Consolidated Engineering Corporation
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Consolidated Engineering Corporation (CEC) was founded in 1937 by Herbert Hoover, Jr. as sole proprietor. Dr. Harold Washburn was hired in 1938 as VP for Research, with a mandate to develop instruments applicable to petroleum prospecting.
Mr. Hoover was trained as a mining engineer and Dr. Washburn had a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering. His thesis Professor was E.O. Lawrence, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Four physicists from Cal Tech were hired into the Research Dept. in a project to develop a mass spectrometer. The initial product was the 21-101 Mass Spectrometer delivered in Dec. 1942, installed in early 1943, initial price $12,000, with no options.
CEC became a publicly held corporation in 1945, with Mr. Hoover selling all of his stock. Philip Fogg became President. The name changed to Consolidated Electrodynamics Corp. in 1955, because some states required that a service engineer for an engineering company be a licensed engineer in that state.
The mass spectrometer products and other analytical instrument products were separated from other product lines in a “Chemical Instruments” marketing department sometime between 1945 and 1948 with Harold Wiley as Manager for Chemical Instruments. The Chemical Instruments Department became the Analytical and Control Division in about 1959 with Harold Wiley as General Manager. This name was later changed to the Analytical Instruments Div.
CEC became a subsidiary of Bell and Howell Corp. in 1960. In 1968 the CEC Corporation was dissolved and CEC became the Electronics Instrument Group of Bell and Howell. In mid-1970 the Analytical Instruments Div. of Bell and Howell was sold to the Instrument Div. of duPont. Later that decade, duPont abandoned the analytical instruments business thus ending the company that pioneered the development and sale of mass spectrometers for chemical analysis.
Notes regarding this article on CEC. This information was provided to the author by Dr. Charles M. Judson, a one time employee of CEC. Additional information about the company may be obtained from the Chemical Heritage Foundation [1] which has an oral history of Judson that the author conducted in October of 2002. A recent article on Dr. Judson appeared in "Chemical Heritage" 24:4 Winter 2006/7 p 29. See also a related article on page 26 of the same issue.
