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REPORT managed by John Atwood, who intro duced new manufacturing methods to Perkin Elmer by replacing costly m a c h i n i n g procedures w i t h toolformed sheet metal parts, a change that reduced the cost for some parts by an order of magnitude. The Model 21 and its succeeding models were manufactured for an other 10 years. The Model 137, how ever, was the genesis of an entire family of IR instruments t h a t still appear in the Perkin Elmer catalog. Two additional anecdotes from my reminiscences will be of interest in light of latter-day developments. As a Perkin Elmer salesman, I recall a sales visit I made to Karl Norris at the U.S. Department of Agriculture laboratory in Beltsville, MD. Norris said to me, "I'd love to have a Model 21 because I think my work on grain analysis would be better carried out in the mid-IR region. But my budget won't allow it, so I m u s t use the near-IR region, which is available in my Cary UV spectrophotometer." If Norris could have afforded a Model 21, the great potential of analyses u s i n g t h e n e a r - I R region m i g h t never have been discovered! The second a n e c d o t e c o n c e r n s Howard Cary. There was a mutual respect between Perkin Elmer and Cary's company, Applied Physics Laboratories. Richard Perkin h a d opened merger talks with Cary, and Cary seemed quite receptive (proba bly, as I was to learn later, because a rapidly growing company cannot generate sufficient cash to sustain its growth.) Perkin asked me to make myself available to Cary to answer his questions about Perkin Elmer, and I made several trips to the west coast to visit him. The negotiations were all for naught, however, be cause of a r a t h e r u n d e r s t a n d a b l e problem: Neither Howard Cary nor Van Williams could see himself re porting to the other.
Van Zandt Williams, with his abiding faith in the future of IR spectroscopy, helped guide Perkin Elmer to its dominant position in the field. the UV wavelength region," he said. He t h e n s p r e a d h i s h a n d s wide apart, saying, "and this is the IR re gion. It is much broader and contains much more useful information." Now that we think in terms of frequency rather than wavelength, Williams' il lustration would have to be some what different. Williams was amazed at the rapid ity of developments in commercial IR instrumentation during the 1950s. He often remarked that someday a sample could be placed in a spec trometer, and the instrument would print out the structural diagram of the molecule and the name of the compound. With the wonderful search programs now available and our increasing knowledge of the rela tionship between molecular structure and absorption frequencies, it would seem t h a t his prediction has j u s t about come to pass.
Van Williams' vision realized
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The First and Finest in Fusion.
Those were the glory days of disper sive IR spectroscopy. My fondest rec ollections of the early instrument pi oneers are of Van Zandt Williams, for whom I worked for 12 years and who remained a close friend after we both left Perkin Elmer (see photo above). Williams was totally committed to the advancement of IR spectroscopy to the exclusion of other spectral re gions. At a stockholders' meeting, when someone asked him why Per kin Elmer had not brought out a UV spectrophotometer, he held up his hand with his thumb and forefinger spaced about an inch apart. "This is
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838 A · ANALYTICAL CHEMISTRY, VOL. 64, NO. 17, SEPTEMBER 1, 1992
Paul A. Wilks, Jr., president of General Analysis Corporation, received his B.S. degree in engineering from Harvard Col lege. He joined Perkin Elmer in 1944 and continued there until 1957. He formed the Connecticut Instrument Corporation with Charles W. Warren in 1958. In 1962 he founded Wilks Scientific Corporation, which became part of the Foxboro Com pany in 1977. At General Analysis Corpo ration, which he founded in 1979, Wilks has developed IR process analyzers and the Macro Lightpipe gas cell.
