A Disruptive Invention

by Peter Shackle

  “I’m on it – I know what to do. If it’s OK with you I’ll become their liaison person at JCB!” said Tim. Moshe nodded and smiled faintly, and walked away. Tim walked round the corner back into the room with John, Judy and Tony. “I have good news for you, ………………..” he began as he closed the door behind him.

  Chapter 9

  John, Judy and Tony were employees number one, two and three of a real company called Electrolev. They had all resigned from their regular jobs and now to make a reality of the company they had to find some physical premises for Electrolev. Steve Harmann, employee number four, had joined them with the title of Chief Operating Officer.

  Steve’s eyes blinked as switches clicked and bright high bay lights overhead glared on, sweeping away the gloom inside yet another warehouse building. Steve’s last job had been as president of a company dedicated to building memory chips, which had been acquired by one of the big semiconductor houses in Silicon Valley. Steve had been paid off largely in stock, but with the condition that he could not sell more than 10% of it per year. This gave him a certain degree of financial independence, however he had a big ego and had been carefully looking around for a new assignment which could use his previous experience and have the possibility of making even more money. Electrolev fitted that bill nicely. The moment that he saw Annette performing her demonstration flight, cash registers started to go “ka-ching” in his mind.

  On this day the four of them had been touring around the Long Beach area with Sadie Nguyen, a realtor who specialized in industrial premises. Sadie had them all loaded into a minivan as they toured around prospective locations. Steve was 45 years old, and from his perspective John, Tony and Judy were almost children. All the same he recognized their talent and had already come to respect them sincerely. He had been introduced to them by Tim Hetherington, and thankfully everything had clicked psychologically between Steve and the three. Steve was about five foot eight tall, and of a substantial but not fat frame. His dark brown hair was thinning a little in the center, and distinguished streaks of grey were starting to show up on his temples. He had already taken upon himself the task of facilitating the work of the three at Electrolev, and was using his vast experience in running a company to take every administrative detail upon his own shoulders in order to free up the three to focus upon LeviStar technology.

  Sadie enthused: “This place has 10,000 square feet, and they are asking for $0.56 per square foot. It is approved for as much as 1400 square feet of office and laboratory inside the warehouse. You have got a nice big yard outside, with two gates to adjacent streets, and there is a ten foot security wall all around the yard. With the market being soft like it is at the moment, you could probably get it for $0.52 per square foot.” She was a professional at this work, and managed to sound enthusiastic about every single property.

  Steve did not have any personal knowledge about technology, since his education had consisted of a degree in economics from UCLA followed by a master’s degree in business administration from Stanford University. All the same he was devouring every word he could glean from the three about the nature of Levistar technology. They had decided that Electrolev would probably go through several stages as it grew, and they were planning to find some premises for the first two years. None of them wanted to move, except for Steve, and he was essentially resigned to the necessity since he could see full well, perhaps better than the other three, what the possibilities were. Electrolev was paying for his relocation from Silicon Valley to Long Beach. His children were already grown up and at college, and as long as he stayed in California his wife Suzanne was philosophical about relocating in the name of career advancement.

  This was the eighth warehouse they had looked at today. Steve was starting to feel weary and suspected that his three younger colleagues were as well. After a while the succession of large warehouses was starting to become a blur. As they arrived at this one they had stared at the grey painted security wall with some razor wire over the top, and tried to imagine the sign “Electrolev” on the side of the building. Trooping along behind Sadie, they surveyed a clean concrete floor with a vaulted insulated ceiling high above. Intense high bay lamps dotted the ceiling. On the side nearest the frontage road, an area of the warehouse had been walled in and nine foot ceilings had been suspended from above along with a mass of air conditioning ducts. On the other side, a huge roll up door led out into the courtyard surrounded by the grey painted cement brick wall, and to one side of this another smaller roll up door opened up onto a loading dock where trucks could back up and deliver things from the street.

  “Could you excuse us for a moment?” Steve asked Sadie.

  Sadie gave a professional smile and nodded: “Of course,” she said.

  Steve gathered John, Judy and Tony around him. “I think the important thing is for us to quickly find someplace so that we can get on with our business. With all the money that you have from JCB we can easily afford to fix this place up however you want. We can build workshops in the warehouse area and laboratories in the office area. We can extend the office out to 1400 square feet, and once the inspector has gone nobody will notice if we double that as long as we tear it all out when we leave. I suggest that we make an offer of $0.50 per square foot and see what the reaction is. Times are hard right now, and you never know, by this time tomorrow we might have a home for Electrolev.” The others nodded sagely, and Steve guessed from their expressions that they would have agreed to almost anything. They went back to Sadie.

  “We want to make an offer for this place……..,” began Steve.

