A History of Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation and Spectroscopist

Waters Symposium: Atomic Emission Spectroscopy

A History of Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation and Spectroscopist Richard F. Jarrell R. F. Jarrell, F. Brech,† and M. J. Gustafson

Around the time Maurice Hasler was building a spectrograph for use in his then-new Applied Research Laboratories in California, and about a year before Walter Baird started his namesake company just outside of Boston, Richard F. Jarrell was finishing up his four-year degree in Physics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His father, J. O. Jarrell (who disliked and seldom used his given name, Joshua Oscar), had an established business in Boston selling microscopes and other optical goods. The elder Jarrell was taking on a new product line: spectrographs and other analytical instruments from London-based Adam Hilger Limited. He arranged for Dick, his oldest son, to spend the summer at Hilger learning firsthand as much as possible about their instrumentation. That trip, followed by a graduate fellowship project at MIT, set the stage for Jarrell’s life in science and business—and for a spectroscopy company that still carries his name. The Jarrell-Ash Company Richard Fiske Jarrell was born January 14, 1913, to American parents in Rockcliffe, a suburb of Ottawa, Ontario. His father was a salesman for the Topley Company, a local dealer for Bausch & Lomb microscopes. His mother Clara (nee Van Zandt) had been a secretary at Rochester, New York– based Bausch & Lomb when they met and were married. Dick was the oldest of their three boys. After World War I, J. O. Jarrell took a sales post with the Hughes Owens Company, eastern Canada’s sales representative for microscopes and other products manufactured by Spencer Lens Company of Buffalo, New York. By 1926 he had arranged to start his own business selling and servicing the Spencer line in Boston. J. O. Jarrell established his firm, named Spencer Lens Company of New England, in a second-floor office at 165 Newbury Street. His first employee was microscope technician Carroll H. Ash, who had formerly worked at the Spencer factory. The Jarrells eventually bought a house in Newton, a western suburb of Boston. As a Newton High School senior, Dick posted the highest men’s score in college entrance examinations in 1931. Aided by a small scholarship, he chose to attend MIT and majored in physics, studying spectroscopy under George R. Harrison. During these and later years, Harrison, under the auspices of the Depression-era Works Progress Administration or WPA, organized a program to measure the wavelengths of spectral lines of all the natural elements in the periodic table. Harrison’s project would result in the 1939 publication of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Wavelength Tables, a now classical reference. Dick Jarrell’s graduation from MIT in 1935 roughly coincided with several changes in his father’s business. After Spencer Lens was acquired by American Optical Company in 1933, J. O. Jarrell incorporated and rechristened his firm †

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Deceased.

by pairing his and his technician’s last names—thus, the Jarrell-Ash Company. The elder Jarrell also negotiated to become the New England sales representative for Adam Hilger Limited. With his son’s undergraduate studies completed, J. O. Jarrell sent Dick to England for two months of training on the Hilger line of spectrographs, accessories, and related products. London’s Adam Hilger Limited,1 founded around 1870 and incorporated in 1904, was highly regarded for the quality of its spectroscopes and other optical instruments. After the deaths of founder Adam Hilger and his brother Otto, the company and its reputation were advanced by managing director and instrumentation pioneer Frank Twyman. A designer of precision instruments for an era, Twyman figured prominently in commercial analytical instrumentation from the turn of the century to his retirement in 1946.2 In the early 1900s Twyman designed a Cornu-prism quartz spectrograph that could focus an entire emission spectrum on a single flat 31⁄4 × 4-in. photographic plate. In 1910 Twyman designed a large quartz Littrow spectrograph for analyzing complex steel spectra, an instrument purchased by the Mellon Institute, American Brass Company, and General Electric’s works in Cleveland, Ohio. Jarrell was as attentive in Twyman’s labs and shops as he had been at MIT, judging by his accomplishments over the next decade. At Hilger he became acquainted with Frederich Brech, who had come to Hilger as an apprentice only a few years earlier, straight from completing his education at London’s Beaufoy Technical Institute in 1932. At summer’s end Jarrell returned to Massachusetts with a thorough understanding of Hilger spectrographs and accessories. His father made him a part-time employee and a director of Jarrell-Ash. Jarrell recalls, “Hilger had just introduced a new 170 cm Littrow quartz-and-glass spectrograph with ‘automatic focusing’ when the quartz prism and lenses were interchanged with the glass or a new wavelength range was selected. This was accomplished by two cams, one for quartz and one for glass, that rotated each prism the correct amount to bring the desired wavelength range onto the 4-inch by 10-inch photographic plate. A screw drive moved the prism along the axis to maintain average focus, and a cam for each prism tilted the plateholder the correct amount to maintain focus across the 10-inch plate.” This instrument Jarrell-Ash imported and displayed at Harrison’s MIT Conference and in the lobby of the Mellon Institute at Mary Warga’s course in Spectrochemical Analysis, which later became the Pittsburgh Conference. It was by far the largest instrument on display. Taking on the Hilger product line brought more cachet than cash to Jarrell-Ash, owing to the Depression and a series of protective trade laws, notably the Smoot–Hawley tariffs enacted in June 1930. A 60% tariff applied to foreign-made spectrographs, Dick Jarrell recalled, “so the instrument was far more expensive than the comparable Bausch & Lomb instrument that required more complicated focusing.”

