Let's get in test with technology with tex stuff from stuff dot com. Hey there be one, and welcome to tex Stuff. I'm Jonathan Strick. And when last we left you, there were two companies that were rising in prominence in various forms of instrumentation, but had as of yet absolutely nothing to do with one another. Yes, they were kind of like those that those awkward boys and girls at the high school dance standing as far apart from each other in the dance floor as they possibly could be.
They were science ships passing in the night. Yes. So we had Perkin Elmer, known for creating scientific instrumentation with lots of syllables that make me fall over myself. And then we have E. G and G, a group of M I T. Brainy acts who were really focused on high speed photography and other instrumentation. So when last we left off, we were just coming up on nineteen sixty or when E. G and G really gets involved in
the space race. That's right, um. They produced the light beacons that were launched into space on board the Gemini spacecraft, or the Gemini spacecraft if you're one of those folks from NASA who insisted on pronouncing it that way. I've never heard that. That's amazing. You have to watch the old videos. I I say jim and I I refused to say jiminy other than the fact that if you watch those old videos it's too many. You mean like
the cricket. Uh. Yeah. So that same year, e G n G also conducts seismic mapping operations in the English Channel as part of a project to create an underwater tunnel connecting England to France. This is nineteen sixty four. We wouldn't actually see that underwater tunnel for many, many, many years, decades in fact, but it's really exciting to me that I had no idea that dated back that far. So that's really cool. In nineteen sixty five, e g MNG lists as a public company on the Stock Exchange.
They had actually already begun offering stock options common stock options over a counter back in nineteen sixty for fourteen dollars and fifty cents a share over the counterstock options. I didn't even know, yes, because they were technically public, but they weren't publicly listed on a stock exchange, so
it was kind of an interesting example there. In nineteen sixty six, they created e G n G International Incorporated, which was a subsidiary of the overall company, and this was specifically to encompass all their ocean of graphic products and services. We talked in the last episode about how they had created underwater cameras and light sources and worked
with Zack Costa. Yeah, that was really pretty cool. In that same year, the Atomic Energy commissioned the a c A sponsored construction of a technical services building in Nevada, specifically for E G and G. Use Wow. This division, sometimes known as Albuquerque Operations, would eventually encompass all kinds of military focused projects, including like landmine detection and ground air communications e MP simulation, uh, and a lot of
whipment shielding projects for rugged environments. Yeah. I think e MP simulations mean that you need some good shielding there. It's pretty interesting stuff that that that, you know, thinking about it, this started as a company that was all about high speed photography and now they're looking into EMP simulations for the military. In fact, their relationship with the government. E G and G's relationship with the government would mean that, uh,
it would get pretty complicated. You had entire divisions of the company that we're working in a more commercial aspect, and a large portion of the company that was working almost exclusively under government contract. That gets pretty complex later on too. Nineteen sixty seven, E G. M G goes on an acquisition rampage. It's like if you've ever seen one of those old game shows where you got to go on a shopping spree at the end of it and just run down the aisles and just shove stuff,
And yeah, that's kind of how I feel. E G and G win at this point. Yeah, because things weren't quite complicated enough, they needed to add all whole bunch of different corporations. Yeah, there were so many that we even we started to list them and then realize that this is just a list of names that aren't going to mean much to anyone who hasn't worked for one of those companies, because most of them are not companies that that most of us know just easily by name.
And we ended up cutting the wall out because Yeah, Furthermore, I mean, this was seven and this would continue going on for the next several years. So nineteen sixty eight, E G and G successfully test the Phoebus to A, which was a nuclear reactor for space propulsion. That's pretty cool, uh, And in nineteen sixty nine, they contribute several electronic components to the Apollo program, which was also pronounced Apollo, So they didn't do anything fun with Ellen. It was not
the Jimini jim anything. That's good. They contributed to the first successful use of nuclear explosives to recover deeply buried natural gas. That's cool. Also in that year, Apollo eleven landed on the Moon and Neil Armstrong's helmet would boast a transparent goal protective coding that was designed by Perkin Elmer. So now we're seeing E. G and G and Perkin Elmer kind of sort of working together but not knowingly doing so, they're all working specifically for NASSA. But uh,
but you know, just just just hints of things to come. Uh. Nineteen seventy three, E G and G supports Antarctic scientific research and also contributes instrumentation to the Pioneer ten space probe. Also that year, Perkin Elmer would acquire a company called inter Data, which was an early computer company, and thus begin getting into digitized components and controllers, which would overall make their equipment easier for people to use with minimal training. Yep.
