Burleigh Instruments was a successful and dynamic company for more than 30 years and employed 160+ people at its peak. It had worldwide distribution and was well known in several different markets: Fabry Perot interferometry, optics and optical research, high precision/high resolution positioning, color center laser development, life science, scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopy and telecommunications. In 2000, the company was sold for $275M1. Yet, a search of the Internet yields remarkably little information. There is no Wikipedia page2. It’s as if the company was swallowed by a black hole and only a few ripples remain in the fabric of time. This brief write-up is an attempt to preserve a bit of company history, while firsthand accounts are still available. Few photos exist from the early days in East Rochester so I've used a few more recent photos to at least give a flavor of the early location.
As one of the earliest employees, I've written a disproportionate amount about our tenure at the East Rochester Facility, even though Burleigh was only there for a few years. I believe the soul of the company was forged in East Rochester, as it was there that the owners determined just what kind of company they wanted to have and what business practices would best achieve their goals. The unusual facility and close social interaction encouraged creative problem solving with minimal politics.
Burleigh Instruments was conceived in August of 1972 by Bill May, Bob Klimasewski and Scott Arrington. A fourth fellow, Robert Buddington, who worked at Corning, was also involved. Bill, Scott and Robert were in the same fraternity at Cornell. While Bill and Bob had quit their jobs and were devoting full time to Burleigh, Scott and Robert provided extra labor as needed. In January of 1972 they asked Robert to come on board, but he got cold feet and declined. He sold his equity back to the company. From early on the remaining three were known as “The Burleigh Boys.” In March of 1973 the company moved to the second and third floors of a historic office building in East Rochester, NY. This was the office of the Merchant Despatch Transportation Company (MDT), built in 1897. The complex was known as "the car shops", and I'll use that term interchangeably with East Rochester.
Though people would call and insist on talking to “Mr. Burleigh,” there was no such person. The company was actually named after a street, Burleigh Drive, in Ithaca NY where Bill May had lived. Growth was rapid and the company soon outgrew the car shops office building. A new facility was built in Fishers, NY, Burleigh Park, and we moved there in 19773. The company introduced many new products and had 160+ employees at its peak. The company was ultimately purchased by EXFO in 2000, after which some operations were moved to their facilities in Canada, and the rest shut down.
I had been working for a small division of Ilex Optical Co., called Desman Electronics. No record of them remains, but they were just down the road from Nick Tahou's restaurant in Rochester. They made control units for the Ilex electronic shutters. They also did contract assembly of custom test systems for Xerox and others. This was where I developed my prototyping skills and began to learn machining. Another contract was building electronics for Burleigh Instruments, who didn’t yet have that capability.
If my memory is correct, the engineer on the project was Howard Schumacher, a very competent and personable man who took me under his wing and taught me digital logic. We built high voltage ramp generators, and something called an Inchworm Controller. Another fellow in the group, Chuck Madsen, had a history of quickly seizing opportunities. I was reasonably sure, if I stayed close to his heels, whatever interesting thing he was doing, I’d be doing next. Sure enough, he moved on. I soon got a call wanting to know if I’d be interested in working for this new company, Burleigh Instruments Inc. Things weren’t looking good at Desman, who had just had a layoff, so I jumped ship and headed for East Rochester.
At the time, my wife and I lived in Henrietta, not far from RIT, where we had met. I’m not sure if we had a car then, nor did I have a driver’s license. I was able to bicycle to the company accountant's house and she’d drive me in. In nice weather I sometimes bicycled all the way. It was 11.2 miles but I was young and could do it in well under an hour. Because the first floor with the main entrance was occupied by another company, we used a small side entrance. Photos show an old entrance on the side and another in front, both created from what were originally windows. I don't remember which one we used. This entrance led directly into the machine shop, not much larger than a couple closets. Bill Vleuten was the machinist. He was originally a tool and die maker. Like most machinists he was quite independent and didn’t suffer fools gladly. The shop had very little equipment. I remember a Tree milling machine with odd little collets, and a small Hardinge 2nd operation lathe, for which Bill had adapted a cross-slide. With my lack of machining experience at the time, I was extremely impressed that he got everything lined up perfectly. I took almost no photos while in East Rochester, but did take the portrait of him that's in the gallery.
From the shop, you went up to the second floor. This was a room the entire length of the building, divided into three sections. A bit left of center was Lynn Ackerman's desk. She handled orders, backlog and day to day operating tasks. She also understood the mysteries of international shipments, which were much more complicated back then. Remember, this was before computers, email and Internet. Everything that happened was written by hand or typed, often in triplicate or more. International communications were by Telex machine. To the left was a walled off section where Bill, Bob and Scott had their shared office, including Bob's treasured antique roll-top desk. The room had a fireplace and a safe. To the right of Lynn was Joyce Papke’s desk. She handled finances, accounting and was my early transportation. To the farther right was the drafting and production area. A room off the production area was used for mirror mounting and optical testing. It contained lab benches with large steel slabs on top for stability and to attach the various magnetic lens holders. At least one slab was supported by partially inflated inner tubes for vibration isolation. There was also a bench where all the mirror mounting was done. There was a big welded steel frame in the production area that held dozens of wooden trays. These were used to keep track of production builds and individual orders. The shipping backlog was typed by hand and held in a clipboard on the wall of the production area next to the lab door. The list was sometimes several feet long and was very tedious for Lynn to re-type, so it was updated by hand as we made shipments or received orders.
I don’t remember all the players at the time, but Richard A. Bizzigotti, who worked with Inchworms, left about the time I arrived. Chuck Madsen, from Desman, was production manager. There were one or two others. I think I was employee #7.
An interesting feature of the production area was “the safe.” It had supposedly been used by the railroad for payroll or records and had a stout steel door with a combination lock. We used it as a stock room for parts. It’s the only safe I’ve ever seen with a large picture window to the outside. A simple extension ladder would have been sufficient to stage a break-in, seeing as it was only the second floor. The building had at least three of these safes, something I didn’t remember until a recent visit. I was told there's a larger one in the basement, but we never had access to that area.
The cleaning solvent of choice was Freon TE-35, a fluorinated hydrocarbon. This was wonderful stuff, relatively non-toxic, with a pleasant odor. It removed all traces of grease and oils and was safe for paint and plastics. It evaporated almost instantly. We bought it in 5-gallon cans and filled plastic squeeze bottles for use at the assembly benches. In warm weather the production area was plagued with wasps. For some reason TE-35 was deadly to wasps. We spent many happy times chasing them around the area with streams of TE-35. They’d drop like a stone when hit, but in hindsight this is probably where a good chunk of the ozone layer went.
Various things in the optics lab had to be level and stable. This was made easy with a heavy steel plate, maybe a foot wide, a foot and half long and an inch thick. It had three adjustable feet for leveling. Did I mention that it was heavy? Needing it out of the way briefly, I set it on the floor, a move I'd regret almost instantly.
The ZZ Top song Sharp Dressed Man may have been written for Scott Arrington. He came in that fateful day proudly wearing some brand new patent leather shoes. For those who don't know, patent leather uses a special process to create a flawless mirror finish. The modern version is synthetic but it was originally done with real leather. Scott's shoes were probably real and probably expensive.
Scott always moved briskly and was at full speed when he came into the lab that day. He connected with the big steel plate I had put on the floor, scraping his brand new shoe across one of the sharp corners. It left a big gouge in the leather, right in front. A few words were said, but I think he was too upset to speak, much less yell at me. I didn't see him for the rest of the day.