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Love of spectroscopy and practical necessity took Jarrell back to MIT’s Cambridge campus in 1937, where he continued to study under Harrison. He also received a fellowship from Walter H. Newhouse in the geology department to design, supervise construction of, and adjust a grating spectrograph for analyzing mineral specimens. Such instruments were not new at MIT. Harrison had built three for his spectroscopy lab and had about two dozen people employed in his WPA spectra-measuring project, and Jarrell remembers using one of the school’s Hilger instruments as an undergraduate. Still it was a substantial undertaking, and the finished product was welcomed by the school’s geologists. Jarrell’s project took less than two years to complete. His design centered on the instrument’s key component: a 21-foot-radius diffraction grating supplied by R. W. Wood3 of Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Wood had become the world’s best source for gratings, ruled one at a time in a painstakingly slow and difficult process (usually overseen by his assistant, Wilbur Perry). Jarrell proposed a then-standard Wadsworth spectrograph configuration, to which he “applied a cam focusing arrangement to the grating, similar to that in the Hilger Littrow spectrograph.” As he later described it: “The instrument was built on three concrete piers in a darkroom. One pier supported the entrance slit, which protruded through the darkroom wall, to admit the light from the [electrical] arc stand. This pier also supported one end of a steel I-beam channel that rotated about an axis under the front face of the grating, to change the wavelength range. On the other two piers was mounted an inverted second channel that formed a support for the plateholder-end of the first channel. The plateholder was mounted on ballways, so that it could move toward and away from the grating to maintain focus as the wavelength setting was changed, always perpendicular to the central ray from the grating.” Machining of the instrument’s precision parts—including its mirror and grating holders, the plateholder, and the cam that maintained the plateholder in focus as the wavelength range changed—was done by Otto von der Hyde in the geology department’s machine shop. “Initially an iron arc was used to determine the best focus at the center of the plateholder, as the bar was rotated to change wavelength, and the plateholder was moved in and out in known steps. Then a cam was filed and mounted on the supporting I-beam, to maintain the grating-to-plateholder distance at optimum focus as the grating and plateholder were rotated to change the wavelength setting. It was found, as expected, that the spectral lines remained in good focus over the full 20 inches [of the photographic plates] if the lines at the center were maintained in focus by an experimentally determined cam.” Concentrations of useful metals in potential ores were estimated with accuracies of about ±25% by visual comparison with synthesized “standards”. Jarrell’s next work at MIT was development of analytical procedures for geological specimens, followed by the design and manufacture of a densitometer for quantitative analyses. Wartime Commissions U.S. industry had recognized the importance of emission spectrochemistry in quality control long before the threat