And in nineteen seventy six, E G and G acquires Rheticon, which was a solid state imaging and integrated circuit production company. Uh so, you know, you can see where E. G and G is starting to look into the components that make up today's digital cameras, including charge coupled devices c c ds. That a sensor that's found in many, uh though not all digital cameras. And uh, yeah, there was there's an interesting note here about some more space stuff, right, yeah,
that you're Perkin Elmer. One of their mass spectrometers went interplanetary. It was one of the instruments that went to Mars with the with the Viking Lander. That's so freaking awesome. Ninety seven. Okay, here's the big one, guys. This is going to take up a large part of our episode because this is the the big blunder really that that comes in here. This is when Perkin Elmer wins a contract to work on components for the Hubble space telescope
way back in nineteen seventy seven. If you happen to know your history of the Hubble space telescope, it might surprise you to know that it all begins back in the late seventies because it wouldn't launch until Yeah. So now Perkin Elmer's focus ha ha was on the optical telescope assembly. There's a note in here that the pun is not intended, and I think you're lying. It's totally intended. Now. It wasn't intended when I was writing it, but then
I was like, I'm totally intending it. Intention has changed. But yes, their their focus was on the optical telescope assembly and the fine guidance system. These are two separate systems that they were working on. And so here's the highlights of what the Hubble Space Telescope was all about
and what the problem was. So the purpose of the Hubble Space Telescope was to take astronomical measurements and observations outside of the Earth's atmosphere, right, because there's a lot of of of stuff, including air and clouds and moisture and all sorts of other other just things that get in the way of your instruments when you're trying to look at really distant stars. And it's also all that stuff can act as a filter and block certain types of radiation that you might want to be able to
study things like X rays and gamma rays. Now we're glad that our atmosphere does this, because life would not really be possible if we didn't have that protective layer. Right, it's excellent, but it does mean that making observations from the ground is very tricky. So what do you do, Well, why not put a telescope outside the atmosphere in Earth orbit. That's exactly the reason that NASA decided to to pursue this idea, the Hubble Space Telescope. So here's how it works.
In general, it uses mirrors to direct light to one or more of several scientific instruments that are contained within the telescope, and then those instruments analyze the light that comes in. So those mirrors are incredibly important, right. They have to have a very specific way of focusing that light so it hits the sensors just right. That the mirror shape and the electronics that are used to guide them are very critical. Yeah, because if it's not focusing
the light, then you're not getting really good images. So Perk and Elmer worked on the mirrors for the optical telescope assembly, and they had to build the structure for it and the supporting systems, then assemble all of them and to test it before it was sent into space. It's the testing part that met with some criticisms, I would say. So. The telescope's launch met with several delays. All right. The original date was October launch, but that
did not happen. No, in January of six for those of us who are old enough to remember, we had the horrible tragedy of the Challenger disaster, and that set back the entire space industry by several months, right right, All of NASSO basically bent itself to figuring out why this tragedy had happened and how it can be prevented in the future exactly. So then, uh, it gets pushed
back over and over again. It wouldn't actually launch until April, and once it was an orbit, it immediately started taking pictures, whereupon everyone realized something was not right. Yeah, they weren't as crisp as they needed to be. They weren't. There was this notion that the images they would get back from the hubble we're going to be a certain level of clarity and crispness. And they were not nearly crisp enough.
