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December 1958 Popular Electronics
 Table
of Contents
Wax nostalgic about and learn from the history of early electronics. See articles
from
Popular Electronics,
published October 1954 - April 1985. All copyrights are hereby acknowledged.
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 Since I live in Erie, Pennsylvania, an erstwhile
very industrial, albeit small town, it is always nice to run across information
on the area in my electronics magazines. There are still a few electronics businesses
in Erie, but as with most of the manufacturing from long ago, high tech here is
found mostly on the shelves of Best Buy and not on manufacturing lines. One notable
exception is
Bliley Electric
Company, maker of crystal oscillators, who was established in Erie in 1930.
Bliley still operates today in a building about two miles from my house. This advertisement
from the December 1958 edition of Popular Electronics magazine is by Erie
Resistor Company. In doing a Google search, I found a brief history of the company
on a UK website. According to the author,
Erie Resistor opened a division in Yarmouth
in 1932. Here is a reference to Erie Resistor Company being credited for discovering
the ferroelectric oxide - "History of the First Ferroelectric Oxide,
BaTiO3." Here is a 1930s era patent issued for a "Resistor" - it doesn't get much more
basic that that.
Erie Resistor building entrance
Erie Technological Products Zippo Cigarette Lighter
Since I live in Erie, I went down to the old Erie Resistor Corporation plant
at 644 West 12th Street and got these photos. The overhead causeway connected
both parts of the building to keep employees in comfort (it gets pretty cold and
windy in Erie) and safety (West 12th is a busy street, then as now).
Thanks to Bob Davis
for sending a link to a page on the Stock Lobster Antique Stocks and Bonds (now
defunct) website that has an image of Erie Resistor's official stock certificate.
Founded in 1929, the year beginning America's Great Depression, they evidently traded
under the name of Erie Technological Products, Inc. After
legal run-ins with unions, Erie Resistor sold out in 1981 to Japan's
muRata Manufacturing Company and
became known as muRata Erie North America.
See also the
Erie Resistor Corporation advertisement in the January 1952 issue
of Radio & Television News and the December 1958
Popular Electronics, and
Erie Technological Products in the October 18, 1965 issue of
Electronics magazine.
You might find this bit of personal experience with Erie Technological Products
by RF Cafe visitor Rick Marz, KD6EFB, interesting.*
Erie Resistor Corporation Advertisement
Erie Resistor Corporation Advertisement
* Notes from RF Cafe visitor Rick Marz, KD6EFB (with
permission):
12/20/2019: Kirt – I was doing a little research on the history of Erie
Technological Products, and discovered your RF Café site. My interest was
personal, as I was an employee of Erie Tech in the mid 60's, at their
subsidiary, Electron Research, Inc. at 530 W 12th St. As you know, Erie Tech was
primarily a capacitor manufacturer, their later technology being multi-layer
monolithic, ceramic products. Electron Research was an early semiconductor
manufacturing company in the US, manufacturing silicon and germanium diodes and
assemblies. I left Erie, PA, in 1969 to join
Motorola Semiconductor in Cleveland,
then the #2 semiconductor company in the world, tied with
Fairchild Semiconductor. At that time,
TI at 30%, Motorola and Fairchild tied at 20% each,
made up 70% of the total, worldwide semiconductor market.
In 1971 Motorola transferred me to Silicon Valley at a moment that I can
honestly say allowed me to experience 99.99% growth of the global semiconductor,
computer and communications industry. What a ride! I spent over 45 years in the
industry, and even in retirement find myself as an advisor to several companies.
Found your site very interesting, if you ever want to communicate, you have
my email.
Best regards,
Rick Marz, KD6EFB (LinkedIn)
12/24/2019: Kirt – Thanks for getting back. Feel free to post anything I have sent, it is
all just historical. The name of the company was Erie Technological Products,
not "Technical." I haven't been in contact with anyone from Electron Research in
many years and fear many have passed away. I started to work there in my last
semester at Gannon, so was maybe 22 years old (I'm now 76, putting things in
perspective) and was virtually the youngest person in in the company, save
production operators.
There were three manufacturing entities in the company, Erie Tech,
manufacturing primarily ceramic capacitors at the time, Electron Research, my
division, an early semiconductor manufacturer producing germanium glass diodes,
and silicon diodes and rectifiers and assemblies.
As you may recall, the early semiconductor manufacturers in the USA were
located in around the east coast, many descendants of the venerable vacuum tube
manufacturers like GE,
CBS,
Sylvania and
RCA. Some small startups in CA emerged
around the universities. Two big influences driving growth in the global
semiconductor business, and the geographical shift west were the acquisition of
the executive team at
Shockley Labs in Palo Alto by
Fairchild Camera (Long
Island based), which was the creation of
Fairchild Semiconductor in 1957, and the move by Dr. Daniel Noble then at
Motorola in the Chicago area, to Phoenix, AZ to start
Motorola Semiconductor.
Fairchild Semiconductor was the incubator for what would become dozens of major,
global Semiconductor companies over the next several decades. In 1968 a
Fairchild team (Noyce, Moore, Grove et al) "spun off" to form Intel. A year
later, another group of Fairchild dissidents formed
Advanced Micro Devices (AMD)
where I spent almost 19 years.
Back to the Erie story. A third entity of Erie Tech was Fryling
Manufacturing, a precision metal stamping facility on West 11th street, behind
Electron Research. They produced many lead caps and components for capacitor
manufacture as well as external customers.
A note about the market at that time. In 1965, we were in the midst of the
Vietnam conflict. Our major end markets included military customers, early
mainframe computer customers and the US television industry. Foreign imports of
television receivers hadn't begun. For Electron research, our largest single
market were the early TV manufacturers in the mid-west, including RCA,
Magnavox,
Admiral, Motorola,
Setchell-Carlson and others. Germanium, point contact diodes
were used as video detectors in the receivers. I recall shipping over a million
units a month at an average selling price of around $0.05 each. With the war
effort, we also had many customers in the military communications field building
squad radios like the
AN/PRC-77 transceiver. Eventually, night vision optics
became important to the war effort and Erie Tech built innovative high voltage
capacitor banks along with Electron Research high voltage rectifiers to use with
multi staged photomultiplier tubes. You can probably research that if
interested. It used a basic
Cockroft-Walton circuit voltage multiplier. Very
small, only a few inches long, curved in shape, they wrapped around the
photomultiplier to be the core of small "rifle scopes" or sniper scopes. The
input voltage was only around 3V, the output between 2-5kV.
Another historic evolution was Erie Tech's innovation in precision molded
plastics. They were an early company importing plastic molding technology and
manufacturing equipment into the USA. It's no coincidence that many of the
country's largest, molded plastics companies began or were located around Erie
in the 60's. [note: there are still many plastics manufacturers in Erie today -
Kirt B.]
More history, in 1968, an executive at Erie, Tom Venable, founded a company
in Erie,
Spectrum Controls, specializing in EMI and RF filter products. As the
capacitor and semiconductor businesses were in decline the Spectrum business
enjoyed robust growth, and was ultimately acquired.
Well Kirt, I didn't intend to blast out all that history, but once I got
started, I couldn't stop. I still have family in and around Erie, my two
brothers are there, many nieces and nephews, so I visit with some frequency. I
agree that the city decline from a manufacturing powerhouse in the 20's through
the 90's was sad. Lots of theories, but I think it will never be the same town
that used to be a forge, foundry, machine tool, plastics, locomotive, appliance,
commercial fishing and motor capitol it once was.
Rick - Have a great Christmas.
Posted November 26, 2019(original 3/18/2013)
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