of a Second World War. As the prospect of war grew greater, recalled Fred Brech, “the supply of [high-resolution] instruments from Adam Hilger of London was jeopardized.” When one of America’s largest and most respected industrial corporations, the General Electric Company, needed a specialized instrument for metals analysis, one of the company’s senior Boston-area employees consulted with a local expert at MIT. H. L. Watson of GE’s River Works in Lynn, Massachusetts, called on Harrison for recommendations for an instrument. It would be used to perform exacting quality-related measurements on nickel/chromium/iron superalloys for aircraft engines. As Watson described his requirements, Harrison concluded that GE needed a grating spectrograph similar to what graduate student Dick Jarrell had built for the geology department, and he so advised Watson. Soon Watson spoke with the Jarrells, first with Dick alone and then together with his father, about the possibility of building such an instrument. Dick and J. O. Jarrell later discussed the project. “Probably with his fingers crossed,” Dick later said, recognizing the financial gamble the company would be taking on, his father agreed to prepare a price quote for GE. Dick Jarrell started drawing up plans for a self-contained, steel-framed version of the instrument that he had built at MIT. As he later described his first commercial product, this “21-foot Wadsworth stigmatic grating spectrograph … combined high resolution and dispersion (5.4 Å/mm) with a wide wavelength range (2500 Å) on two 4-inch by 10-inch photographic plates. The stigmatic image, contrasted to other grating spectrographs, permitted the use of a seven-step rotating-sector disk or stepped filters just in front of the entrance slit, to prepare characteristic curves for the photographic emulsion, to translate measured line transmissions into intensities.” Other spectrochemists portray the instrument as “superior to any other commercially available” at that time. In addition to his own planning, Jarrell contacted Wood at Johns Hopkins to determine the availability of a diffraction grating. Wood’s response was positive.4 Jarrell also asked von der Hyde, the MIT machinist, if he would do the necessary machine work for the parts and assemble the complete instrument if GE placed an order. von der Hyde agreed, assuming that Jarrell-Ash bought the required tools and rented a suitable space. Jarrell showed him the layout for a bolted steel and cast iron frame and drawings for the entrance slit, mirror and grating holders, and plateholder. von der Hyde quoted a price and estimated completion time of five to six months, which Dick Jarrell explained to his father. JarrellAsh quoted GE a price of $9,600 and eight months delivery. They immediately placed an order. As Jarrell recounted the scene, “Space for a small machine shop and for assembly of the large instrument was found in a Newton Highlands location fairly near [my] apartment and Otto’s house. Orders were placed for a South Bend lathe, Bridgeport milling machine, a surface grinder and appropriate hand tools, and an order was placed for the grating. … Otto resigned from MIT, machined the parts, assembled and bolted the steel frame, and installed the components.” One of the last steps had Jarrell working through the night in a bathroom-turned-darkroom, making the exposures required to determine the shape of the plateholder focal curve

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and then the shape of the cam that maintained focus as the bar was rotated to change the wavelength setting. GE was then advised the instrument was ready for acceptance and shipping. Completing the spectrograph took about six months. GE’s Watson came to the shop, examined spectra from several test specimens, and was shown how to operate the instrument. He agreed to its shipment, and a truck was sent from GE’s works north of Boston to pick it up. The instrument was loaded on the truck, and that was the last Jarrell saw of it. Security regulations prohibited him from installing or adjusting the spectrograph in GE’s labs. Jarrell came to consider that a plus, after he learned the bulky-yet-delicate device—with a focus that had to be maintained within 0.1 to 0.2 millimeters—was to be hoisted up and inserted through an upper-floor laboratory window. “That process would have given me fits!” he said. He later heard that GE workers managed the basic installation in two hours. Working from the brief instructions he received at the shop, Watson and an MIT graduate student soon had the first Jarrell-Ash emission spectrograph in service. About a month after the shipment to GE, one of its suppliers, International Nickel of Bayonne, New Jersey, contacted Jarrell-Ash about a second such instrument. “As soon as we quoted, we received an order,” Jarrell said. “Dr. Wood, as soon as we advised him of the prospective customer, agreed to ship another grating. We were able to deliver a second instrument three months after the first.” Jarrell later learned that both spectrographs were used to analyze new “superalloys” of iron, chromium, and nickel poured by International Nickel and machined by GE for aircraft engines used during the war. Volatile elements such as Bi, Cd, and As had to be held at parts-per-million levels or they would become centers for corrosion and failure of the engines. Since the spectrum of high Fe, Cr, and Ni was complex, high dispersion was required. No other commercial spectrograph provided the combination of high dispersion and wide wavelength range needed to measure the trace elements at ppm levels. Jarrell installed and adjusted the International Nickel instrument and instructed their Neal Gordon in its operation. Then came more requests. The National Bureau of Standards (now the National Institute of Standards and Technology) and Union Carbide asked Jarrell-Ash for detailed descriptions and prices for similar spectrographs. Again, Wood agreed to supply gratings, and orders were placed immediately after Jarrell-Ash quoted prices and delivery dates. For the NBS, the instrument was shipped and Scribner and Corliss were able to install and calibrate it for themselves, Jarrell recalls. “It was employed initially to analyse uranium for harmful trace elements, but later became the spectrograph used for most of the NBS experimental work that was published as ‘Tables of Spectral-line Intensities, Arranged by Elements,’ a bible for spectroscopists.” The instrument for Union Carbide was shipped to the company’s plant in Oak Ridge, Tennessee. Jarrell installed it, although its intended use in uranium analysis was not disclosed to him at the time. The next high-priority spectrograph order came from Velmer Fassel at Iowa State College (now Iowa State University) in Ames. That spectrograph would be the first of a new design, one in which the most obvious feature was a welded 594