This is only funny looking back and if it isn't happening to you. Bill May had a bit of a temper. I was working in the shop when he came down and chewed me out for something. No idea what, but I thought it was highly unfair at the time. As he was leaving the room, I rolled a big chunk of Invar (heavy piece of metal) across the floor like a bowling ball. Problem was, I misjudged the timing. It hit the wall next to the door with a big thud before he was actually out the door. He turned, but didn't say anything. I was pretty sure this was game over for my tenure at Burleigh. By some miracle, he didn't fire me. No idea why and I wouldn't have blamed him for a second if he did. Burleigh provided every opportunity over my career and in hindsight my life would have been far different, and probably poorer, had that day ended differently. It was a valuable life lesson I've never forgotten.
Why mention food? It was the close social interaction that helped to make the company so successful. There wasn't a huge age difference between us and it was perfectly natural that we all go out together. When people are close socially, it's difficult to have fights and develop strong dislikes.
Periodically, Bill, Bob and Scott would take us down the road to the Northside Inn for lunch. It was a great Italian restaurant, in business for nearly 100 years. Lunch would typically last for half of the afternoon.
When we weren’t too busy some of us would make the drive to Fairport for lunch at The Green Tavern (The GT). They had incredible cheeseburgers and ham sandwiches with an impossibly tall stack of finely shaved ham. With a bit of mustard, they were heaven.
The Freight House was a bar on the corner of Despatch Drive and North Washington Street. It was previously a railway station. Much beer and wine was consumed there on Friday nights after work. There was a large tunnel under the railroad tracks so workers could get to the car shops from East Rochester. We often walked through the tunnel for lunch at the many places on Main Street. This area was known as “The Barbary Coast,” being a bit seedy and having a remarkable collection of bars. The tunnel was soon blocked off and eventually filled in, possibly being considered a crime hazard or flood risk. All that remains is a historical marker.
One of the advantages of having three owners is there's never a tie. Bill, Bob and Scott each had unique talents and viewpoints but when they came out of a heated session in their shared office, the vision and orders were focused and singular. If anything contributed to the success of the company, it was their ability to choose the best direction out of conflicting and sometimes limited information, and then make that direction crystal clear to the rest of the company. They were aggressive in expectations. They also ran the company in an unusually liberal and open manner and made sure the employees knew our financial condition and what needed to happen to be successful. They also made clear what would happen if confidential information was shared, or goals weren’t met.
Their personalities were quite different. Bill May had boundless energy and enthusiasm. He wanted action and was usually thinking several steps ahead of everybody else. Though he had an Electrical Engineering degree from Cornell, he was more comfortable with the mechanical side. Later on, as they disengaged from day to day operations, I really missed Bills ability to distill confusion down to order and present a clear game plan. Bob Klimasewski was more laid back, but there was no less passion there. He took a masters degree in optics from the University of Rochester, essential knowledge considering the business we were in. Scott Arrington was more of a generalist, also the freewheeling one, but practical. He taught me how to work with multi-thousand dollar optics and not damage them, at least most of the time.
What they had in abundance was charisma. If they asked us to storm the gates of Hell, we'd have given the Devil a run for his money.
Robert Klimasewski, Distinguished Alumni
Whether it was a conscious motivational technique, or just how they perceived things, we were always given an enemy. Everything the competition did was viewed as an urgent threat or even a carefully planned attack aimed directly at us. This was the most exciting time of my career. Every morning I’d wake up just itching to get to Burleigh. All the projects were exciting and new, and we had to get them done right now, before a competitor beat us to the punch!
"Here's a true story. Bill and I thought we needed start up capital of $250,000. Bill's mother worked for Ruth Farkis who was Nixon's ambassador to Luxembourg. Ruth's husband was George who owned Alexander Department stores around the Northeast. A wealthy man. We went to New York City to do the ask. We pitched him at lunch. After lunch at the Harvard Club and walking back to his office he said (and this is a quote I still remember) 'boys, sometimes the best deal you make is the deal you don't make. I'm not investing in Burleigh.' To this day I believe he knew we'd be a success and he wanted us to keep all the ownership." (text msg, November 19, 2022)
When I started at Burleigh they already had a solid and growing optical product line. Other than the large interferometer, which was designed at Berkeley, all the products were designed by Bill May. Amazingly, almost every product continued in production for the life of the company, a tribute to how good Bill May's designs were.
Burleigh started out in the laser optical industry, concentrating on lab bench components like mirror mounts and various interferometers. The Star Gimbal Mount was a 2” mount available in aluminum and stainless steel. The parts were investment castings with tension applied by four small torsion springs. Assembling the thing was awful until you developed the knack of rotating the springs around in their mounting holes and installing the pivot screw. We made hundreds, if not thousands, of them. There was also a 6” cast iron version that was heavier and less popular. Assembling Star Gimbals was the first training for anyone starting out.
Interferometers were not only a significant products in and of themselves, but many future products were interferometer systems or would contain interferometers. For the uninitiated, what are interferometers?
Interferometers are nothing more than very rigid and stable structures that hold two mirrors perfectly parallel. Often, one of the mirrors can be scanned in and out a few microns, changing the spacing. They’re also called etalons. We made a small and medium version called the “TL-15” and “TL-38,” the numbers referring to the mirror diameter in millimeters. Scanning was accomplished with three strips of piezoelectric ceramic. Our claim to fame was the ability to add and subtract area from the electrodes, matching the three strips so they would move in unison. This allowed the mirrors to remain perfectly parallel as they scanned, so performance was the same across the scan. It was a trial-and-error process requiring practice and just the right knack. Piezoelectric ceramics contain a high percentage of lead and we probably breathed more lead dust while grinding on them than would be considered safe. An interesting feature of the TL etalons was that they were made with materials having different thermal expansions. The dimensions were carefully chosen so that expansion due to temperature changes canceled out and wouldn't affect the mirror spacing. That was called a re-entrant design.
There were simpler versions of the etalons made out of aluminum and without the spacers and adjustment screws. They had a simple mirror cup on the front and were known as PZATs, piezoelectric aligner-translators. They were good sellers for many years.
We made large "Fabry-Perot" style interferometers out of Super Invar, a low expansion alloy. As mentioned, they were designed at Berkeley by Dr. Linn Molleneur, the west coast connection explaining why they were initially machined by a fellow in Washington state by the name of Knittel, rather than done locally. They arrived as a kit of parts. After Berkeley, Dr. Molleneur went to Bell Labs, and continued to be a friend of, and great supporter of, Burleigh Instruments.
Below is a first generation Fabry-Perot, identified by the complex differential adjustment screws for the adjustable mirror. Coarse adjustment was using the central screws with knobs. These screws could be locked and unlocked from the torque arms with small bearings on the end. Once locked, fine adjustment was had with the flat knobs next to the end plate. These knobs turned a double screw with a very slightly different thread pitch between the inside and the outside. The difference between the two pitches was the effective pitch, allowing a very fine adjustment without having to cut a very fine thread, albeit with a fair degree of cost and complexity. Photo courtesy of Bob Arkin.
One of the first Fabry-Perot datasheets, courtesy of Bob Arkin
At some point Bill May decided our flagship interferometer, the Super Invar RC-10, and its aluminum plate cousin, the RC-40, needed a makeover to reduce costs and increase sales. I remember him sitting down at the big drafting board and, in under a week, redesigning the entire instrument. I contributed the idea of using sapphire V-blocks in place of the easily brinelled piano wires used for bearings. They were far from indestructible but provided better performance and ease of assembly. Linn Molleneur and his machinist's royalties were reduced but they were OK with that, having already made quite a bit of money on the design. The new design survived as the RC-110, with few changes until the close of the company. RC-140 is the aluminum plate version and RC-150 is the aluminum short travel version. They still show up frequently on eBay. There is a fellow by the name of Bob Arkin that refurbishes Burleigh interferometers and optical equipment.
