Peter Gifford is the President and CTO of Cyromech Inc. He talks about cryogenics, the science of super low temperatures, and the challenges of growing a mid-sized high tech manufacturing company.
Transcript
Speaker 1: Spectrum's next.
Speaker 2: Okay.
Speaker 3: [inaudible]
Speaker 2: [inaudible].
Speaker 1: [00:00:30] Welcome to spectrum the science and technology show on k a l x Berkeley, a biweekly 30 minute program bringing you interviews featuring bay area scientists and technologists as well as a calendar of local events and news.
Speaker 4: Hi and good afternoon. My name is Brad Swift. I'm the host of today's show. Our guest today is Peter Gifford, [00:01:00] president and chief technical officer of crown incorporated, a manufacturer of cryogenic refrigerators for industry and research. Peter was visiting the west coast and we took the opportunity to talk with him. Peter's father, William e Gifford co-invented, the Gifford McMahon's cycle with Howard McMahon in the late 1950s while they both worked at Arthur D. Little company. The Gifford McMahon cycle is a unique method of reliably providing closed cycle refrigeration at temperatures [00:01:30] below 10 degrees Kelvin, which is minus 452 degrees Fahrenheit. The Gifford McMahon cycle became an important standard for the semiconductor industry. It was also vital to the early u s space program by cooling microwave amplifiers in ground stations for satellite communications. Peter Gifford talks about cryogenics and the integration of science, engineering and manufacturing. The day of the interview. Peter had a bad cold and his voice [00:02:00] is scratchy. Rick Karnofsky also joins me for the interview. Peter Gifford, welcome to spectrum. Well thank you. Good to be here. Peter, give us an overview of cryogenics.
Speaker 5: The basic definition that I use is all the temperature range from liquid natural gas, colder. That's about a, you know about 120 Calvin and
Speaker 4: what are the large scale applications of crowd genics?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I wasn't around [00:02:30] in the early 19 hundreds when the early work was, but I think what they were trying to do as they are trying to separate liquid air into oxygen and nitrogen, they are trying to get oxygen so that they could make fire hotter for steel manufacturing. During the Cold War, it started to be wanting to see what the Russians were doing. So we had these satellites and they'd send them these very faint messages from satellites and the receivers. Temperatures had to be reduced low [00:03:00] enough so we can reduce without noise. That vibration of the atoms and the crystal, so we could see lay an egg breast, Jeff's cool pack of cigarettes in his pocket at the wharf and flat a boss Doc, you know, that kind of stuff. That's when the different McMahon segway refrigerator started coming out and with those small refrigerators, the next thing that happened was all the materials scientists and other physicists wanting to use cryogenics and laboratories. They found that they could start [00:03:30] to recognize more stuff, more interesting physics in their a samples at low temperatures. Then after that they started prepping vacuums with thing called cryo pumps. Every chip manufactured in every phone, television, anything is made in the Cryo pumped vacuum with a Gifford McMann type cryo pump bay on those things. We didn't make all that money, so I've had to work for a living. The next big application was cooling MRI [00:04:00] magnets. When you go in those MRI things, they slide you in there and they have that sound.
Speaker 5: That's a cry refrigerator is re condensing liquid helium. That's for Calvin. It cools the magnet in there. It's just a little distance away from your body and then after that there'll be a few things coming out with high temperature superconducting future, but right now I have a, as far as HTS, I attempted superconducting applications that [00:04:30] people don't really know yet. And what does Cryo Mek do in particular for this industry? What chromic does is we manufacture crier refrigerators. That means we take heat out of something so that it can reach cryogenic temperatures below 120 Calvin cr refrigerators at our place go down to 1.7 k. It's a very simple device. What my father's invention was is he separated and integral crier [00:05:00] refrigerator with a compression part of it and the expansion part of a write together, he's separated the two and made them more reliable and you could use off the shelf air conditioning parts and the compressor while you made the expanded device.
Speaker 5: Very particular, very controlled environment. That's what we do our specially, we've got 32 different crier refrigerators and 54 different products based around them. The area of cryogenics than that [00:05:30] that you work in, how do you describe that? We sort of spend most of our time looking for the new applications. So our manufacturing models, we are open and flexible to new opportunities and then we can manufacture our cry refrigerators efficiently so we can make money and stay in business. And what are some of the unique features of these? Are they larger volumes or do they get down to the lower temperatures? Well, people say small crowd coolers, small crowd colors might be anything. It's [00:06:00] hard to describe. We are talking in Watts here folks. A Wad is one joule per second of heat being taken out of an object. Okay. So we'd go down to maybe a half a watt up to like 600 watts.