frame eliminating the exterior bolts.5 “At this stage it seemed faster and less expensive to employ a welded steel frame,” Jarrell explained. The instrument was completed just at the end of World War II. Jarrell expected demand for his spectrographs to be about six to eight high-dispersion, wide-coverage instruments per year, which was equal to the number of diffraction gratings R. W. Wood agreed to supply. The Newton Highlands shop was too small and his output of instruments was too slow to meet that demand, Jarrell believed. Furthermore, von der Hyde had decided to work for himself on one-of-a-kind projects rather than continue in what was becoming a production-oriented job. Vestiges of the next steps Jarrell took can be found in the business today, more than a half-century later. With his father’s approval, Jarrell went looking for new manufacturing quarters and for new help while finishing his new spectrograph design. Things quickly fell into place. He rented the semi-basement level of a building in nearby Watertown for production space. Perhaps most important at the time, Jarrell found the skilled help he needed. The first new employee he hired for fabrication was Bill Rice, and through him two more employees—Rice’s brothers, Bud and Dave. Among them, the Rice brothers possessed all the basic skills needed for production: welding, machining, and assembly. This trio, like Jarrell himself, was exempted from military service because of the nature of their jobs.6 Soon Jarrell hired another machinist and a secretary. But even with the expanded crew, he was finding it difficult to keep up. His own responsibilities included adjusting the spectrographs as well as designing several supporting accessories and adjunct instruments: plate-processing equipment for the darkroom, plate dryers, a projection microphotometer (a device to locate the desired spectral lines and measure their transmissions), and a calculating board to convert transmissions of analytical and internal standard lines into intensities and intensity ratios, then into concentrations. Such accessories were being offered by Hasler’s California-based Applied Research Laboratories (ARL) and his eastern distributor, so Jarrell felt obliged to provide them, too.7 For help with some of the more technical tasks, he hired Henry Ransom, a friend from the MIT “Spec Lab”. By this time it was apparent that there was a good potential market for a large spectrograph with higher dispersion and wider wavelength coverage than any on the market, and a catalog was needed. A photograph was taken of Henry Ransom operating the first welded Wadsworth, just before it was shipped to Fassel at Iowa State. This image was used on the front cover of the first Jarrell-Ash spectrograph catalog describing the 21′-10′′ Wadsworth spectrograph. The instrument was sold not only for trace elements in uranium but also for volatile elements such as As, Bi, Cd, P, and S in high-alloy steels. The catalog also listed spectrographs for gratings with radii of 35′ for very complex spectra and 480 cm or 305 cm for Al, Cu, or other nonferrous alloys. The 21′ radius was sufficient for almost all specimens, and only one 35′ instrument was shipped, to Los Alamos. The 480-cm spectrographs were sold for Al, Cu, or other nonferrous alloys. The 3.4-m Wadsworth spectrographs were the Cadillac of spectrographs—the market’s biggest and best, and most expensive, too. They were needed only for minerals with fer-