  Chapter 10

  Christmas music was echoing through the Electrolev building as Julie Redbridge happily arranged ornaments on a huge Christmas tree in her reception area. About five foot six with blonde hair and a freckled face, Julie was a single mother living with her Mom, Dad and one year old son in nearby San Pedro. She was happy to have found a regular, secure job only a few miles from home. The bright lights of the tree were visible from outside through the wide glass front doors of the building, and contrasted strangely with the grey painted walls topped with razor wire that surrounded the courtyard.

  At that moment Steve Harmann came into the reception area followed by one of the lab technicians. “Julie, I need you to join the orientation session in the main conference room for the next hour. Adrian here can mind reception for you while you are away.”

  Julie walked past the warehouse area towards the conference room. On her right technicians were installing workbenches, a lathe, and machines for milling, coil winding and for grinding ferrite cores. Further back, workers were fussing over foot square green circuit boards on a conveyor belt that were automatically progressing through machines which put on glue dots, applied chips, dried the glue and automatically soldered them all together. At big tables on one side, a row of patient workers was fitting in large capacitors and transformers to the boards.

  Julie joined a dozen other new employees filing cheerfully into the conference room. Everybody was in a holiday season mood, and since this was in the depths of a recession they were all especially happy to have their new jobs just before Christmas.

  Steve sat them all down around the conference table and stood up at the end of the room. “Now you should have all read your paperwork already, but let me just go over a couple of highlights. First of all you are each owners of this company. Each of you has options to buy shares which amount to 0.1% of the company, presently valued at 10 cents per share. Obviously this only becomes meaningful if the company is successful and goes public. We in the management all believe that it could easily be worth a billion dollars in five years from now. We can replace the space shuttle and the satellite industry. If that were the case then your 0.1% shares could easily become worth ONE MILLION DOLLARS for each of you! But this is only going to happen if you put in extra effort. We expect you to be prepared to do just that, to come in early and to stay late!

  “Secondly, you each must sign a co
nfidentiality agreement which forbids you to say anything about company business to anybody who has not signed the same agreement. This is really serious stuff, because the knowledge that we have inside this company is what will make your stock options valuable. If it leaks out, it is like your money in the future leaking away. If you are not comfortable honoring this agreement, you should leave right now.”

  The assembled crowd of about ten men and women, mostly between 20 and 40 years old, looked at each other and then nodded soberly back at Steve.

  Steve continued: “If your mother-in-law or whoever really needles you about what is going on here, you can say that we are building equipment for helicopters. In reality nearly everything that you see in this building is consistent with that story. Now, in truth, what we are developing is a new kind of propulsion system that could really be used in a helicopter type of vehicle. This technology is tremendously valuable, and if you knew how it really worked you might be a target for industrial spies. So believe me, for your own safety you really don’t want to know all the details of how this technology works.

  Just to make sure that you are believers in what we are doing, I have got here a scale model of one of our propulsion systems. I am going to give you a quick demonstration of what it’s about.” With that, he heaved a cardboard box onto the conference table and lifted out one of the Annette models. He flipped the switch on top of it, and then operated the RC controller so that it lifted clumsily off the table and rose to the ceiling, then bounced and descended precipitously down close to the table before rising slowly again. Then it abruptly changed direction and thumped down onto the table. “Look, I’m not very good at flying this thing.” joked Steve. The assembled new hires looked at each other and at Steve, eyes wide and some with gaping mouths.

  “Holy shit!” exclaimed one young black man.

  The meeting droned on, and eventually they all signed papers and started wending their way back to their work areas. Julie looked curiously into the workshop area as she went by, where she saw John talking with a girl technician in a white coat. She caught a snatch of the conversation:

  “You need to shorten the end strands to different lengths so that when soldered together they end up well apart from each other” instructed John. “After that you solder each pair together. Then we tape the end you just soldered onto the center of the bobbin like this….”

  As she walked through the office area, Julie saw Judy in a seminar room lecturing eight young men and women, each of whom had a laptop computer on the table in front of them. She was pointing to a block diagram on a whiteboard as she spoke. “The most basic function going on in this software is horizontal stabilization loop. The program continuously goes around it, and then after each iteration we have an interrupt to accommodate other functions. We monitor the batteries, and make sure that the temperatures of the coils are within specification………………….”

  Further down the corridor, she saw Tony’s office with the words “Chief Technologist” over the door.

  “Hi Julie,” greeted Tony from his doorway. Tony nodded and smiled at Julie as she went on her way back to reception. “It really makes me feel good to see the company growing like this,” he remarked to the two new physicists, Ian and Jim, that he was working with. Turning back to his white board, he continued with his orientation talk. “The easiest way for you to understand what is happening in this system is to remember the principle of conservation of energy,” he lectured. He had been out of his university teaching position for three months now, but he still carried on as if he was inculcating students.