Speaker 5: Big Air separation plants as large cryogenics, you know, for big research institution where they're talking megawatts, we're talking very small in terms of capacities. I don't know if that defines it. That's a very tough definition. [00:06:30] Do you want to go more into the innovation of your father's invention? My father's basic innovation was back there in 1955 56, he had been working down in a, the redstone arsenal, Donald Huntsville, Alabama for the start of NASA, uh, where they had the Germans brought in to make rockets and rocket fuel, sort of liquid hydrogen, liquid oxygen. And so we left there. We'd come in from Boulder, Colorado. We left there and went up to Boston, [00:07:00] uh, precisely so that my father could work on making smaller ground coolers. So this big integral thing that would take about the size of an average living room could be a more portable things so they could set up these receivers for the satellite systems all around. And so to do that, he's, the separation is really the Gifford McMahon Cycle. And uh, it was, it was quite unique and it allowed people to have cry refrigerators anywhere you want [00:07:30] them. Right now. Crier refrigerators on the South Pole on the North Pole on icebreakers. I've got, um, you know, under tents in Ethiopia making liquid nitrogen for artificial insemination purposes for producing milk.
Speaker 3: [inaudible]. [00:08:00] Our guest today on Spectra is Peter Gifford, the president, CTO chromic incorporated. In the next segment, Peter Talks about making cryo refrigerators. This is kv LX Berkeley.
Speaker 5: What kind of balance between making new instruments and selling these new instruments versus supporting instruments that you already have [00:08:30] out there? Do you have the drive to that? Our customer is pretty much two by yielded. That'll run as long as it can go. When I first got in the business, if you made a career, refrigerated, ran for 5,000 hours, that's you know, the year as eighties six 70 or something, it was considered good. Then it went to 10,000 hours. Then it went to 20,000 hours. About the year 2000 now we're suppressing 30 and moving up to 40,000 [00:09:00] hours. Meantime between any maintenance on these devices, so that's what people expect from crier refrigerators in course of running the company over these many years. How has the manufacturing process on your side changed keep well an adding more products, but the basic products have stayed the same. What has happened is as we've made more, instead of going from one a month to one a week to [00:09:30] one a day to now three a day coming down the line, trying to build the capacity, you can focus as you get to bigger numbers and start to focus on different places, you got more people and you can start to recognize what it is that you ought to be doing at different places.
Speaker 5: It's hard to see everything when you're small and you're just doing a few things. It's, it's amazing. Uh, right now my key word is the word recognize. I'm seeing [00:10:00] things clearly. I'm recognizing things a lot clearly in the manufacturing process. Plus I got a lot of people out there that are paying attention. What kind of challenges are you most interested in solving? Are they some of the managerial stuff or some of this stuff on the sales side or some of the engineering and technical challenges still? I wonder whether or not I've ever separated those. There are some interesting things coming at us. Again, recently we've instituted [00:10:30] a new quality management system where we're defining what we need. We're training people better than we audit people and we've gotten a lot better. It's very interesting, these sort of soft sociological things that you do at a company that yets the employee more, the employee starts to feel more included and it's amazing how the whole foundation of the company's quality rises.
Speaker 5: [00:11:00] It's been unique to witness for the last year. So I guess what I'm saying is is I liked the manufacturing production side of it. Peter, when you joined the company, at what point in that process did you feel comfortable with the engineering aspects of the, I went back and finished a lot of the engineering courses I hadn't had in my truck. Gated scientific training. I asked my father if I needed a to get a full mechanical engineering [00:11:30] degree and he said, no, don't waste your time comfortable with the technology maybe only in the last 10 years. So that means after 27 years or so messing around, people contact us from everywhere from malaria research in Malawi, needing to have a small liquid nitrogen. People talk to us through technical issues. I think what you do when people talk to you and try [00:12:00] to ask you how they can use cryogenics or can their cryogenic connect to what they need. It took a while to accept that what I was doing just Leslie and well was the best thing I could bring to a field. Then the other thing is if somebody really needs something to, and if they're good, they will take the time to explain it to you clearly.
Speaker 6: [inaudible]
Speaker 4: [00:12:30] you are listening to spectrum on KALX Berkeley. Our guest is Peter Gifford. In the next segment he talks about research funding.
