Review of ARTHUR COLLINS RADIO WIZARD by Ben Stern

 

ArtthurCollins Radio Wizard by Ben W Sterns

Ben Sterns worked as a public relations executive for Collins Radio for fifteen years and he has assembled here an exhaustive coverage of the life of Arthur Collins and the development of his company.  Collins Radio began as provider of ham radio equipment and before it was sold to Rockwell International it had become a giant in the world of electronic storage and communication.  Art Collins did not invent the concept of communication by wire or through the air, but by the end of his life in 1977, he was recognized world over as belonging right up with Guglielmo Marconi, as  one its major developers.   

Stern’s book is not a mass market tour of the career of a famous businessman. It logs the company’s operations minutely right down to technical details and product serial numbers.  A general reader will not be excited by a lot of this, but do not let that scare you off.  The story of the man behind this technical curtain proves that he was indeed a wizard.  

Collins was born in 1909 and by the 1920’s was already fiddling with crystal sets in the attic of his parent’s home in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. It was there he started his first ham radio business and it didn’t take him long to outgrow manufacturing his units in the family’s basement. By 1933-34 he had a rented location in town. His name was already becoming a byword in the industry because his transmission equipment was on board and functioning when Admiral Richard Byrd embarked on his Antarctic expedition.  Over the next years Collins Radio built a reputation for providing high quality products that could perform even under the most challenging of conditions.

One thing that comes through in the book is that Art Collins was a driven man. He was devoted above all to experiment, improvement, and ultimately perfection in every product he made and sold. To that end he hired talented employees and expected them to be as driven as he was. No executive stayed long at Collins if they could not become accustomed to being called on a Sunday morning or in the middle of the night to report for work in the lab or to have a committee meeting. The only piece of humor about him cited in the entire book was from 1950. He was asked by a reporter “How many people you got working for you now?”  Art’s answer, “About half of them.”

WWII provided the juice that moved Collins out of the ham radio niche and into the world of large government contracts. The war needed airplanes and those planes needed to be able to communicate privately with each other and to their bases on the ground. Collins literally invented the radios that could do that and by war’s end his company was a world leader in aviation electronics. An interesting sidelight to this was that the assembly lines in Cedar Rapids that produced his equipment during the war years were held together by women—many from Iowa’s Amana Colonies. Arthur discovered that with smaller fingers and skills in fine sewing work the women could do accurate electronic assembly jobs better than men. Civilian air traffic mushroomed after the war and Collins equipment anchored the construction of the nation’s air traffic control system and by the early sixties it was the largest supplier of aviation electronics in the world.

Never resting on his laurels, Art Collins piggybacked next on the discovery of solar radio waves and radio-astronomy. His company designed, built, and installed massive receiving dishes for astronomical research and long-range communication all over the world. He also managed to revolutionize marine navigation by inventing something called the radio-sextant that made it possible for ships and even nuclear submarines to know their exact position even when no sky was visible or the sub was underwater. This was one of the key elements in our entire defense posture as it enabled nuclear submarines to stay underwater for extended time periods without ever re-surfacing and thus being almost impossible to track.

The continuation of major government contracts continued on into 1970’s with Collins Radio building facilities in Texas and California as well as Cedar Rapids, IA. (where the company was now the city’s largest employer.)  NASA’s space program was heating up and Collins engineers supplied the audio and video transmission equipment for the Apollo program that culminated in live pictures from the surface of the moon. With the Space Program’s success assured, Collins leaped ahead to work on high-speed computers and network communication. He began pouring large sums of money into research in this area, but unfortunately profitability dropped as the research bills skyrocketed.  Other entities saw weakness and began to make buyout and merger offers. Art’s vision was accurate, but too far ahead of its time.  With his health deteriorating and the business under stress, he was finally edged out of the president’s chair and the company was folded into a new consortium. Happily, they did keep the Collins name alive and the signs now say Rockwell Collins Aerospace.

As noted in my introduction, this book contains considerable amounts of names of many executives and engineering researchers as well as details of products that are somewhat technical in nature. This slowed me down, but will not hamper a reader who has a more advanced technical background. It does not obscure in any way the fact that Art Collins built a multi-million dollar company that had a major impact on the nation’s military capabilities, helped put the country on the moon, impacted the computer age, and brought the joy of clear, long-range radio communication to the masses. He was indeed a wizard.

I give it a 4 out of 5.