A side note on the large interferometers. The very first ones were very similar to the units produced by Tropel and I believe the mirror mount dimensions were the same so they were interchangeable. This may have had something to do with the fact that Bob Klimasewski had previously worked for Tropel. The later units had a simple fine pitched screw with large black knobs. Being made of Super Invar, they had a tendency to seize unless well lubricated. Unfortunately, one of the greases used had a tendency to harden like epoxy over time and an old one can be almost impossible to free up. I remember we hand lapped the threads with a red substance called "Putz Pomade" that was used to deglaze printing press rollers. I believe this technique was introduced by Scott Arrington. Because the threads were so fine it took many turns to get from one end to the other. It was thus a tedious and tiring process, but made the operation smoother.
Bob Arkin's site (has some broken links)
The extremely flat matched mirror sets were purchased from IC Optical Systems (ICOS) in the UK, the best in the business and still in business today. Mirrors from 25.4 mm to 70 mm could be mounted. Interferometers must be stable with time and temperature and ours were the best. Just outside the building were several railroad tracks and every day trains would pass, shaking the building. Our goal was to build interferometers that remained perfectly aligned as the temperature changed and the trains passed by. If they worked in our environment, customer labs would be no problem. I developed a temperature-controlled chamber for the large interferometers that held the temperature within a few thousandths of a degree. This was later redesigned by David Braverman for lower cost and higher efficiency.
I'm going to reveal the secret color code for wiring almost all Burleigh products. We bought thousands of feet of multi-conductor cable and the same cable was used on almost everything. The wire colors were red, orange, black, white, blue and green. There was also a ground wire and sometimes a shield. For all the devices with three piezoelectric elements, element #1 was red and orange, element #2 was black and white and element #3 was blue and green. Polarity? The darker color was always positive, so red, black and blue were positive. Though there was a ground wire, many early products had no ground connection. Later on we developed crimped sleeves to remedy that. At the other end of the cable was a small 9-pin plastic connector made by Viking, called a "Thorkom." It was somewhat obscure and hard to assemble, but was one of few small connectors rated for the high voltage we used.
Additional popular products were "pushers", which were technically "unpushers". They were thin-walled piezoelectric tubes in stainless steel housing with a ceramic cap on top. When you applied voltage, the cap retracted slightly towards the housing. This is opposite of what you might expect from something called a "pusher" but every bit as useful.
We made "erector sets" that consisted of various flat plates connected by steel or Invar rods. These could be used to construct custom optical systems.
We built an actuator called the Inchworm Motor. It was essentially a piezoelectric micrometer head with a 1" travel and 0.1 nanometer resolution. The design came from Bell Labs and was quite clever. The problem with piezoelectric ceramics, and the devices built with them, is they don't move very far. Sometimes the motion can be levered up, but we're still talking less than a millimeter and there's a severe penalty in push force and stiffness. The Inchworm motor took a different approach, locking and unlocking two piezoelectric rings sliding on an alumina (ceramic) shaft. The spacing between the two rings was controlled by a third piezoelectric tube. By alternating which clamp was clamped, and shortening or lengthening the spacer tube, the alumina shaft could be "inched" along for whatever distance was needed. It required parts lapped to extremely precise tolerances and, as far as I know, no other company has ever been able to commercialize the design. I designed the first high voltage MOSFET amplifiers that allowed the Inchworms to operate at high speeds. Until then it had been a very slow moving device. High voltage MOSFETs had just been introduced, so not much was known about using them, at least by me. I blew up more than a few learning their secrets.
Having a third party build our electronics (Desman Electronics) didn’t last long. We set up electronics manufacturing on the third floor of the car shop. It consisted of a few benches and a couple people. Products were built by Loretta Henry, her sister Wanda Bragg and an engineer. I can’t remember who came first, but eventually the job was held by David Braverman. There was no elevator and everything had to be hauled up and down a staircase. The third floor of the building had interesting windows you can see in some of the photos. They overlooked much of East Rochester and one could get a great view of storms and fronts as they approached. The ceiling was sloped so you had to watch your head.
Bell Laboratories was a rich source of technology. Our Inchworm motor, an ultra-precise long-travel actuator, was originally developed there. We decided to get into the infrared laser business and hired Dr. Ken German, who was a world authority on pumped crystal lasers at Bell Labs. A very hands-on PhD, he went to work designing not only the laser, but all the support equipment, including the crystal ovens needed to process the crystals. He became Chief Scientist at Burleigh. We hired Dr. William S. Gornall in 1977, who got us into the wavelength measuring business. He went on to become VP of technology at Burleigh.
The company was never shy about buying or licensing technology from universities or other sources. Our big Fabry-Perot stabilization system, the DAS-1, was developed by Dr. Boris Stoicheff and Dr. George Stegman at the University of Toronto. It was built by Tracor-Northern. Seeing that product, Dan Bechtel, a PhD student at Colorado State, helped us with the smaller DAS-10 system. Even if not buying a technology, we always worked closely with researchers to perfect our products. Later on the company would get into the life sciences market in a bigger way, but even in the car shops we were working with someone on a cancer treatment that involved fiber optics. They would be inserted into tumors that had been sensitized with hematoporphyrin, producing compounds that would kill them off.
To this day we joke about “Burleigh University,” but the fact is you couldn’t get a broader education in technology. Everybody needed to do everything and if you didn’t know how, somebody would teach you. Interferometers, optics, mechanics, instrument design, high vacuum systems, electronics, machining, cost control, quality, good business practices and how to fix the copier. We all learned customer relations and sales; it wasn’t unheard of to talk to a researcher and discover he/she was a Nobel prize winner.
We got valuable lessons in business. The Burleigh Boys were never greedy, but never left money on the table. Product discounts were verboten because they come entirely out of profits. We actually gave away service parts because we realized it was cheaper to toss them in an envelope than to process an order for them. We learned what kind of mark-up was really needed on custom orders, having lost our shirts on too many. They made it crystal clear that the company would never operate in the red and they were thinking in terms of weeks, not months, before drastic action would be taken. Painful, but it's way easier to avoid getting into a hole, than to climb out.
We quickly outgrew the car shop, and a new building was designed. Surprising attention was paid to energy efficiency and ergonomics. The plan was to attract other companies to build or lease on the site and a promotional brochure was made. This monochrome scan lacks the same character as the textured yellowish original but is somewhat clearer. For whatever reason, there were no takers and only the original building has been built, though it’s been substantially expanded. There was room for a good sized machine shop, with a garage for bringing equipment in and out. The shipping department was on one edge of the shop, near the garage door for ease of access. The optical/laser lab was on a cement slab that was poured separately from the rest of the building to reduce vibrations. The building had an elevator and a skylight that was prone to leaking. The building was finished in an attractive cedar, including the inside central area. I remember it was easy to get small splinters under your fingernails going up and down the stairs, which became infected no matter how quickly you got them out. Though I pick on the minor flaws, the facility was really 1st rate and a joy to work at.
That takes us to 1977/8, which for most people who never worked at the car shops, is where the story really begins.
Burleigh Park was built for growth and when we first moved in it seemed cavernous. Here's a young Dr. Gornall hard at work in the engineering department shortly after we moved in. No shortage of space here! You'll notice some hanging plants at the windows. Bill May's wife, Carol, thought we needed plants to make the space friendlier and not only chose the plants, but came into water them on a regular basis.
Burleigh Park had three floors. The machine shop, mechanical production and laser lab were on the ground floor. Interferometers and electronics were built on the second floor, which also held the engineering department, sales department and cafeteria. Owner's offices and administration was on the third floor. Over time space was reallocated for various purposes, but that was the general layout.
At some point there was a serious falling out with Scott Arrington and he left the company around 1984. Resulting litigation took five years, after which Bill and Bob were the sole owners.