Speaker 2: [inaudible]
Speaker 5: [00:13:00] have you learned anything from other cryogenics companies? I have seen graduate and companies that spend a lot of money on developing products that people didn't need and wondered why they didn't need them. I've seen cryogenic companies, you know, make a good product that I'm sort of, you know, I missed the boat. Um, but how do you say the relationship [00:13:30] of watching your competitor move? Uh, I don't know. I don't know how to the answer that we don't spend a lot of time reverse engineering. I think historically people have been copying us most that sought. And do you see any gaps that the industry as a whole has to push through?
Speaker 5: Well, you know, there are things that I would like to do. The thing is is the question is whether or not somebody needs them. [00:14:00] I guess my head is really stuck there. When you're running a business, do you do what you want to do or what your customers need? I think the answer, and that's pretty simple if you're ready, but there's a sort of a school of thought of pure engineering that you build it regardless of whether or not it's going to have any application or anything like that. It's just because it's sort of a spiritual thing that you have in you. You've got to build it and there are some people, yeah, we'll certainly make money. That's something that historically the government [00:14:30] labs were useful. Here we go. What's looking to see if we can do that? I would like to make a little statement here.
Speaker 5: The federal government is not funding research in the United States anywhere at any levels equal to Korea. The Europeans anywhere we have fallen beyond what it was like the 60s and the 70s when this country was on fire and the money has been taken away from it. This idea that basic research [00:15:00] will be dead at corporations. It is not corporations job to do basic research. That tall space race, that paranoia about the communist block at stuff's gone. What is motivating it? Now I've go to Korea. Somebody took me to a university that was being set up 20,000 students, but he told me they are putting up a new one every five years. They had the latest, you know, electron microscopes, the latest big cryogenic plants and recovery [00:15:30] systems and so I'm going, wow, that isn't happening in the United States and aside idea that you don't have to fund this.
Speaker 5: That's what made America really good at that time. It's just, it was all hidden from the average person. A lot of side fund research, fun universities and hopefully some of that will trickle down to you too. Some of it will. Right now I would say most [00:16:00] of our business comes from people who actually make products. I'm thinking more about learning what the next applications are. That early Gifford McMahon cycle refrigerator was funded by the government, tried to read messages off of satellites for defense. There's all kinds of stuff, early computers, the chip manufacturing, everything. It was being funded some way that way.
Speaker 4: Where do you see research happening now in crowd genics? Are there institutions [00:16:30] and organizations that you follow that you look to?
Speaker 5: NIST is still spending quite a bit of money on cryogenic research. That's the old national bureau standards. We'd not seen that much in university labs. As the research gravitated overseas, our strongest competitors we have is basically company in Japan. Everybody said a wondering when there's going to be a Chinese company making cryogenic refrigerators of our time. They haven't seen them yet. [00:17:00] That could be a real game changer, but there were a lot more crier refrigerator manufacturers in the eighties and nineties and some of them have left the picture consolidated under that one big company. So they got bought up basically. Yeah. Or the business took too long to get big for the investors to wait for
Speaker 4: how much of the engineering can now sort of pass off to others and how big his engineering team [inaudible].
Speaker 5: Right now we have eight engineers [00:17:30] at Crab Mc, we should be more like 15 we've been having trouble hiring people. We like to get people to different types of somebody with a lot of experience deepen in cryogenics, but most of the time we want to get raw mechanical engineers directly out of school. Somebody with an open mind and with good practical tools sense the chief technical officer, part of my job, everybody calls me an entrepreneur now and entrepreneur. Really [00:18:00] the form that I am who sort of grows with a company out of nothing. We don't really know what we do. You don't really know all the things you do because you take it on naturally to be successful. You're not really that aware of it. But one of the things as I pull him back, I recognize how they need my scientific recognition in the different aspects of the business.
Speaker 5: I hope that's not getting too conceptual. You know, you have an engineering perspective [00:18:30] as whether or not form, fit and function is doing what we need. You know, you have the technical perspective, the people whose hands are actually touching the device on the line. You know you have the financial officer's always looking over the shoulder, but in a technical business that's innovative, you don't want them running the show, but you want them to be aware of what's going on. You know? And then there's my point from the chief technical office and just the business thing. Can we do this? Do they get [00:19:00] it? Is there training? Getting in, is the quality being held up? That's sort of, there are different birds of prey. How about birds of friendships, sort of soaring over the situation, recognizing what ought to be done there at any moment on the production line. So that's I think my most important job and also trying to figure out strategically where we go next.