I mean, they weren't awful, but they were blurry, and there was some confusion at first as to why that was, and eventually they determined that the problem was Hubble's primary mirror, which had been pollished over the course of an entire years. How big and delicate the thing is, it had something called a spherical aberration. It means that that the curve on it was was very slightly off. Yeah, like we're talking about the thickness the similar larity of a thickness
of one of a sheet of paper. So if you look at that and you were to take a sheet of paper, divide it fifty times equally, one of those would be the difference in curvature that it was versus
what it was supposed to be. But but even that small difference meant that the light bouncing off of it was being focused on a very slightly different point than it was supposed to be, right, So that meant that the the center, the light that was hitting the center was hitting one part of the sensor, and the light that was hitting the edges of the mirror was hitting
a slightly different focal point. So no matter why however you align the mirror, you were never going to get the perfect image because the center and the edges were out of alignment of the mirror itself, and so how do you fix this? Well, they decided to use what they called the Corrective Optics Space Telescope Axial Replacement, which I'm sure they named it just so they could get
the acronym co star. So CO star was a series of ten smaller mirrors that intercepted the reflected light from the primary mirror and then corrected it for that spherical aberration. So they had to go up there and then do some very delicate surgery on the Hubble Space telescope in orbit. All right, This all took place in in December of nine three UM. The installation required eleven months of training
and five days of spacewalks once they actually got up there. Yeah, so we're talking about it because you know, you're in those giants space suits, right, you have very little mobility, you don't have a lot of flexibility. It's it's tough. There's a limited period of time that you can be out there. It's incredibly high risk kind of operation and also just one that's just monumentally difficult. But they were able to do it. They were able to make this replacement. Now,
it didn't come cheaply. The estimated costs were somewhere in the round of eighty six million dollars. It's a big mistake to have to fix. And then subsequent visits to the hubble involved replacing some of the old instrumentation on there with new versions of it that could by themselves account for that spherical aberration, meaning that co star eventually became obsolete because the instruments could correct for the error all on their own. They didn't need that extra set
of mirrors. So that's kind of cool and in another prick and Elmer system would need a replacement. Uh you, I remember I mentioned that they had the fine guidance system. That was the second part of the systems they worked on. So fine guidance system was all about letting the hubble remained very stable while taking measurements and to very finely tune the telescope's directions that you're pointing exactly what you
want to point at. They had to replace one of the three sensors, which a huge deal because that is you know, it's wear and tear like eventually, so and it wasn't like that was a faulty system, but this gave Perkin Elmer a pretty black eye at least in the space industry for a little while. Uh, and became kind of the stuff of legend in in the NASA chronicles. And it was a mistake that no one knew about until after the Hubble Space Telescope was in orbit, which
was decades after Perkin Elmer had gotten the contract. Sure, but you know, anytime you've got a near billion dollar mistake, that's a government contract. That's not that's not looking great. It's pretty rough. So we've got a lot more to say here. But yeah, yeah, don't worry. It's if we don't have it's not sad ending books. We're gonna have a happy ending, we promise. But we're gonna take a
quick break to thank our sponsor. Alright, so we're back, and now that we've got the Hubble hubbub out of the way, uh, we're gonna go back to nineteens sent eight. So we took a little bit of a diversion in order to cover all of Hubble. I thought it would have been too confusing to actually intersperse Hubble with the
rest of this. It would admit a big mess. But N E. G and G. Remember them, that's the other company we had been talking about They joined the Department of Energy in Morgantown, West Virginia, in order to look at fossil fuel and alternative energy research, and that following years, in nineteen seventy nine, E G and G would establish a new company called E. G and G Hydro Incorporated,
to establish hydro electric power sources in the northeastern United States. Meanwhile, back in ninety eight, while we're time hopping around, UM, some E G G monitoring equipment was used aboard aircraft measuring the radiation levels at Three Mile Island. Yeah, so that was the nuclear power facility in the United States that accidentally released radioactive coolant in the form of steam, and so they needed to have ways of measuring the
radiation without putting people in harm's way. Uh. It's interesting to me again just to see how far from the origin of eggs. Uh. You know, per this, we've come from high speed photography to Three Mile Islands and fossil fuels and alternative energy. That's kind of interesting. Nineteen eighty they also do something else with extreme photography. We're talking about setting up cameras around Mount St. Helen's, which erupted
that year. Uh. An enormous eruption that that was, uh, you know, read your history books for that, because it was I remember living through uh the news reports on that, and it was always really dramatic. So they set up cameras to help the U. S. Government kind of keep an eye on what was going on, again, trying to do so without putting people in harm's way. Two NASA awards E G and G a contract to provide base operations support at Kennedy Space Center. Obviously a big contract there.