Growth was rapid and more or less continuous. Enough time has passed that creating an accurate timeline for new product introductions and all the other events that occurred over the years would be iffy at best. Instead, I'll try to highlight the various departments and go into a bit more detail on some products. No doubt others will fill in some blanks as this story evolves.
In the early days the only way to reach customers was through print ads and trade shows. One could also make "cold calls" to potential customers, but it wasn't very efficient. The cost of print ads was high and Burleigh typically ran quarter column ads in magazines like Laser Focus World. Every now and then they'd run a full page ad. They typically had a large headline to grab attention and text below. By todays standards it was too much text but back then it was the only way to get the information across. The ad I remember best had a headline something like "This Magazine Sold Us Out," followed by an explanation of how recent ads had cleared our shelves of almost everything.
"Both Bill and I were responsible for advertisement in our previous jobs in a trade publication called “Laser Focus”. Since we had little money, Burleigh focused (no pun intended) on advertising our products in that magazine. And orders were good, but slow coming in since Burleigh was an unknown. We got the idea of selling their management on an ad that would benefit them and us. We proposed we’d pay for the copy and layout if they run the ad for free. They agreed. You know the headline but the key part of the ad was Bill and I signed the ad. It was key because customers from our previous employment didn’t know where we went and our employers wouldn’t say. Now customers knew where to find us. Because of trade secret laws we were prevented from directly contacting any customer from our previous employment. Worked like a charm. Phone calls flooded us. I don’t have a copy of that ad." (email, January 4, 2023)
The ad appeared just once in Laser Focus, March 1973, vol. 9, no. 3, p47. That was two years before I started at Burleigh, but I would have seen it displayed on the wall. Even Laser Focus magazine has no archive of the early issues, but it appears here courtesy of the University at Buffalo libraries:
You may notice that the ads contain pricing for various items. They seem shockingly low in 1973 dollars because those same things today would be priced about 7X higher, or more.
We'd attend several trade shows a year. These were major productions due to all the preparation work, travel and the cost of the show itself. A big one was CLEO (Conference on Lasers and Electro-Optics,) held on the West Coast and still held today. Other shows would alternate between East and West Coast every year so more people could attend.
The IBM PC was introduced in 1981. The Compaq "portable" came six months later in 1982, though "luggable" was a better description of the 28 pound behemoth. Burleigh was somewhat late to adopt computers but sales and marketing was the first to get a Compaq and start a customer database. I remember getting Jean Kelsey, who kept records in sales, started with dBaseIII programming. She took to it like a duck to water and we were able to produce reports that were previously difficult or impossible.
Sales and Marketing went through many incarnations over the years but the heyday was probably under Dr. Brian Samoriski. There were at least four full time salespeople, plus support staff. I worked in sales briefly, which was great experience, but engineering was where my strengths were.
We had offices in Germany and the UK, plus representatives in several other places, and travel was frequent. I was scheduled to make a trip in 1989 that included Germany, the UK, Sweden and Japan. I was supposed to go with Mike Cook, who was an experienced traveler, but at the last minute he couldn’t go. They sent me alone. This was my first trip to Europe. Highlights included staying on the top floor of a traditional UK pub and playing a neighborhood pub quiz game with Shaun Coles, who ran the UK office. It was great fun and they were really into that sort of thing; maybe you remember the Brain of Britain show on the BBC. I walked around the old cemetery in Uppsala Sweden where many famous scientists are buried. I remember one of the tech guys (Artur Wojt?) driving me into Germany from the airport in Amsterdam. CD players for the car were a recent innovation and we came into Germany at about 100 mph, at night, in the rain, with Pink Floyd at full volume. Volker Buerschinger, our sales guy, let me drive on the autobahn during the day and we cruised at about 210 kph (130 mph). It was remarkable that one still got passed at that speed, so lane discipline was critical. The trip was in early November, and I was at the Berlin wall just a few days before it fell, but nobody knew what was about to happen. Japan was a great experience as I rode around with the young sales guys there. We joked about many things. They apologized for Pearl Harbor. I apologized for the problems we were having with some products. Possibly for the bomb as well, but I don't remember. They took me to an oceanfront seafood shack where whale was on the menu. I passed. They suggested eel and it might have been OK, but I wasn’t feeling well so it didn’t quite hit the spot. I took the bullet train to Osaka for some sightseeing, including the famous shrine. The trains were all color coded, so it was relatively easy to avoid getting lost. I remember the country as extremely beautiful, with warm and friendly people and with the smallest hotel room you could ever imagine.
Interferometers require extreme mechanical stability and the slightest change in dimensions due temperature changes is a problem. The solution is to make them out of something that has a very low coefficient of expansion. Invar is one such metal. It was invented in 1896 and changes by about 0.0000012 units per unit per degree C. Regular steels are about ten times greater. The name comes from the word "invariable." There's a version called Invar 36FC that's quite easy to machine, the FC standing for "free cut." Most shops have little trouble with it.
Even better performance can be had with an alloy called Super Invar. Super Invar has a region around room temperature where the expansion coefficient is near zero. Perfect for Burleigh products except for two things. First, machinability is terrible. Machinists hate the stuff and most shops won't even quote parts that use it. Second, it's desirable to chrome plate the parts for appearance and protection, and getting the plating to adhere is part science and part magic. Even at its best, if the plating is damaged it has a tendency to peel off in sheets and strips. We worked extensively with Anoplate, a Syracuse plating house, to develop a workable plating "recipe" for Super Invar. In spite of all that, if you're going to make the best interferometers, Super Invar is the thing to use.
A lesser known fact about Super Invar is that to get the best thermal performance it needs a final heat treatment after machining. It needs to be heated to about 200 F for 24 hours and allowed to cool slowly. This can be done in an oven or even by putting it in a bit pot of boiling water for 24 hours, then letting the pot cool. I think we tried it once, but couldn't tell the difference and we never did it again.
The above might have been more than you wanted to know, but the important thing is that nobody wanted to machine Super Invar parts for Burleigh. Or anybody else. Ever. If we were going to have a reliable source of parts, we'd have to machine them ourselves. A well equipped machine shop was needed.
Much of the following is from a conversation with Joe Guarino on December 14, 2022. Right after the move, the shop consisted of Bill Vleuten, Joe Guarino, Jim Herpst and Dave Peterson. Bill Vleuten was in Fishers for about 6 months before starting his own shop, Despatch Machine, in a building behind the car shops office. Al Wordingham was brought in to run the Burleigh shop and overlapped with Bill for about two weeks. This was in 1978. Al was also doing motorcycle repair and machining out of his garage shop nearby and the arrangement was that he could continue to do that. At that time the players were Al Wordingham, Joe Guarino, Harold Deal and Pete Woodworth. After a couple years Al went on to form Wordingham Machine and the shop was staffed by Joe Guarino, Harold Deal and Pete Woodworth. Various people came and went but staff increased as demand increased. The only parts that were jobbed out at that point were sheet metal parts. Everything else was made in-house.
The shop initially had manual equipment, the Tree mill, a couple lathes and a Harig 612 surface grinder. There was also a big ancient lathe, maybe a Warner & Swasey #3 or similar, nicknamed "Bertha". It had a large spindle bore and was used for the heavy work. The shop was eventually equipped with CNC mills and lathes. Al bought a Bridgeport BOSS4 mill. After that came a big CNC lathe. It used a heavy granite base with large rods as the "ways". There was a loud crash as it fell off the back of the truck onto the pavement during delivery! Trashed. I think we were more successful on the 2nd machine. In 1991 they bought a Hardinge CNC lathe. There was also had a very precise Levin/Tsugami internal/external grinder, a honing machine and a kiln, so we could process the piezoelectric tubes used in Inchworm Motors.