rous-type elements or for steels or superalloys of Fe, Cr, and Ni, and uranium. The dispersion was unnecessary for aluminum, copper, lead, or other nonferrous alloys. Jarrell-Ash also introduced a 1.5-m Wadsworth spectrograph, which preserved the stigmatic image that permitted a stepped filter or rotating stepped sector disk just in front of the entrance slit to produce lines with stepped transmissions. These could be measured by a microphotometer and plotted against the known intensities to produce “characteristic curves” for that plate or film at the wavelength of interest. Then intensity ratios could be plotted against concentrations of chemically analyzed “standards”. This 1.5-m Wadsworth also employed film, which was less expensive and somewhat simpler to process and dry than the photographic plates of the 3.4-m spectrograph. It was competitive in price to the ARL grating spectrograph developed by Maurice Hasler for the California Geological Survey in 1932. When J. O. Jarrell consented to build a small new factory in Newton along the south bank of the Charles River on Farwell Street, basement space was reserved so the company could set up its own equipment for making diffraction gratings. Ruling Class One of the company’s most important and lasting developments came after R. W. Wood, who had been willing to rule diffraction gratings for Jarrell-Ash as part of the war effort, said he would not continue to do so for regular postwar trade. Wood was, however, willing to assist the company in setting up operations to make its own. That help, combined with the hiring of another talented local machinist and the company’s need of more manufacturing space, led to the company’s decision to put up its own building along the south bank of the Charles River in Newton and build a ruling engine. Paul McPherson was a highly skilled and experienced machinist who had attended Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and formerly worked for D. W. Mann, a local company that produced precision measuring tools such as micrometers. McPherson took a machinist’s job Jarrell offered, with the understanding he could maintain his own small sideline in crafting machine tools. In 1946 Dick Jarrell sent McPherson and a fellow machinist to the experts in Baltimore to learn how grating ruling should be done. “Paul and Dave Rice visited Johns Hopkins, Paul to study how to design a J-A ruling engine and ruling room, and Dave to learn the art of actual ruling,” Jarrell recounted. “Paul returned after two days, but Dave stayed for several weeks to observe the ruling of two gratings with different spacings: 30,000 and 7,500 grooves per inch. On his return Paul started the design of an engine capable of ruling 30,000, 15,000, and 7,500 grooves-per-inch gratings.” McPherson and Rice’s work had to be meticulous. “All the critical components of these engines, such as the nitralloy stage ways, the lead screws, and the lead screw gearing were fabricated using extreme care and laborious hand lapping to obtain the highest possible accuracy,” as Thermo Jarrell Ash employees Robert Krupa and Eugene Pereira described it in 1997.8 From the time of McPherson and Rice’s original visit, it took five years to complete the ruling engine and turn out its first acceptable grating. “We all celebrated when the first grating ruled proved to be as good as those we had received from

Johns Hopkins,” Jarrell remembered. That engine and another they made served the company for more than three decades before going through a complete modernization. While Jarrell-Ash’s machinists proceeded with their work on the ruling engine, in 1948 the company began a parallel project in grating replication. In 1950 Jarrell-Ash was the first in the world to produce a four-inch experimental replica grating, and five years of refining the process led to regular production of four- and six-inch replicas. That was a pivotal year for the company in several other respects, too. First, 1950 was the first “Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy”, along with its “Exposition of Modern Laboratory Equipment”. The Jarrell-Ash Company had been represented at earlier spectroscopy meetings organized by the University of Pittsburgh’s Mary Warga, which led to Dick Jarrell’s participation in the original Pittsburgh Conference, February 15– 17, 1950. Jarrell Ash exhibited its 3.4-m Wadsworth grating spectrograph and as a representative for Hilger offered prism spectrographs, Raman spectrographs, infrared spectrophotometers, interferometers, etalons (devices for interference measurement of spectra), X-ray diffraction units, and other products including microscopes. The equipment may have been a relative bargain at the time, judging by Jarrell-Ash’s advertisement in the conference program. In boldface type the ad proclaimed: “Sterling Pound Devaluation Means New Low Prices on All British Equipment.” In 1943 a crisis developed at Jarrell-Ash when J. O. Jarrell became ill with pneumonia and died. Ash, who had assumed responsibility for the sale of Spencer microscopes and other products, was due to retire and did. Dick Ashley, who in practice had been gradually taking over Ash’s product lines, became manager of the 165 Newbury Street business. Dick Jarrell had to replace his father as general manager and treasurer of the company. He found himself more than fully occupied with the design of the new welded construction Fastie-Ebert 21 spectrograph, improved arc and spark stands, and a floor-mounted comparator microphotometer. The latter was capable of projecting two 4- by 10-in. analytical plates against two 4- by 10-in. reference plates, to identify spectral lines and measure their transmission. It was designed by Dick Brehm, who had joined Jarrell-Ash as Engineering Director. The 20 inches of projected spectrum was the largest in the world. Hiring a director of research was one more noteworthy development for Jarrell-Ash in 1950. Given the company’s ties to Hilger and Dick Jarrell’s personal involvement with the science and business of spectroscopy, it probably was inevitable that he and Fred Brech would become close associates. The men had met during Jarrell’s first summertime visit to Adam Hilger Limited and became better acquainted through the years, especially during Brech’s extended stay in the United States in 1948 to further study X-ray diffraction analysis. Jarrell had often tried to persuade Brech to join his growing business. Brech expressed interest, but always stopped short of committing to a job. Finally in 1950, partly out of exasperation—and possibly a bit of desperation, since he needed more experienced technical and marketing assistance at the top of the company—Jarrell sent Brech an ultimatum in the form of a one-way ticket to Boston. It was a “come-now-or-forget-