And in nineteen eighty five and E. G and G scientists actually got to join the Space Shuttle crew for a mission. It was Mission fifty one b slash Space Lab three in order to study crystal growth in micro gravity. And I just wonder, like, how cool is it for you to say that you worked at a company where one of your co workers got to go out into space to do work. That's that's pretty cool. We can't
say that, No, we can't. Uh, one of our former co workers went on a parabolic flight and got to have um um uh you know, the the simulated weightlessness. It's about as close as I think we've gotten, but it's still pretty neat. So N nine E G and G. Is awarded contracts to support the Department of Energies super conducting super collider project in Texas UM, which you know, super colliders are always awesome. Even when those projects don't
ultimately finish, it's still nifty. In nineties, some of their components would play an integral role in the Department of Defenses global positioning satellites. Yeah, so we're talking super high tech and in it was a big, big year. So Perkin Elmer merged with a company called Applied Biosystems, which was founded by two Hewitt Packard employees, and that company designed and manufactured scientific instruments, the first one being a
protein sequencer. In October of n Perkin Elmer agreed, along with Hughes Aircraft, to pay a twenty five million dollar fine to head off a government lawsuit regarding that Hubble mistake you talked about. Perkin Elmer's specific share of that would be fifteen million dollars, which, when you consider that the the price of the or the cost of the error was much higher than that, I guess they were
getting off relatively easy. Yeah. I have no doubt whatsoever that the people at Perkin Elmer were trying very hard to make a good product just based upon the company's history. But it also I mean, they were under a lot of criticism saying that after all this time, when all that testing, you would think that that aberration would have revealed itself. And some people alleged that there were at least folks at Perkin Elmer who were aware of the
problem but allowed it to go on anyway. Yeah, So whether that's true or not, I don't know, but that was certainly in the allegations. Also, E G. And G got into the micro machining game in a partnership with the Institute of Microelectronics, National University of Singapore, so building lots of teeny tiny machine parts at this point in was another big year. Uh So that year Perkin Elmer
reported revenues of more than one billion dollars. So they're not doing too bad for themselves despite all of this. Huw about how about that that fifteen million dollar uh fine might not seem so uh so monumental in comparison to a one billion dollar revenue. You never want to find obviously, but um and and a lot of that was coming from that from that life Life Sciences division that they had just recently m. Yeah, so life sciences was becoming a really big part of Perkin Elmer's portfolio.
I mean before they were really in chemistry in general and inorganic chemistry in particular. And yeah, so now we've we're seeing them branch out. Meanwhile, E, G and G reorganizes into five operating segments, uh, and then almost immediately discontinues one of those five. They had a Department of Energy Support division, but with all of that stuff that we've been talking about for the past couple of decades, right,
all the alternative energy stuff, all that. But what happened was they had made a bid on a particular contract, it didn't work out, and the company ultimately decided that it made more sense to just fold the division than to continue trying to bid for these contracts. They still got government contracts in other ways, but not in energy anymore. Uh. And then also something big happened just in world news, right, that was that that underwater tunnel between England and France, yep,
the Chunnel, the Channel. I once had the opportunity to go on a trip underneath the channel, and I didn't get a chance to take it. But this is really cool because you know, G and G was the company that did all that seismic mapping of the English Channel to try and study the possibility of having this underwater tunnel. So this is we're seeing it start to pay off
decade later. Uh and in nine, E G MNG one government contracts to build advanced X ray and explosives detection systems for locations ranging from the Manchester Airport at the in the United Kingdom to federal courthouses throughout the United States. So again really branching out, nineteen, the non governmental division of E G MNG purchases the Analytical Instruments division of
Perkin Elmer for four and fifty two million dollars. Yeah, so now they change the name or this is why we've been talking about E G and G and Perkin Elmer for two episodes. You know, you've been waiting to find out how are these two companies involved, apart from the fact that they occasionally worked on projects that came together in the form of the Apollo program. It's because the year in part of E G m G buys part of Perkin Elmer, and the new company is called
Perkin Elmer, except it doesn't have a dash in it. Yeah, we probably should have mentioned that Perkin Elmer previously had a dash between Perkin and Elmer. Yes, imagine every single time that we have said the word Perkin Elmer previously in these two episodes, that we were saying Perkin Elmer but with a dash. Yeah, now we're saying Perkin Elmer with no dash, which obviously saved the company millions of dollars by eliminating that dash. Um. But now, seriously, they
became Perkin Elmer. So what happened to the rest of the Perkin Elmer company. You know, only part of it was purchased by E. G and G. Right, the old company became PE Corporation, which was focused on that life sciences and biotechnology kind of stuff. Yeah, and also on genomics. So in two thousand, PE Corporation changes its name to apple Era, which was a kind of a portmanteau of Applied and Selera, which were parts of other companies they
had acquired previously. Yes, and if you happen to listen to you forward thinking, you will know that Celera is a genetics and genomics company that in fact has very little to do with Selary, despite what it sounds like. Right, So we finally have this point now where we've got we've got Perkin Elmer. Uh, there was a brief time where Perkin Elmer and PE Corporation made it really really confusing. And plus you had you know, the the governmental parts of E G and G that still exists as well.