  “I have only come to realize in the last few weeks that we have not paid proper attention to the issue of how to bring one of these vehicles down from a great altitude. With the quality of anti-coils that we now know how to make, they are locked solidly into the gravitational field. So if a vehicle comes down a long way at high speed, our regeneration circuits will reclaim all that energy and overload the battery, unless it is uneconomically huge. So I now realize that we have to implement some kind of scheme to dissipate a lot of energy in a hurry.

  What I want for the Delia generation product is that we will install about 50 kW of halogen lights on the underside of the vehicle. Then if it has to come down a long way, fast, we can automatically turn on the lights and discharge the battery in a hurry. All that excess energy can then be just radiated away from the vehicle as light energy.”

  Ian interrupted: “You know, that reminds me a heck of a lot of driving my hybrid down a big hill. You can look at the screen and see it regenerating and regenerating, and all the while the battery is getting more full. Then suddenly the battery‘s full right up and you can feel the car abruptly lurch forwards down the hill. A fraction of a second later the vehicle changes into a low gear to try and use engine braking to replace the regenerative braking that you just lost.”

  “That’s exactly it!” exclaimed Tony. “Only imagine if you were at 50,000 feet up and your battery just became full! There is no engine braking to save you then. On the Delia vehicle we are going to install a parachute, in case of a catastrophic failure, but the normal response to a battery overload will be to turn on those fifty kilowatts of lights on the underside.”

  “That will sure look spectacular at night!” mused Jim thoughtfully. “It would be just like one of those flying saucers in a science fiction movie.”

  Tony’s face clouded over. “Don’t ever talk about that again!” he ordered sternly. “I am afraid that with that association investors will not take us seriously and it could prevent us from raising money.” Jim and Ian looked at each other, shocked by this severe response from their new boss.

  Chapter 11

  Tony was driving through the widespread suburbs of Long Beach on his way to work and although he missed his career at Cal State, the excitement of Electrolev was consuming him. He found it gratifying to have a decent salary as chief technologist of a high tech company instead of the pittance paid to university teachers. He was also starting to really enjoy the company of Judy Chen. With his role as chief technologist and her role as Vice President of Engineering, they had to spend lots of time working together. It was now spring time in Long Beach. In the center medians bright multi-colored poppies on stems twenty inches high, known as Icelandic poppies, were packed in shoulder to shoulder making a riot of color. Hanging baskets of pansies were suspended from the overhangs of porches.

  This morning John had planned a meeting with Tony, Judy and their managers to talk about the functionality and software for Barbara, as Judy had named their first manned vehicle. If Barbara was a big success then their future funding and growth to a company that could go public was assured.

  The group gathered together in the Electrolev main conference room. John, who had the title of president and also acted as head of power electronic engineering, had brought along his system design manager Terry Entmann with him. Electrolev had a similar culture to some of the older Silicon Valley companies in which anybody was allowed to come to any meeting. All meetings were advertised in advance.

  John stood up and welcomed everybody to the meeting. “Thank you all for coming. I think you know how important Barbara is going to be for Electrolev. Once we have demonstrated manned flight, then it is agreed that we get another $20 million of funding which will allow us to develop the next generation vehicles Charlotte and Delia. So this milestone is crucial to the progress of the company. I propose that we meet every week here at this time from now on until we can record the first manned flight. I know that Tony has a lot of thoughts to share on how he would like to do things, so Tony why don’t you lead off?”

  Tony stood up in front of the white board: “These are the principal features that I want embodied in Charlotte,” he commenced.

  “This meeting is to plan Barbara!” interjected John.

  “We can discuss them both together!” replied Tony brusquely.

  “Regenerative descent – this means Terry is going to design a whole n
ew set of power conversion circuits to extract energy from the anti coils and put it back in the battery. Judy will have to write software to manage this process.

  “Then I would like to see a vertical axis inertial stabilizer function installed. So the operator can now operate one lever, if he pulls it back…”

  “He?” interrupted Judy.

  A smile flickered across Tony’s face. “If the operator pulls it back, then the vehicle starts to move upwards, and conversely if it is pushed forwards then the vehicle starts sinking down and regenerates energy.”

  Over the last several months Judy had been developing a new more assertive image compared to the safari vest camouflage that she had always worn around Lighting Enterprises. Today she was wearing a short light grey skirt with a close fitting black sweater that emphatically outlined her considerable bust. “That’s a huge software development” she said. “Charlotte can have it but not Barbara.”

  Undeterred, Tony continued his unfocussed dreaming: “Next, we have to give it a propulsion system. I think that certainly by the Delia generation we ought to have a jet propulsion unit on board, but for Barbara and Charlotte that is the least of our concerns, and all we need is some way to make it move forwards, turn and stop. So what I propose is that we have something like a big leaf blower on board, with a system of valves so that the jet can be directed backwards for moving forwards, frontward for slowing down, and downwards for doing nothing in particular. We can put a kind of vane in the middle of the front and rear facing jets to allow it to turn.” As he spoke Tony outlined untidy shapes on the board to illustrate his thoughts.