There was a large stock of Invar and Super Invar rods and plates, thousands of pounds at times, plus aluminum, brass and plastics. A very old reciprocating hack saw cranked away cutting up the stock. They don't make them like that anymore and after watching and listening to it, you'd understand why. Still, for Super Invar it was probably the perfect tool.
As previously mentioned, Bill May did the early product designs. Later, the engineering department, Ken German and Bill Gornall, drove the designs, but when it came to implementation of those designs, Tom Bracken stood out. He had a better understanding than most of what the shop capabilities were, combined with a grasp of complex mechanisms. He never got comfortable with CAD systems, but when his designs came off the sometimes ash covered drawing board, they were producible and worked.
Many others were involved in detailed product design including Steve Walker, who was also the town justice in nearby Rushville. Bob Taylor did optical designs. Lou Rapp did a beautiful job with the Life Sciences Patch Clamp system. It was an elegant thing, but expensive to machine. I was assigned to cost cutting, and that was a major factor in Lou leaving the company, something I feel bad about to this day.
Software was a major part of many product designs and Tom Wall was one of the best coders. He had the ability to look up from the depths of the code, answer a complicated question on a completely different topic, and pick up again as if nothing had happened. Keith Worek also did coding.
WWII bomber tailgunners were said to have an average lifespan of about five missions. Some of our production managers lasted almost as long. Chuck Madsen was the production manager when I started at Burleigh. He soon left and I took over the job. We were still in East Rochester. I hold the unbeaten record as having the shortest tenure in the job ever. I think it took only a couple days to reach the mutual conclusion that my skills were better utilized elsewhere. Paul Nealon took the job and continued with it after we moved to Fishers. I don't remember how long he did it, but after that we seemed to go through production managers on a yearly basis, sometimes less. Eventually we achieved stability when Cynthia Payne took over and I believe she remained in the job until the company was sold.
The F-Center laser used a cooled crystal to convert visible laser light to infrared. At the time there were no inexpensive infrared diode lasers, so if you wanted to do certain types of communications research, you needed an FCL plus all the support equipment. The FCL required a variety of different skills to build. The vacuum lines and valves underneath were soldered together with silver solder. The liquid nitrogen dewar used special epoxy and unusual techniques so it wouldn't fail over a wide temperature range. The optical system had movable parts and required extreme cleanliness. The various windows, chambers and valves sealed with O-rings, so no scratches on the surfaces were permitted. The laser could be tuned over a moderate wavelength range by a mechanical sine bar system that changed the angle of a grating. The whole thing had to be leak checked using a helium leak detector and a tank of helium gas. Our leak detector was an old Veeco unit that was prone to periodic failure, so I learned to repair it. Eventually, Bill Dickinson built a residual gas analyzer (RGA) from individual components. This was a much more sophisticated device for leak detection and replaced the old Veeco. Once you learned to build an FCL from the ground up, you could certainly call yourself an experienced instrument builder.
The finished FCL shipped in a large wooden box suspended inside another larger wooden box with springs. The specially prepared crystals had to be kept cold and arrangements had to be made so the maximum shipping time was never exceeded and that the customer had a supply of liquid nitrogen to keep the crystal cold for as long as they intended to use it. The whole thing was a major project, but they sold for upwards of $60K, so they had great effect on the shipping bonus.
A brief story while I think about what to write in this section. We bought piezoelectric ceramic parts from a Florida company called Marine Resources. We were waiting for a large batch of ceramic tubes to build Inchworm motors when we found out that Marine Resources was going out of business. They didn't have the time or people to complete our order before they closed. We offered to supply the labor to complete the parts. Bill Schutt and I were soon on a plane headed for Florida. This may have been a blessing in disguise, as they taught us things about making piezoelectrics that we never would have known otherwise. We spent hours dipping tubes in a mixture of silver powder and glass frit, carefully cleaning the ends so they wouldn't eventually short out. We found out how to apply a high voltage to give the tubes their polarity. We even fit in a trip to Disney World. With our new knowledge, we started doing the same finishing operations in Fishers, which gave us far more control over the final product. In the photo gallery you'll see a shot of the inside of a kiln door. The big kilns were used to fire the piezoelectric ceramics. Lead is a large component of these ceramics, which would tend to burn out at the high temperatures of firing. To prevent that, the parts were covered with ceramic caps, with extra lead placed inside. As you can imagine, this whole process isn't environmentally friendly, and you can see all the deposits on the kiln door from the various compounds being released. I heard that everybody who worked there had to have blood tests for lead levels every 6 months. Various people still manufacture piezoelectric ceramics but it's become a much more controlled, albeit expensive, process.
The large interferometers used a scanning module consisting of two invar rings with stacks of piezoelectric disks between them. They're the simple disks shown on the right hand side above. It required a stack of about ten or so disks to scan the needed distance. We'd build up the stacks with epoxy, alternating between disks and brass shim tabs, to make the connections. After curing in the oven, we'd measure the motion of each stack and match them in sets of three. The hope was that with matched motion, the scanning assembly would scan in a parallel fashion, keeping the mirrors perfectly aligned. Most of the time they did, with minor errors being corrected in the driving electronics. This control was called "slope trim." I think we may have had a patent on it. Interferometers for the infrared would use thinner disks made from a material with more sensitivity, since infrared wavelengths are longer and longer scans were needed. Some scanning assemblies used stacks containing both types of disk.
We continued to refine the Inchworm motor design over the years, introducing more sophisticated controllers that could be fully programmed. Special versions were made with longer and shorter travel. Some could be used in ultra-high vacuum. An Inchworm with a separate braking module was made for space applications. Jim Kaufer redesigned the motor itself to make it stronger and more producible. The Inchworm motor became the building block for various multi-axis postioning systems, including fiberoptic alignment systems for the telecom industry.
Save for the mirror mounts and erector sets, almost every product needed an electronic controller, high voltage for most and medium voltage for for life science tools. The high voltage output stages used high voltage transistors typically found in the horizontal sweep sections of televisions and in electronic ignitions. They were configured in a totem pole arrangement where the upper transistor would charge the capacitance of the piezoelectric device and the lower transistor would both discharge the piezo and turn off the upper transistor. The circuit was simple and clever. As far as I know, it was designed by Howard at Desman and looked very similar to low voltage circuits found in early logic chips. Almost every Burleigh amplifier used a similar circuit. The PZ-70 was a simple high voltage amplifier. The RC-42 combined an amplifier circuit with a ramp generator to scan the interferometers. Inchworm controllers had three amplifiers to drive each of the three piezoelectric elements of an Inchworm actuator, plus the digital circuits to create three synchronized waveforms. Over the years all manner of similar amplifiers and controllers were designed and sold, with total numbers certainly in the thousands.
In those pre-computer days, circuit boards were made by applying black crepe tape to a sheet of translucent Mylar where the copper traces needed to be. Patterns and tape invariably came from a company called Bishop Graphics. The Mylar sheet was then photographed with a room-sized process camera at a graphic arts shop to create a negative film tool. This film was sent to the circuit board manufacturer, who used it to expose a light sensitive mask on copper circuit board material. After development, etching and tinning, you'd have a circuit board. It was quite an exercise and changing a circuit board was a last resort sort of thing.
As far as I know, Burleigh never did the tedious tape work themselves, but jobbed it out. It was usually done by a fellow who would show up on a big Harley Davidson to pick up the schematics, then come back a few days later with the finished tape-up. Legend has it that the difficulty of the tape job could be determined by how much popcorn and beer the fellow consumed while doing it.
