Piercing the Horizon. Sunny Tsiao
under a brand-new management structure. The change streamlined GE and saved millions of dollars while boosting its stock value. But part of the savings came by way of eliminating management layers and cutting the number of mid-level managers. Paine was one of them; he found himself with no choice but to leave Lynn. In September of that year, he transferred back to Schenectady. Herb Hollomon was waiting for him, this time in the Metallurgy and Ceramics Research Department.
Studying the behavior of composite materials in a time before there were digital computers was not easy. Solutions to “finite element” analyses of materials that are solved entirely by computers today took hundreds of hours to do by hand. Paine performed thousands of calculations using a slide rule and plotted the data on translucent onionskin graph paper with a wooden pencil, all by hand.10 The tedious work supported other parts of GE. The applied research he performed had one goal, and that was to improve the commercial products the company made and sold to consumers around the globe.
In the spring of 1960, Hollomon left for Washington, DC, to become assistant secretary of commerce for science and technology in the new Kennedy administration. This left Paine in charge of the materials lab. Paine liked Hollomon, but was glad he left. They had worked closely together for many years. He considered him a fair mentor, a good technical manager, and an excellent engineer. He recalled learning most from Hollomon about the nuances of GE’s complicated partnership with the federal government. But he did not always endorse Hollomon’s inflexible way of doing things. Now, he was in charge, and had his chance to run the lab as he saw fit.11
He thought the laboratory had underperformed with Hollomon as manager. To reach its full potential, it needed to broaden its customer base and win new government prime contracts by relying on the laboratory’s proven technical merit and past performance. Paine received permission from the corporate office to branch out to reach a more diverse set of clientele from various agencies of the federal government. He brought in new, nontraditional GE customers such as the National Bureau of Standards and the US Geological Survey, agencies that would go on to use the lab’s expertise in unorthodox and esoteric ways. They looked to his lab for quick results. Projects became much more dynamic and were no longer limited to research and development in material science. Work in medicinal electronics, water purification, and urban transportation now complemented the other engineering programs. GE headquarters began to take note. At age forty, Tom Paine was starting to make a name for himself.
In August 1956, General Electric had opened an office in the quiet seaside community of Santa Barbara, California. Nestled in the narrow range between the steep Santa Ynez Mountains and the Pacific coast, it was a new kind of office, gathering in one place many of the company’s top engineers and scientists from around the country. Their job was to use science and math to forecast the fast pace of change in the world of high technology. It was officially called the GE Center for Advanced Studies, but most people just called it TEMPO.12 Over the next couple of years, the office grew and became the center of excellence for GE’s national defense research business.
East-West tension between the US and the Soviet Union was at an all-time high in the late 1950s and early 1960s. One miscalculation on either side could have led to an all-out nuclear war. Civil defense exercises were part of daily life for school children across America. Backyard bomb shelters were not uncommon. It was in this precarious Cold War setting that TEMPO had the very difficult job of trying to predict the needs of the country fifteen years into the future. They had to come up with creative solutions to better the country’s military, recommend ways to grow the national economy, and actually predict the future without being too hyperbolic. Experts gathered intelligence from government and private sources around the world and from classified materials in order to brainstorm the trends and possibilities in technology. What was the trajectory of the arms race, what was just over the horizon, and what were the changing needs of national security? Key in all this was selecting weapons (primarily nuclear) that would guarantee America’s survival in a protracted Cold War.13
Richard C. (Dick) Raymond was TEMPO’s first general manager. He had set up the center as an intellectual community that the Department of Defense could call on at any time for special studies and advice. He realized early on that to operate effectively as a “think tank,” they had to have as much autonomy from the rest of GE as possible, both geographically and in terms of the makeup of its people.
Raymond staffed the office with experts from all walks of life. Linguists, psychologists, and economists sat next to mathematicians, scientists, and engineers. Unlike other parts of General Electric, TEMPO delivered no products, only ideas. In just a few years, the Santa Barbara operation became one of the top think tanks in the country. With national goals and priorities changing all the time, the phone was constantly ringing. Washington wanted ever-more visionary solutions to difficult problems, and it wanted them fast.
But by 1960, the group was beginning to struggle as a profitable business unit. In 1961, TEMPO had a major role in the disastrous cancellation of the B-70 Valkyrie strategic bomber program. At the time, the program was one of the largest Defense Department acquisitions since World War II. Designed by North American Aviation in nearby Downey, California, the Valkyrie was a very large, Mach 3, six-engine bomber that could fly well over 70,000 feet. This would have made it invulnerable to the MiG-21 interceptor—at the time the only Soviet defensive capability against the bomber.
TEMPO studies had pointed out, however, that Soviet surface-to-air missiles had advanced to a point that high-altitude bombers were vulnerable. A particular threat was the S-75 Dvina (code-named the SA-2 Guideline) missile that could fly in excess of 80,000 feet to bring down an aircraft. This effected a fundamental defense policy change with regard to ballistic missiles and strategic bombers. The Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), which was already in production by the Convair Division of General Dynamics, could also deliver nuclear weapons anywhere into the vast Soviet territory. That March, President Kennedy canceled the expensive bomber. The irony was that GE was already under contract to build the aircraft’s engines. Executives at headquarters in New York were furious. They demanded a change in Santa Barbara.
Paine was looking for a change, too. He recalled that he had reached an impasse with the senior leadership in Schenectady. “It’s hard to get emotional about the GE monogram, and it’s not always a place where you can find the crisp intellectual life. The question is whether you want to devote your life to devising the perfect watt-hour meter or to 37.2% of the electric toothbrush market. It is a model of a rigid hierarchy, though to be fair, the top men try to do something about it, to achieve a more flexible structure. The trouble is that someone always gets alarmed, and the effect is to turn power back to the pope.”14
He knew of the situation at TEMPO and applied for the job. He told his managers that “for family reasons, my geographical preference is for northern California.”15 It was not northern California, but it was close enough. In March 1963, GE headquarters appointed him general manager of the Santa Barbara office.
The first thing he did when he arrived was to change the way TEMPO did business. He started with the office building itself. Since it first opened in 1956, employees had been working out of a rented, run-down hotel building in a rather unsavory part of town. He moved the office into the much more attractive Barbara-Balboa-El Presidio historic downtown district.16 Then he changed the outfit’s business strategy. “We concentrated on areas I thought were important,” he said. “Rural development abroad, urban rehabilitation here, communications, transportation. What we would say was, ‘We have been spending a lot of time looking at the world of the future, and we think we can tell you a lot of valuable things about the problems you will be facing 10 or 15 or 25 years from now.’”17
The corporate office still treated TEMPO as somewhat of an outcast. The bearded, open-collar, “West Coast” look of many of the employees did not sit well with the suit-and-tie corporate management back East. Changing that perception was not easy. Trying to restore TEMPO’s standing took more effort than he had expected, he told close friend Ed Schmidt. But Gerald L. Phillippe, the President of GE, believed Paine when he said that TEMPO complemented the rest of the company and added value to the corporation. During that first year, he spent a third of his time at the corporate office in New