Corporations: To See & Analyze

Its cameras photograph Ho Chi Minh’s missile sites. Its sensitive in struments help police to identify paint smears on hit-and-run victims, enable conservationists to check traces of water pollution in fish. Its products helped in the creation of the first atomic bomb, also made possible the production of synthetic penicillin and vitamin B12. All of these tasks—and many more— are the business of a little-known Connecticut company named Perkin-Elmer Corp., one of the fastest growing members of the fast-growing scientific instrument industry. Variety has paid well for Perkin-Elmer: last week it reported its tenth straight year of record sales ($66.7 million, up 17%) and its eighth straight year of record profit ($3,500,000. up 34%).

Perkin-Elmer sells no consumer products, strikes for a balance between Government contracts and sales to U.S. business. Last year the company supplied the Government with $27 million worth of instruments and precision optical equipment, shipped $24 million worth of instruments to U.S. industrial firms, hospitals, research laboratories and universities, and sold another $16 million worth to such overseas customers as a Swiss drug company, a Japanese steelmaker and a Spanish brewery. Perkin-Elmer operates nine domestic plants, owns or is affiliated with manufacturers in Britain, West Germany and Japan.

Son of the Sea Dog. From headquarters in Norwalk, Conn., this global operation is run by a man with a famous name: Chester W. Nimitz Jr., 50, son of the naval hero and himself a retired rear admiral. Salty-tongued Chet Nimitz, who served in the submarine service in World War II and later got his technical training as an executive at Texas Instruments, went to Perkin-Elmer as a vice president in 1961 because he wanted to be nearer the salt water. When the company’s president resigned because of illness eight months ago, Nimitz took the helm.

Perkin-Elmer’s founder and chairman is Richard S. Perkin, 58, whose company has made him a millionaire 25 times over. As a youthful Manhattan investment banker with a passion for amateur astronomy, Perkin and a friend named Charles Elmer in 1938 opened a small shop in a converted Jersey City rathskeller to grind precision lenses, mirrors and prisms for telescopes. When World War II came, the fledgling company suddenly found itself designing the optics for bombsights, aerial cameras, range finders and submarine periscopes.

Mystical Mechanisms. Optics still produce 40% of the company’s revenues, but Perkin-Elmer has expanded vigorously into analytical instruments that serve the chemical industry in myriad ways. The company now derives more than half its sales from such mystical mechanisms as its $25,000 infrared spectrophotometer, a crucial tool in the development of synthetic fibers, and the $6,000 atomic absorption spectrophotometer, which almost instantly measures the amount of metal in a chemical sample. Lately, it has also branched into laser technology, produces the powerful gas lasers used in tracking missiles. For the U.S. space program, it makes the instruments that align the Saturn and Centaur guidance systems, the infra-red sensors that monitor carbon dioxide inside the Apollo spacecraft, and the cameras that photograph—and sometimes ride on—the rockets launched from Cape Kennedy. Its balloon-borne telescopes analyzed the atmosphere and climate of Mars long before Mariner spacecraft ever got near that planet.

To continue its growth, Perkin-Elmer searches restlessly for new products, spends $4,000,000 a year on research. Nimitz runs the company like a tight ship, believes that the Navy teaches valuable lessons about “the necessity and the way of getting a job done through other people. Almost any plan is a good plan if you can get people to work at it willingly and together.” Perkin-Elmer’s plan is to win for itself a reputation as a place that will design or make an analytical instrument to suit the needs of any customer. Customers have already gotten the message. Perkin-Elmer has a record $36.3 million backlog of unfilled orders.