Initially, Loretta Henry and her sister Wanda Bragg built all the electronics. They also built all the interconnecting cables we sold. Various techs did the final troubleshooting and testing. I spent a fair number of hours at the test bench, as did Paul Kruly. Working at a production test bench is great training because you have to get good and you have to get fast. Because the Burleigh units had 1500 VDC power supplies you also had to get good at keeping your fingers out of the circuit. The PZ-70 was particularly fun because the internal adjustments were placed such that it was almost impossible to reach them without touching nearby high voltage components. We all got bitten at least once and it wasn't something you quickly forgot.
Burleigh entered the Life Science market in the 1980’s with Inchworm systems used for sharp glass electrode recording in animals. This segment of neuroscience (brain) research is electrophysiology. The electrical activity of the central nervous system is measured and analyzed. Essentially, this is measuring the frequency and amplitude of neurons “firing”. Inchworm motor provide a fast, precise and stable solution for moving a sharp glass needle into brain tissue with minimum cell damage for extracellular measurements. In the late 1980’s a new and Nobel-prize winning electrophysiology technique was invented call patch clamp recording. Burleigh collaborated with Dr. Fred Sachs from the University of Buffalo who was a close collaborator with the Nobel laureates. Burleigh created a piezoelectric micro manipulator to provide 3-axis sub-micrometer positioning of glass pipettes with extreme stability. Researchers around the world adopted patch clamp recording and sales grew steadily. Sales grew rapidly in the 1990’s under the leadership of David Henderson and Ed Friedrich. Product improvements, such as Gibraltar and Fast Piezo Switching, improved performance and enhanced integration with popular microscope companies. Global sales grew 300% as stronger distributors were recruited. After the EXFO transaction this product line was moved to Mississauga, Ontario for a few years and then sold Thorlabs. The patch clamp market declined after 2015 and Thorlabs discontinued the products around 2020.
Gerd Binnig and Heinrich Rohrer, two IBM researchers, invented the scanning tunneling microscope (STM) in 1981. They won a Nobel prize in 1986. Gerd Binnig, Calvin Quate and Christoph Gerber then extended the technique, inventing the atomic force microscope (AFM). There were eventually several well known players in the commercial market (Park Systems, formed in 1997, was the major competitor), but Burleigh saw an opportunity to develop a less expensive educational version of the device for use in college courses and even advanced high school labs. With knowledge of high stability devices and control electronics, a fairly high performance device was developed. Software was contracted out to a local firm, UFO Systems Inc. (User Friendly Operating systems).
A small group consisting of Carol Rabke, Kirby Jensen, Jim Guelzow, myself and several others worked under Dr. Gordon Shedd, who started in 1995. The Educational STM, Vista SPM and Horizon interference microscope systems were developed and refined. There was also a smaller SPM developed before the Vista system. The products were quite good but market acceptance was difficult. In hindsight, Burleigh was a bit arrogant thinking they could just enter the market with no credentials, and gain instant acceptance. Sales were disappointing. To my knowledge, Burleigh never came close to recouping their investment in this area. What the projects did accomplish was demonstrating the technical capabilities of Burleigh. Developing these products from scratch required a diverse assortment of talents and we had the people to do it.
We bought the Horizon interference microscope design from a group in Arizona. Bob Blair, Jim Guelzow and I traveled to Arizona to learn how to build it. A few photos from the trip are in the gallery.
The second time I worked for Burleigh it was to oversee the service department with Paul Kruly. Burleigh products were generally reliable, save for a few known trouble spots, but after so many years of business there was a steady flow of repair work. By now we were both experienced and could make quick work of it. We were a two-man empire and had a lot of freedom in how to handle things. Once a week we reviewed what had gone well and what had gone poorly. We'd make specific changes to address problems, usually just changing forms, computer reports or how the service work got done. It was incredibly effective and after some months of doing this, things mostly ran like clockwork. Well enough for Paul to handle everything, and for me to move on to other departments.
It's hard to make money on small components. If those components can be assembled into a more complex and expensive system, profits tend to go up. I had left the company before these systems were developed, but automated fiber optic alignment systems were created that used multiple Inchworms and stages, the ProAlign and Freedom systems. They might well have been the best systems on the market but this wasn't long before the infamous telecom bust and few were sold.
There were advantages in being close to Rochester, home of Kodak and Xerox. Their needs caused a large number of support companies to flourish in the area, which we could take advantage of. As an example, the Frank E. Laffan & Co. hardware store could supply just about any hardware needed, but would also come in, count your stock and replenish whatever was needed so you never ran out. TT Bearing had thousands of bearings on the shelf. We had (and still do have) many local machine shops. Al's shop, Bill Vleuten's shop and several others were used. White Wire and Metal Products, S.B. Roby, Cook Iron Store (started in 1907 and still in business) and several others provided speciality products. The major semiconductor companies, Texas Instruments, National Semiconductor and others, had local offices. The reps would visit and/or you could walk in and get data books and samples as needed. We had electronic distributors like Summit and Rochester Radio, with large inventories easily available. As Kodak and Xerox scaled back, and the Internet took over, most of those resources disappeared.
Burleigh was never as patent crazy as some companies, but did accumulate quite a few over the years, starting with improvements to the Inchworm motor by Bill May and Richard Bizzigotti. A partial list includes:
Burleigh Northwest was a joint venture to do optical coatings with a company in the Isle of man. This was in a small room off the laser lab. It was a fairly short lived venture. There was a software company, Ommnicad, that rented space, but that we had no business relationship with.
Burleigh Christmas parties were legendary. So legendary that we eventually had trouble finding places to host them, as we were sometimes blacklisted after one event. Everyone got gifts and Bill May would sometimes dress in costume to distribute them. These were different times and significant amounts of alcohol were consumed. The last day before Christmas about a half days work was accomplished before festivities commenced. The machine shop would typically have a large bottle of peppermint schnapps available and vendors would drop by with wine and other goodies.
Burleigh had a bonus system that, at times, yielded very generous sums. The formula was tweaked because some people were even making more than the owners which, as you can imagine, didn't sit well. It was also tweaked over the years to accommodate different business conditions and shipping history. When things had been going well, it wasn't too hard to continue the growth and continue the bonuses. The problem was that if shipments fell short it was almost impossible to get back on the curve and cross the bonus line. The best bonuses happened when one or more expensive FCL laser systems shipped.
Bill and Bob had been looking for an opportunity to sell the company for many years, but the right deal had never materialized. In 2000, telecom was booming and Quebec-based EXFO Electro-Optical Engineering Inc. saw an opportunity to get into the Wavemeter and related businesses. A deal was struck and Burleigh was sold for $40-million cash and $235-million in Exfo stock. This was the published number but by the time the deal closed it was about $228-million due to the falling stock price. Understand that this was a remarkable deal; the numbers I had heard might be accepted in previous years were far lower. Bill and Bob were always generous with employees, but they, and senior management, outdid themselves at the end. They gifted a large amount of stock, about $10-million, based mostly on length of service, to the employees. There were two catches. The employees had to pay tax on it, usually in the form of part of the stock. They also couldn't sell it for four years. In 2000, at the peak of the telecom boom, Exfo stock was selling for just under $44/share. Several people realized that, on paper, they were millionaires, or close to it, but they couldn't cash out. The sale was at the peak of the boom and the bust that followed was especially painful. Within a year Exfo stock was selling at half the peak. The freefall continued to below $3 in 2003, a year before anyone could sell. It rose only slightly after that. Exfo currently sells for about $6/share. None the less, Burleigh had excellent benefits, 100% paid, and most people also did well with their 401K plans.