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I-ever-asked” proposition. Brech then joined Jarrell-Ash as its director of research. He later would be closely associated with efforts to expand the company’s analytical instrumentation product lines. His counsel and support were welcomed by Jarrell, who in 1951, some time after his father’s death, had been named the company’s chairman and president. Brech is quick to credit Jarrell’s role in the 1953 commercial design of a spectrograph that “remained the mainstay of photographically recorded spectroscopy” into the 1970s. Based largely on an Ebert mounting spectrograph described in a paper by researcher William Fastie of Johns Hopkins University, the commercialized version was ready in a mere four months. It became one of the company’s best and longest selling products. By Jarrell’s description, the “much more compact” Ebert 3.4-meter spectrograph “led all instruments world wide in dispersion, resolution, and wavelength coverage. It offered the possibility of even greater dispersion and resolution by using the grating at higher orders, to resolve 0.01 Å.” Like his war-era instruments, this new spectrograph was especially useful in the high-purity analyses required in atomic research—then one of America’s strongest and most important scientific initiatives. As good as this new spectrograph was, it was not fundamentally different from the first commercial spectrographs from the turn of the century, in that it captured spectra by photography. With new postwar technology, the process would start becoming electronic. “Direct Readers” Of all the devices that resulted from technology initiatives spurred by World War II—radar, computers, transistors, to name a few—one that revolutionized spectroscopy was the photomultiplier tube or “PMT”. “Photomultiplier tubes were … proven to be sensitive, linear, and reproducible devices for measuring not only relatively weak spectral lines but also alloying concentrations,” Jarrell recalled. “Photomultipliers introduced the second major revolution in spectrochemical analyses, as great as that of spectrographs that replaced visual observations of spectra. For routine analyses, direct-readers were faster and slightly more repeatable and accurate than photographic spectrochemical analyses. They had one major disadvantage. They had to be designed for specific, relatively routine analyses, because the spectral lines that needed to be measured were different for each specific type of specimen: steels, copper base, aluminum, magnesium, lead, or other base metal alloys. A single analytical line, exit slit, and photomultiplier was needed for low concentrations of an element, and then a second, less sensitive line for higher concentrations. Usually two or possibly more spectral lines might be required for each alloying element. For example in analysis of steels, it might be desirable to measure chromium or tungsten as trace elements from .001% to 1% in some metals, and in the range 1% to 20 or 30% for some alloys. So two or even three exit slits and photomultipliers might be required for a single element. Most of the minor elements, such as carbon, phosphorus, sulfur, or silicon, not expected above 1% in steels, would need only a single exit slit and photomultiplier.” Hasler was an early and strong advocate of direct-readers. ARL’s “Quantometer” and a direct-reader from Cam596

bridge, Massachusetts–based Baird Associates were among the first commercial instruments. Both were advertised in 1950 in the Pittsburgh Conference program. Jarrell-Ash introduced its own direct-reading instrument, called the “Atomcomp”, around 1953. Those most closely involved with the instrument’s development were Brech, Dick Brehm—who had joined the company as director of engineering, and John Bernier, a talented technical employee who would spend his entire career with the company. Bernier had already made a major contribution through his design of the Jarrell-Ash microphotometer comparator. Much of Bernier’s interest was in electrical engineering, making him a natural for the company’s development of a direct-reader. In terms of performance, the analyses from all three companies’ instruments “were essentially the same”, according to Jarrell. The major differences were in the approaches they used in reaching their analytical conclusions. ARL and Baird developed procedures centered on using relatively large capacitors to accumulate voltages from the PMTs. Jarrell-Ash instead used small capacitors that charged quickly to a relatively low voltage, when they were grounded and immediately reconnected to the photomultiplier. This process was repeated again and again, so that each counter rapidly and linearly counted up to a maximum of 10,000. When the channel for the internal standard line reached a selected count, the exposure was terminated. Then the count for each analytical line read directly Ia/Is for that element and could be converted into concentration from the calibration curve for that element prepared from chemically analyzed standards. From a performance standpoint, the analyses of all three systems were essentially the same. From a market standpoint, ARL’s slightly lower dispersion and price permitted them to become leaders in primary producers of aluminum and other nonferrous alloys. Baird, with better dispersion to permit measuring C1930, S1807, P1782 Å, dominated the “Big Steel” companies. Jarrell-Ash, with wide wavelength coverage and good dispersion in evacuated spectrometers, was preferred by specialty steel companies such as Inland and Cartech. All three companies competed in the fabricator market—auto, truck, airplane, railroad, and other large manufacturers—and also for small companies producing furnaces, clocks and watches, and so on, to confirm the correct composition of metals before starting expensive machining processes. For many years the corporate slogan was “The Science Company That Aids Industry”, which was especially fitting in light of Jarrell-Ash’s line of research-grade monochromators. In the mid-1950s, Brech explained, “Jarrell foresaw the need for marked improvement in monochromators to permit studies of line shapes and widths, as well as energy levels in emission and absorption spectra. Jarrell, however, was unable to inject ambition and speed into the Hilger development programs and therefore took steps himself to develop improved monochromators. Three forms of Ebert scanning monochromators were designed in quick succession, namely the 0.5-meter, 1.0-meter, and 1.83-meter. The last of them was designed especially as a high-resolution instrument and indeed represented the first commercially available … to provide a guaranteed resolution of 400,000,” as great as gratings would then allow. As gratings improved, Brech stated, “resolution markedly exceeding 500,000 became practical.” The original line was produced in the late 1960s.