Uh complicated issue. So from two thousand to two thousand and fourteen, we had even more crazy corporate shenanigans going on. Oh yeah, a lot of a lot of purchases and acquisitions and change name changes. The name specifically Applied bios Biosystems got tossed around and capitalized and recapitalized in several
different iterations. Yeah, it was changed from Applied Biosystems to like PE Biosystems, and then a year later changed back to Applied Biosystems and then eventually acquired by a totally different company. So yeah, we're this is why this is a really complicated topic. It's not just the technology, which all on its own is complex, but because we're talking about the really uh muddy and sometimes political world of commerce and how a company is more than just a
single unit. It's made up of all these other divisions and subsidiaries. I think it's really messy really quickly. In fact, there were elements of some of these companies that had their own stock symbols, So you had divisions within one company that each were being publicly traded but in different ways. So that's unusual too, or at least unusual to me.
I mean, it may happen all the time, but it was one of those things where I was like, really, I think it's not entirely uncommon, but yeah, well, you know, it shows how much I play the stock market. I I that stuff is just opaque to me. Okay, but so what exactly is Perkin Elmer no dash up to today? Wow? So much stuff? Okay. So Perkin Elmer also owns lots of other little subs of the eeries. When I say little, I've talked about multimillion smaller than Perkin Elmer, which is enormous.
It's a two point two billion dollar company. So Perkin Elmer is involved in things like stem cell research, has a subsidiary called via Cord that does that kind of work. Also genomics and diagnostics through a company called Signature Genomics. Also prenatal screening through Perkin Elmer Labs, slash nt D viral and bacterial DNA slash RNA isolation, chemical analysis, thermal analysis.
This one's really cool, the thermal analysis because imagine that you are a giant manufacturing company and you work with a lot of different chemicals and you are trying to create a new product, but you're not entirely sure if your processes are going to work with the chemicals you want to use, Like you aren't really sure if your factories are going to explode or not, that kind of thing.
What thermal analysis does is run through the various processes at the same temperatures and conditions that you would have your production facilities to see what happens. So if toxins are let out, if there's anything dangerous, if the ultimate uh end product is not serviceable for some reason. It's it's kind of a prototyping for chemical manufacturing. That's awesome.
So it's kind of neat. Uh. They've also got their hands and energy conservation UM and like green energy solutions stuff like that, and environmental monitoring and analysis that all like pollution and toxin detection kind of stuff. Food science, neutraceuticals, that's a word that they use, neutraceuticals. You guys, This is the best word I have ever heard in my life. I hadn't seen that until it showed up in the notes. Neutraceuticals.
I'm pretty sure they mean vitamins. Yeah, that that makes sense. They also are involved in creating forensic analytical lab equipment, so for law enforcement agencies and that sort of thing, and they do consumer product materials testing. So this is an other way where they try and help companies determine
that their products are indeed non toxic. Very important. Let's say you're making toys for young kids, or or or cookware or comfiting or I mean basically anything that we come into contact with has to go through this sort of testing. UM and haza for having fewer things around us that cause cancer, right exactly. So this is the kind of company that builds the stuff that allows other
companies to finish their products. It's one of those that, you know, if you've never heard Park and Elmer before, it's you know, it's it's not a big surprise, because it's not. It's not one of those that is usually direct to consumers and any kind of way unless you work with scientific lab equipment, in which case you may
be really familiar with it. Yeah, So this has really been an interesting topic for us to cover because I was not familiar with Park and Elmer apart from I knew of it because the hubble hubbub, but that was all I had heard of. And I really wasn't familiar with a lot of the equipment because my my experience in chemistry, I remember doing titrations and that's about as much as I remember, and that didn't involve any any complex equipment. Yeah, my kind of experiences from like tenth
grade in high school. Yeah, So it's it's been a while for each of us, and so it was kind of fun to go back and look at this stuff. It's, you know, material that I don't often look over, and it's fun to to explore that. So if any of you guys have suggestions for other fun topics we can cover, you know, something that you've always wondered about, even if you know maybe it's one of those things kind of like this this subject where it involves lots of different
types of tech. Let us know. We like the challenge. Just give us a lot of heads up time, uh, Like, Hey, the anniversary is coming up next week of such and such company that's been around for four years. That might Yeah, we might not be able to get that out in time, but otherwise let us know. Send us a message. Our email is text up at Discovery dot com, or drop us a line on Facebook, Tumbler, Twitter or handle at all three is tech stuff, hs W and Lauren and
I will talk to you again really soon. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how stuff works dot com