Even before Burleigh closed, several employees went on to form successful companies. Bill Vleuten started Despatch Machine. Lynn Ackerman started a cleaning company (check). Al Wordingham formed Wordingham Machine, which he eventually sold. Not ready to retire, he went on to found another successful business manufacturing and supplying British motorcycle parts, European Spares LLC. Will Houde-Walter and his wife Susan founded Lasermax, supplying laser sights to police and military. Joe Guarino, Lonnie Bennett and Tim Terwilliger formed Advanced Design & Assembly, which was bought out by New Scale Technology, the company David Henderson formed in 2002. I had left to start a CCD camera company with four others, but eventually left and went to New Scale.
The two largest companies that arose from the ashes of Burleigh were New Scale Technologies Inc. and Bristol Instruments Inc. Dave Henderson was my boss in the Life Sciences division of Burleigh. When Burleigh closed, he invested essentially all of his severance and personal savings into starting New Scale. In the beginning, we looked for any interesting engineering contracts that matched our skill set. Dave never stopped thinking about piezoelectric devices and soon invented what is now known as the Squiggle Motor. My main contribution was the name. That became the foundation for an entire product line of focusers and stages. Even smaller piezoelectric motors were then developed, along with sub-miniature electronics to drive them. Life Sciences became a major market and New Scale also started a robotics division. Many ex-Burleigh employees have, and continue, to work for New Scale.
For many years Brian Samoriski ran sales and marketing at Burleigh.He was laid off on April 26, 2004. EFOS took over management of the Toronto and Fishers (Burleigh) divisions of EXFO as of about April 15, 2004, rendering Brian redundant. During the summer, Brian began to conceive of the idea that, since EXFO wasn’t really an E-O company but more of a telecom company, and of far greater size than Burleigh, that a scientific product line of wavelength meters could form the pilot revenue stream for a new company. There were no patents or other IP involved and several of his cohorts had ideas for the design and function of wavelength meters that were profoundly different than Burleigh’s. Brian discussed it with Mike Houk, who was on the fence about committing to a venture, being a senior scientist at EXFO. EXFO continued through the summer with assurances that the Burleigh division had a future. A short future, as around Labor Day EXFO announced the closing of Burleigh as of Dec 31, 2004. This gave Mike and Brian fresh incentive to accelerate discussions about a new Burleigh-style company based on wavelength measurement.
With a loan from the Ontario County Revolving Loan Fund via New York State, Brian Samoriski, Mike Houk and John Theodorsen incorporated Bristol Instruments Inc. on January 1, 2005. Their first order in March 2005 was from EXFO themselves, who had trouble building the WA-1500 and sent several over for diagnosis and repair. The two bills totaled $907.50. Their first wavelength meter shipment was roughly September 15 of that year. Like New Scale, many ex-Burleigh employees continue to work at Bristol Instruments.
All of us benefited greatly from knowledge imparted by The Burleigh Boys, Bill, Bob and Scott. More company info can be found on the websites below.
Every industry has lingo and buzzwords. Everybody at Burleigh heard Fringes, Finesse, Free Spectral Range (FSR), Drift, BBAR, Multi-pass, PZT8, PZT5H, Slope Trim, 6328, 488, 514.5, Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM), Spatial Hole Burning (SHB), Color Center, Torr, Lead Zirconate Titanate, Dispersion, Gain, Doppler Broadening, Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), Mode-matching, TEM00, Twyman-Green, Fabry-Perot, Michelson, ICL8007, Hard soldering, Emissivity, BII, BI Squared, BI2.
I'll add to this as I receive more contributions. Note that I've lightly edited contributions to ensure that bodies remain buried and skeletons continue to be locked in their closets.
Oh, those were good times. I was employee #11 so yes, I was there. Actually, now I can’t believe I took a job in a building like that. 😆 Old train station on Despatch (Drive?) It was a very close-knit group though. We used to take 2 hour lunches (with Bob and Bill’s approval, Scott not there yet) because there wasn’t much to do as the company was just getting started. I remember Paul Neelan (sp) locking me in the safe one time. He thought it was funny. Co-ed bathrooms. My desk was a door stacked on wooden boxes and I had to make sure hole for doorknob didn’t get in my way. I did the accounting. I came there in 1975 and we built new building shortly after. Maybe 1976? There were also rats, but I only saw one. Pretty dirty place but no one cared. Not exactly the Ritz. Bill G, Loretta, Paul, receptionist, John Upton too, and one of your closest friends who had dogs. I can’t remember his name. Those are the only ones I remember. Paul was shipping/packaging. We had machinist too who was a really nice guy, plus helper. I have to add it was one of the greatest companies I ever worked for. I would have been there until the end but I saw the hand writing on the wall when it came to Exfo. As far as I was concerned they were after our patents and technology.
I started as a test engineer working on High Voltage Power Supplies, High Voltage Ramp Generators, high voltage op-amps and Inchworm electronic motion products. I think the timeframe was around 1977 or 1978. When product modifications and new products were needed by customers, I moved into a design role. First product mod was adding a digital display for the high voltage four channel power supply. The second mod was adding an optical readout and positioning system for the inchworm controllers, which used two Ronchi rulings and two optical detectors to count the interference pattern it produced along with a custom chip to do the signal conversion and counting. We got this from a local company in the electrometer business. I designed a position counting system based on a thumbwheel location setting for how many steps it was to take. Each step was 25 nm, with an overall travel of 1 or 1.5 inches. Worked so good for the optics guys that brain researchers wanted to use it to place electrodes into monkey brains for experimentation. This is where the story gets funny. Working with the mechanical design team, they had to design the monkey head mount and then how to mount an electrode to get the signal out. The electrode was about 4 or 5 inches long. The idea was to bore a hole thru the alumina shaft of the inchworm to get the wire out to connector on the back. We struggled with how to easily mount the electrode and make it quickly replaceable. This went on for a few days, until we all started to click our Pentel mechanical pencils……Eureka, we quickly took the pencil apart and found it to be the perfect grip for the electrode. Then the mechanical guys started designing the head restrictor and seat, but my design was done. The best story I remember is my product design failure for the digital ramp generator. (Never came to market). The ramp generator used an analog integrator to make a linear ramp which then went to a high voltage amplifier. It typically drove a piezo stack in an etalon (and optical cavity that allows for spectroscopic analysis). The signal was picked up by a photomultiplier tube, which would show peaks when certain chemicals were detected. I got the clever idea of replacing the analog integrator with a DAC (digital to analog converter), and by varying the clock, you could in essence magnify the peak signal. The only problem was we were driving a piezo stack. Each step of the DAC produced a small spike which would be amplified 1000 times for the high voltage drive. The problem was at certain ramp frequencies that noise was in the audio band, which made those piezo stacks sing! I reinvented a tweeter, (take that Magnaplanar). I tried every sort of filter to squash that noise to no avail. I even tried running the DACs backwards in a bizarre current mode, nothing worked. So that product never got launched. (Years later in another job, I discovered that CCD devices had a similar problem, but they had a fancy way to get rid of it called correlated doubling sampling). My last design was for the Wavemeter. I got to design the front panel display and control electronics. I have the schematics and some of the operational manuals.
My early boss who hired me was Mike Ruczak (spelling ?), who left a few months earlier. The designer before me was Joe something. I hired two tech/engineers, Dave Petruccione and Dave Wagner. Not true that I only hire Daves. I remember Bill Schutt who built inchworms. Paul Nealon was mechanical production mgr. Al Wordingham was machine shop mgr. Cynthia Payne was shipping clerk. Bob Taylor and Tom Bracken were mechanical design. I used to commute with Tom, he got the better deal, a car in winter and his Honda 750 in summer. What was I thinking, two coconuts commuting on a bike?.
Got hired to build subassemblies for the F-Center Laser. After several years the product lines got so large that Burleigh needed to computerize its inventory control system. Was responsible for setting up a new computer system and integration of the inventory into the system. Trained employees on using new system and new inventory part numbering system.
