altitude, the seal around the platform is not keeping the pressure where it should be.” He instructed Graves to call the group that had made the platform enclosure and put in a better seal. They did, and the problem disappeared. Graves said he received praise for solving the problem, but it was Cencel who did it. He let Graves have all the credit. When telling this story, Graves remarked, “Art was that kind of guy.”
Art Cencel has this to say about Graves: “Gordon was a joy to work with. He was more focused on inertial guidance systems, and I was a mechanical engineer, but I knew gyroscopes. There were two qualities I appreciated about Gordon: one was his capacity to put up with nonsense. It made him a great salesman when he needed to be, and he always kept his cool. The other was his approach to work. His work ethic was more a discipline, a technique as pure as the science itself, and it made him a good problem-solver. He is a keeper, that’s for sure. It’s not at all surprising to see what he has accomplished since Litton and Teledyne. We still communicate, mostly over the Net. I can truly say that Gordon Graves enriched my life.”
Business Management
Dr. Kozmetsky left Teledyne and went to the University of Texas in Austin (Graves’s alma mater) as Dean of the Business School in 1966. Gordon followed him in 1969 and worked part-time as the Technology Advisor for the Barnabus Fund, a venture-capital investment partnership jointly owned by Rauscher Pierce, a Texas-based investment banking firm and the University of Texas’s endowment fund. One of their successful investments was with a startup in San Antonio called Computer Terminals. They later changed their name to Datapoint. Graves’s focus was on going to the university’s graduate business school. He made all As and won the Dean’s Award for Academic Excellence. A couple of Gordon’s professors tried to entice him to remain in academia. Still, Gordon, by that time, had a passion for getting back into the business world and trying his hand at running a company.
When Graves finished graduate school in 1971 with an MBA, George introduced him to Dr. Dave Learner, President and Chief Executive of Applied Devices Corporation in College Point, New York, across the bay from LaGuardia. The investment banking firm, Loeb Rhoades, a company that started during WWII by a very prolific inventor Harry Bellock, controlled Applied Devices. The company grew rapidly until Bellock lost interest. A series of new managers, along with various disasters, came and went. In 1969, when Loeb Rhoades asked Kozmetsky to get involved and help them, the company was in disarray. Rhoades had recruited Learner, who Kozmetsky knew from his Carnegie Mellon days.
Dr. Learner bankrolled Graves’s first venture, a company Gordon named Advanced Products Laboratory (APL). He was thirty-three at the time.
Graves recruited some smart engineers (including Larry Drayer) from Teledyne and picked up Dr. Marty Keane, a brilliant mathematician and engineer from Chicago. They designed a microprocessor-based LORAN receiver, which they then sold to the Army. They next went after a contract to develop a complete avionics system for a light observation helicopter. Bell Helicopter, out of Fort Worth, was the prime contractor. APL competed against Litton, IBM, Teledyne and other avionics systems houses. APL used the same type of large-scale system design techniques Graves had used on the IHAS project.
Bell narrowed the competition down to IBM Federal Systems Division out of Owego and Graves’s Advanced Products Lab. APL won because they were bolder and worked harder than the competition, the result of a philosophical work ethic Graves had learned at Teledyne. Graves said, “I was at my physical prime then, and I could really work hard. When you write a big competitive procurement proposal like that one, you never finish writing—you just run out of time. You design as much of the system in as much detail as you possibly can, before hitting the deadline for proposal submittal, which sometimes becomes too close for comfort. Then you write it all down and polish it until the editors and the typists tell you there is no time to finish, and then you keep writing and redesigning a little longer until everyone is screaming at you. Then you jump in and help make copies and collate the pages and bind the documents and drive to the airport with them and put them on an airplane.”
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