Graves said he believed two primary innovations allowed Teledyne to win business from other companies, many times larger and richer than them. One was as a result of microchip-based redundant, robust computer design and the other was their use of large-scale system design and life-cycle costing techniques that allowed them to select the best system design alternatives. They constructed a math model of the helicopter performing its various missions that allowed them to evaluate the effectiveness of the aircraft in monetary terms. For example, Graves said they looked at the probability of completing a mission in terms of the accuracy of the helicopter’s navigation system. They traded off the cost of an unsuccessful mission due to navigation errors or malfunction versus the incremental cost of buying a more accurate navigation system. Gordon led the effort to develop this type of model at a micro level using processes he learned from Dr. Gafford, Dean of the Electrical Engineering School at the University of Texas while taking a course Gafford taught on engineering economics for electrical utilities. Dr. Kozmetsky took the lead in developing the design technique on a macro level. Kozmetsky hired Abe Charnes and Bill Cooper from Carnegie Mellon to develop linear programming and Monte Carlo techniques to predict theoretical mission success.
Teledyne pitted itself against Texas Instruments and Nortronics in a competitive development contract. George Kozmetsky spent the last month while the Navy was evaluating the results in Washington, DC, roaming the halls of the Bureau of Weapons during daylight hours. At the end of the day, he would call and tell Graves and the team what material he needed for the next day. Then Gordon and his team would spend the rest of the day and the evening preparing it before shipping the components via American Airlines’ counter-to-counter service to Kozmetsky. Those were, of course, in the days before FedEx existed.
George would pick the materials up the next morning and be ready for another day of presentations to the Navy. George was staying at the Madison Hotel and ran out of cash. The rest of the team was rotating back and forth between Washington and their base for a few days at a time. George worked like a Trojan, as always…until in his late eighties before he died. Jay Last, who started Teledyne Semiconductor, said George was the only person he had ever known who made a million dollars at a rate of one dollar per hour of work.
Teledyne won the production contract for the IHAS, which became a multimillion-dollar program and was probably the turning point in the company’s success.
The day Teledyne learned they had won the contract, Dr. Kozmetsky gave Tech Wilson his credit card and told him to take the team to a celebration dinner at an expensive Beverly Hills restaurant. Everyone overindulged. After dinner, a small group decided to go to the home of one of the team members, Lew Elmore, who lived in the Hollywood Hills.
Gordon rode with Wilson in his little Triumph sports car. Tech drove like a maniac and eventually didn’t make a turn. The car went over the cliff rolling over and over for about 200 feet straight down the hill. When the vehicle stopped, it was upside down. Tech said, “Gordy…are you alright?” Graves answered, “Yes, how about you?” Tech said he had torn an ear almost off, but more seriously, he said his leg was pinned between the door and the steering wheel. He couldn’t get out.
Graves was able to crawl out his side of the car and tried to raise the car to free Tech’s leg. He couldn’t do it. He eventually clawed his way back up the cliff to the road and ran to Elmore’s house and told him what happened. Elmore called a wrecker and an ambulance and stayed by the phone. Graves ran back to the accident site.
The wrecker arrived first, and a man asked where the car was. Gordon pointed down the hill. The wrecker driver said, “You mean somebody is alive in that car?” Gordon said, “Yes, but he’s trapped. Let’s go down and try to free him!”
The wrecker driver started down, stumbled, and went head over heels tumbling down about 200 feet. Graves went after him and dragged and carried him back up the hill. He was a mess. His clothes were torn, and he was bleeding from various scrapes, cuts, and scratches. About that time, the ambulance arrived, saw the driver, threw him in the back of the ambulance, and off they went with the wrong victim while Graves screamed, “No, no. You have the wrong man!” Graves ran back to Elmore’s house and called both the wrecker and ambulance again. They were finally able to free Tech and drag the car back to the road.
To say the least, it was an unusual end to the celebration.
Shortly after this, Graves’s work on the navigation and flight control portions neared its end, and Cliff Barker12 stepped in and took over that project. Graves noted Barker did a great job, and Gordon moved over and became Director of Marketing for Servomechanisms, a manufacturer of air-data computers acquired by Teledyne in 1966. Art Cencel, Gordon’s friend and sponsor, became VP and General Manager of Servomechanisms. The company later decided to expand into recording systems for commercial airlines and changed its name to Teledyne Controls. Within a year, one of the proposals written a couple of years earlier to develop an inertial guidance system got funding through Max Lipscomb at Wright Patterson. Art and Graves started a new navigation division within Teledyne Systems with Graves becoming Director of Engineering.
There, Graves developed a tiny high-precision floated gyroscope with gas spin bearings, electrostatic suspension and capacitive pickoffs. The system used a quartz flexure accelerometer that eliminated one of the classic problems in gyro compassing that had always plagued Litton. The system featured a gimbal system with direct drive motors and microchips for electronic gimbal control—which mounted directly over the gimbal elements to eliminate the need for slip rings—which were the largest failure items on an inertial system. The computer they used was a digital differential analyzer. Graves designed the functional flow diagram for it and developed the algorithms, then hired Larry Drayer from Hughes Aircraft to develop the computer. Drayer had started working for Litton at the same time as Gordon, though he had started in the computer logic design group, he became a top-notch computer designer.
The U-2 Project
Russian defensive forces managed to shoot down the U-2 spy plane aloft over Russia and flown by Francis Gary Powers in 1960. They shot down another U-2 on a mission over Cuba in 1963. Both were flying at about 70,000 feet. The US Air Force came to Teledyne for a solution. What they had in mind was a navigation system that would operate at 100,000 feet, or 30,000 feet higher than where the U-2s previously flew.
The U-2 used a Doppler Radar to determine speed. A Doppler Radar bounces radar signals off the ground to determine speed. According to Graves, it works kind of like throwing tennis balls against a wall. If you throw them at once every second, they will come back at once a second. But if you are running toward the wall as you throw, the balls will come back at a higher frequency. That difference in frequency tells you how fast you are moving.
Graves helped design a system that mixed inertial with Doppler Radar, air-data sensors, and a star tracker in a configuration that took advantage of the strengths and ignored the weaknesses of each type of sensor. This led to some pioneering work in the use of Kalman filters, which has become a classic technique used in the navigation industry. Graves designed the computer for the inertial trial-guidance system, a digital differential analyzer using microcircuits.
Edwards Air Force Base in southern California did the flight testing for U-2s, and the new equipment got its shakedown at that base. The Air Force, however, called Art’s boss, Joe Smead, and told him the system was not working. Joe called Graves and said, “You go out to Edwards and don’t come back until it’s working.”
When Graves arrived at Edwards and got an escort to a hangar, Graves saw an airplane with an enormous wingspan. The test pilot was standing beside it, and Graves asked, “What is that?” The pilot said, “That’s the U-2, son.”
Although every Teledyne employee working on the system had top-secret clearance, they didn’t have a “need to know” what the system was for, so the people Graves was working for weren’t aware it was a U-2 project.
On the first flight, the inertial system platform began to wander off from pointing north when it got to approximately 40,000 feet in altitude. Graves called Art Cencel and told him what had happened.