It seems that all businesses begin in older rickety buildings. Burleigh was no exception. It was an old train repair shop that was literally beside an operating railroad track. Nowhere near energy efficient cold draft in the winter and insects getting in during the summer. Sweaters took care of the winter drafts and really obnoxious insects generally succumbed to the squirt bottles that we used for freon to clean parts before it became an environmental no-no. Demonstrating equipment in the lab to customers was always amusing when a train would go by 15 or 20 ft. from the building and the instruments would settle back into good alignment as the train rumbled off into the distance. One winter we lost heat and arrived to find frozen over toilets. Fortunately they got heat back on reasonably soon and after a couple of hours things got warmed up and back to normal. Another time there was a chemical spill in the parking lot and a co worker who knew what had spilled suggested it was a good time to leave for the day about 20 min ago. Some things from back then are still true today: A comment was made when there was a U of R laser lab event that when 100 or so PHD level people stand around waiting for the first pffft that we not hold our breath waiting for our electric bills to go down. Still waiting never did bother to hold my breath. Other interesting incidents: Someone got across the output from a high voltage power supply and was asked if it triggered the current limiter warning light. Response - I was too busy letting go to notice. A Dremel tool was reduced to a smoking mess after too much grinding on a part that didn't quite fit. The person doing the grinding could not be persuaded to let it cool for a while. One day we all went to lunch and one of the guys who was wound a little tight ordered large fries at the new Wendy's up at the corner. They handed him small. When he informed them they took the small fried from him and dumped them into the large container and handed them back. Wrong guy to do that to. He went ballistic and entertained us all while he got it corrected with the store manager. I liked the site because the main part of town was just across the RR tracks handy to a lot of things during lunch time.
I worked seven years at Burleigh and for me, it was a great place to work. Yes, I loved my job and working at Burleigh, but my greatest memories were the compassion of all the people in upper management and the people on the floor whom were amazingly awesome. During a time of illness, the group as a whole were so very supportive and caring in giving me the time I needed to get thru, with extra days donated to me for more time off. I would have retired from Burleigh.... Burleigh was a family-oriented company. I miss the company and my co-workers. Sincerely, Mae White
Conrad R. Hoffman is many things. He is a gentleman, a technologist, a historian, an astronomer, a photographer, a gunsmith, a standards and measurement lab (his basement is known as HNL – Hoffman National Labs), and never was there a more willing co-conspirator whenever I would occasionally cook up some hare-brained scheme, usually having something to do with a pipe dream involving water and/or bicycles. Conrad devoted many tens of hours of his free time, partly because he’s been a great friend at need over the decades, but also because I believe it was his pleasure to investigate and conquer any technological puzzle. We agree on many things, but the most important of them is this: Bat Out Of Hell is one of the greatest rock and roll albums of all time. (Where do you want those season tickets sent again? CH)
Absolutely wonderful Conrad. Thanks for giving our heartfelt memories a voice. I can honestly say the best part of being at Burleigh was everything. Not since Burleigh have I worked with so many kind, generous,brilliant and funny people under one roof. Thank you again. Ann
Henk Quispel, the owner of Burleigh GmbH, our German representative. No link available.
Shaun Coles, the owner of Burleigh Ltd, our UK representative, December 12, 2022. No link available.
I've collected some images taken over the years. Those were the days of film. The quality ranges from 4x5 view camera, to copier scans from tiny prints when nothing else was available. Modern software has cleaned them up a bit, but please be forgiving of a less than perfect view of days past. Some of the building images are recent, as few photos were taken in the early days. Al Wordingham was a motocross racer and several of us would show up for those events, which I usually photographed. Some pictures are from a company picnic. Hover your mouse for a description, click on images to open the full resolution version. Right click if you want to open in another tab.
Photos courtesy of Lynn Ackerman. These are second generation copies so the resolution is limited, but they show the people in an era when Burleigh was booming and the sky was the limit. We had a lot more hair back then!
1. Even though the deal might have started off at $275M, this was not the final number. There was some cash and a ton of stock in the deal. As the stock fluctuated between the original announcement and the closing, so too did the final amount of the deal. See the memento Wit Soundview (the dealmaker) gave upper management after the deal closed (photo gallery). The amount at the time was $228M but falling fast as the market price for EXFO (and the whole telecom market) was declining. By the time any of the stock included in the deal could be sold (there were restrictions) I am guessing it had lost 60-80% of its value. For this history, I think $228M is a better number. (D. Farrell, 12/5/2022)↩
2. I attempted to create a Wikipedia page for Burleigh but it was rejected. Wikipedia has very strict standards for citations and almost none are available for Burleigh. First hand accounts are not acceptable, even though those would be the original sources of the needed citations. I know various articles were published, but the available databases don't cover the time period. Personal visits to libraries that have original Times Union issues and journals might turn up more for someone willing to do the legwork. (C. Hoffman, 12/6/2022)↩
3. Question: Did we move to Fishers in 1977 or 1978? Shortly after I began my employment (May 23, 1977) I delivered the check to purchase the Fishers property to the attorney doing the deal, so the building could not have been started until after May 1977. If my memory is correct, we moved into the Fishers building in February or March of 1978 (Can Bev, Bob K., or someone else verify this?) (D. Farrell, 12/5/2022)↩
All businesses change character as they grow and Burleigh was no exception. After the move to Fishers and especially as the owners relinquished much of their day to day involvement, a lot of the original intensity and excitement was lost. It could be no other way, but I wish later employees could somehow have had the experience of those early car shop days.
It was a great a place to work, but not all rainbows and unicorns every day. Like anyplace, there was occasional drama and not everybody exited on good terms. Some excellent people got less than excellent treatment at the end. Lots of people, myself included, left for greener pastures. In my case I came back, at least until I was ready to strike out on my own. There were some lean times and layoffs, but also flush times and bonuses.
Manufacturing was still strong in the '70s and '80s, but change was in the wind. This RBJ article outlines what happened.
Fifteen years that reshaped rochester business
The article was local but reflects wider ranging changes. I sometimes wonder if Burleigh's business model would work today. In the early days it wasn't nearly as hard to make a profit manufacturing mechanical devices. Today, raw materials are disproportionately more expensive and there are many more regulations that have to be followed. The cost of labor is greater. The income needed to support a Burleigh-like company, with a large machine shop, engineering department and lots of support staff, would be tough to find today. Foreign competition is an issue we never had to think much about. Demand for the types of products Burleigh made has dropped off, possibly because much more research is done via calculation and simulation. Lab work is still done, but it doesn't look like it did in the 1970s.
It was as close to a perfect company as you could get, set in the perfect time. The odds of those particular owners getting together was one in a million. Most of the people who worked there over the years were exceptional. Rose colored glasses? Perhaps, but I think the majority of people who worked there would agree with my overall assessment.
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C. Hoffman
Started November 11, 2022. Last major edit August 10, 2023
Bob's Stock Certificate
ER building, front
ER building, rear
Cornerstone
ER Assembly Room
The Famous Safe
Laser Warning Signs
Tunnel Marker
Planted! Page 1
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Bill Vleuten
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Star Gimbal Mounts
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The Rochester Engineer
Burleigh Park Bond
Article on upcoming plant
Groundbreaking For Burleigh Park
Lynn Ackerman
Bill Gornall
Al Wordingham
Stick-on Inchworms
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Bill Schutt
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Conrad and Bill
Paul Kruly
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Mike Houk
Conrad
Marine Resources Kiln Door
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Sale Memento
Custom Truck Creations
Volker Buerschinger
Bob, Bill and Dave
Ann Kost
Production Team
Debbie and Wanda
Machine Shop Crew
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