Like many other American companies, Jarrell-Ash was affected by the “space race” that began with the former Soviet Union’s unexpected launch of Sputnik I in 1957. As Brech recounted, “The studies of rocket engine exhausts, reentry physics, and high temperature plasmas, led to the growth in the use of spectrographs and spectrometers for the study of high temperature conditions. Jarrell’s reaction was to set [for] himself and his staff the tasks of defining how our existing spectrographs and spectrometers could be used for such applications, and to impart meaningful knowledge on using spectrometers for such purposes to Jarrell-Ash salesmen.” Several important scientific meetings and conferences were organized around those and similar topics, with the company and Jarrell himself taking leadership roles. New Places and Products By the end of the 1950s, Carroll Ash had retired and Jarrell-Ash’s original business in Boston was assumed by Dick Ashley, who continued to sell and service various types of microscopes and projectors at the Newbury Street address. Ties with Hilger were severed in 1959, coincidentally the year that long-since-retired Frank Twyman died. Although JarrellAsh was no longer involved with its original supplier from overseas, the company remained keenly interested in international business. Jarrell Ash began realizing soon after World War II that the potential market for its spectrographs was worldwide. “Unsolicited inquiries began to be received from Europe, South Africa, South America, and Asia,” Jarrell recalled. Although he responded to most of these by mail, Jarrell traveled widely making scientific and sales presentations in places then seldom visited by Americans, including the former Soviet Union and mainland China. Jarrell-Ash later established a small, wholly owned manufacturing operation in Le Locle, Switzerland, for the European markets. The company took a different approach to address the Asian market. “With Kinsho-Mataichi as a partner, we were the third U.S. company after the war to form a joint venture operation in Japan,” according to Jarrell. Nippon Jarrell-Ash Co. Ltd. in Kyoto was 33% owned by its American partner, 33% by Kinsho, and 33% by NJA. Its primary business was to redesign and manufacture spectrographs specifically for the Asian markets. Through much of the rest of the world, Jarrell-Ash established local sales representatives or distributors. During the late 1950s and early 1960s Jarrell-Ash began to diversify its product line, introducing gas chromatography, atomic absorption, and Raman instruments. However, this diversification eventually caused financial strain, leading to cutbacks. In 1968 Jarrell-Ash merged with Fisher Scientific Company. In 1970 it introduced an industry first, the Digital Equipment Corporation PDP-8M optical emission spectrometer controlled by a computer with a microsecond time-gating system. This improved spark control allowed better detection of volatile elements, which previously tended to become obscured by the more refractory elements. In 1975 Jarrell-Ash introduced its first inductively coupled plasma emission spectrometer; it eventually became a significant force and frequent innovator in the world market for plasma instruments. Further reorganizations occurred. In 1981 Fisher Scien-