Speaker 3: [inaudible] [00:19:30] spectrum is a public affairs show. [inaudible] hail expert. Peter Gifford is cryogenics engineer and our guests could today. In the next segment, Peter Talks about engineering and the stimulation it is brought to his life.
Speaker 5: [00:20:00] What sort of technology changes happened over the years you've been running Cromac that affected your business? I would say the most important one for us is the Internet. The Internet allowed us to market and then communicate with people by email. When I first got into the business, the only way to send a drawing and try to figure out what somebody needed [00:20:30] from you was through the mail. Then it went to telexes, then it went to FedEx. Then it went to fax machines and now with the Internet it's just amazing if you've got a draw and you can send to anyone planted real quick and I'd say roughly about 60 to 65% of our business is overseas. In terms of other things, CMC machines, material manufacturers, a CNC, [00:21:00] CNC is computer it basically it's computer machine. In your devices, your pieces and stuff, temperature sensors had been better.
Speaker 5: Vacuum equipment is getting better. What's happening is a lot of the equipment that you were working with in the fifties sixties and seventies and eighties have matured. People have been making them for a longer period of time. And that maturation and a mechanical devices is a, Jess gets better with time. That's [00:21:30] just the way it is unless you know the front offices are taking the value out of the product. You talked a little bit earlier about what you look for in a young engineer, a new engineer out of school. Do you want to go into that a little more? Uh, you think that people are maybe getting too much pressure to go to a phd? I'm not that interested in higher and a phd in what we're doing right now. I have a phd in house who is the crowd refrigerator expert [00:22:00] really getting into her career and you know, making work, you know, you gotta be there on the job.
Speaker 5: Most of the phd work is laboratory work anyway. At least it is in mechanical engineering. You know, it's that integration between the science and the actual thing that's getting made. That is the important thing. And if you're in the laboratory studying, not getting out there where it's being made, then you miss all that. [00:22:30] The best thing to do is get out there and start doing it right away. It's pretty obvious when you start working with people whether or not they've got the courage to use their intelligence. You know whether or not they're going to work on their communication skills, whether or not they're going to start to recognize the important stuff you see it go out there and get involved. I would recommend sooner than later. Don't be so timid. A lot of people are timid to get involved in the workplace [00:23:00] and it's are you looking for people that have a bachelor's of science or master's degrees right now?
Speaker 5: We'd be happy with Bachelor's science and that falls into that whole idea of gets started. Get going. Yeah. Get into the mix. We have a lot of very interesting applications. We recently hired three engineers all about three years ago and all three of those young guys are absolutely slumped with new things to learn and they're just alert. They're sort [00:23:30] of running around and not sitting behind computers. Drafting. They like getting a drawing, going out there, doing something, traveling, answering that service question from Kazakhstan about a little liquid helium plant. They're calling up a and talking about vacuum equipment that learning about thermal conductivity and thermal radiation. They're using size. My father once said for you, he said, Peter, you know the real enemy is, I go, what? I didn't [00:24:00] even know what he's talking about. And he said, boredom. Boredom's the enemy. And since I've been involved in cryogenics I had just not bored.
Speaker 5: I'm a 63 and people were saying, oh you kind of step back from business now and I will tell you this, I am afraid of stepping back from the intellectual stimulation of the business. You know some of the stress managing all the people on the floor. Yeah, but the intellectual variation of it. No, I don't [00:24:30] know if I can step back. I think it would be self-destructive. You know, I've been in this business as 1973 and I happened in it because my father had this little company. Here's a full time college professor. So I started making refrigerators. I graduated from high school in 1966 from the best high school in Syracuse, New York, not one of the other people in that graduating class as far as I've been able to see did anything in manufacturing. They became doctors, lawyers, some [00:25:00] other type of businessmen or professional types.
Speaker 5: I'm the only one who went into manufacturing and in the eighties and the nineties and the early two thousands everybody thought I was an idiot to be trying to manufacture cryogenic refrigerators and upstate New York and uh, it's been a great career for me. It's just very, very interesting. We built a company up to 105 people. We've been profitable since 1988 no, it's been a very good life [00:25:30] and I'm very pro manufacturing and I don't think that the United States is going to get back on its feet again until people start manufacturing a lot more stuff and seeing it as a reality we can manufacturer for [inaudible]. Thanks very much for coming on spectrum. You're welcome.
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