tific Company was acquired by Allied Corporation (later Allied-Signal Corporation). Allied also acquired Instrumentation Laboratories, a maker of spectrometers and medical instruments. The operations were merged to become Allied Analytical Systems. Finally, Allied sold its spectrometry business to Thermo Electron Corporation, a small company manufacturing instruments for environmental monitoring, primarily of air pollutants and nuclear radiation. The business was renamed Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation. Further acquisitions followed and by 1996 the company, now named Thermo Instrument Systems Incorporated, posted annual sales exceeding one billion dollars and ranked as the world’s leading manufacturer of environmental monitoring and other analytical instruments. Richard Jarrell “retired” in 1983 but remained active as a part-time consultant for the company whose fortunes he shared for so long. Notes 1. The company, now a part of Thermo Instrument’s Thermo Optek subsidiary, later was a division of Hilger & Watts Ltd. and had other owners between the 1960s and 1990. 2. Twyman designed Hilger’s Model D-83 infrared spectroscope, the first such device commercially available and one commonly used into the 1940s, when modern electro-optic infrared instruments first appeared from Perkin-Elmer, Beckman, and Baird. Twyman also had an interest in X-ray techniques and made instruments for crystallography in the 1920s. 3. Wood, his ruling engine, and the diffraction gratings he produced have been described in accounts of optical science and analytical chemistry, including A History of Analytical Chemistry , Herbert A. Laitinen and Galen W. Ewing, editors, Division of Analytical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society, 1977. 4. It and other gratings Jarrell-Ash received through Johns Hopkins during World War II were ruled to 15,000 grooves per inch. 5. An example of this spectrograph is preserved and on display in the lobby reception area of the Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation headquarters, 27 Forge Parkway, Franklin, MA 02038. 6. Oscar Jarrell also was exempted from military service. After college he explored for metals in South America, then returned to the United States and ranged the West for uranium deposits under the guise of prospecting for copper. Porter Jarrell served in the campaigns in North Africa and Italy. 7. “Initially Jarrell-Ash sold source units—DC arcs and highvoltage sparks—manufactured by Howard Bedell and John Heim at National Spectrographic Laboratories in Cleveland, Ohio,” Jarrell wrote in 1996. “When NSL dropped out of that market JarrellAsh started to make its own source units. Also, originally JarrellAsh sold Hilger microphotometers, but these were not competitive in the United States with the ARL projection comparator microphotometer, which made it simple to identify the appropriate line of an element of interest and measure transmission. Jarrell-Ash developed a sturdier comparable comparator microphotometer for two 4′′ × 10′′ plates that was only slightly higher priced.” Again it was the largest and most expensive comparator microphotometer, but the most versatile. 8. The reference to “engines” accounts for the original grating ruling engine, designed for inch-based ruling, and a second engine also built in the 1950s for ruling in grooves per millimeter.


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Sources Krupa, R. J.; Pereira, E. R. Optical Grating Manufacturing, Ruling the TJA/Baird Echelle Grating; Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation: 27 Forge Parkway, Franklin, MA 02038, 1997. Information Please Almanac; Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 1993.

Jarrell, R. F. Jarrell Ash Leadership Spectrographs and Spectrometers for Research Analytical Control; Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation Application Note Q32, undated. Capital Changes Reports, Commerce Clearing House (via Kirstein Branch of Boston Public Library by telephone).

A History of Analytical Chemistry; Laitinen, H. A.; Ewing, G. W., Eds.; The Division of Analytical Chemistry of the American Chemical Society: Washington, DC, 1977.

Moody’s Industrial Manual; 1961, 1966 (p 2023) and 1971 (pp 2269–2270).

Chemical, Biological and Industrial Applications of Infrared Spectroscopy; Durig, J. R., Ed.; Wiley: New York, 1985.

Program for “The Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy,” Feb. 15–17, 1950, Pittsburgh, PA.

Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the Royal Society, 1959, Vol. 5; The Royal Society, Burlington House: Piccadilly, London, W. 1.

Rhodes, R. The Making of the Atomic Bomb, Touchstone edition; Simon & Schuster: New York, 1988.

Unpublished paper by R. F. Jarrell, August–September 1996.

Grollier’s Multimedia Encyclopedia (undated, via CompuServe).

Brech, F. Written nomination of Richard F. Jarrell for the Maurice F. Hasler Award (administered by the Pittsburgh Conference on Analytical Chemistry and Applied Spectroscopy); undated; award presented in March 1983.

Angelotti, W. J. The History of Optical Emission Techniques for the Industrial User; In The History and Preservation of Chemical Instrumentation; Stock, J. T.; Orna, M. V., Eds.; D. Reidel: Boston, 1986.

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Applied Spectroscopy 1984, 38(1), 93; “Society News” section.


A History of Thermo Jarrell Ash Corporation and Spectroscopist

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