Meat Market to Navy E

Eight years ago Bill Eitel and Jack McCullough, two young California radio hams, set out to prove that they could make a vacuum tube higher powered and cheaper than anyone had ever made before. They had $5,000 put up by two friends, an empty meat market in San Bruno near San Francisco, and some practical experience in the laboratories of a nearby radio manufacturer, Heintz & Kaufman. Last week Bill and Jack had an enormous military-secret backlog, a new plant in the West besides their hugely expanded San Bruno factory, a long list of licensees, and an Army & Navy E to prove how well they had served the U.S. war effort.

As Jack McCullough puts it now, "We didn't know what couldn't be done when we went into the business so we went ahead and did it." He is also modest about Bill Eitel's and his first experience with making vacuum tubes (when Heintz & Kaufman turned them loose on an order for some from an R.C.A. competitor). "Bill burned his fingers a little and broke a lot of glass," says Jack, "but he finally came out of the basement with a vacuum tube."

But by the time Bill and Jack got through experimenting in their meat market they had come out with something the engineers said was impossible: a tube in which a high vacuum is created, without the aid of special chemicals and maintained by the tube elements themselves. Though radio engineers in 1934 thought 3,000-4,000 watts was the top power for vacuum tubes, "Eimac" tubes are now capable of power peaks up to 1,000,000 watts--yet their cost is extraordinarily low. Even at the beginning Jack and Bill sold 2,500-watt tubes to incredulous airline ground stations for only $75 v. the $300 they had to pay other manufacturers for tubes that could only produce 400 watts.

When war orders for "Eimac" tubes began to roll in E. & M. still had only 22 employes. Now they have 50 times as many in San Bruno alone, expect to have many times that when their new plant, opened last July, really gets going full blast. By last year they were able to shell out $57,000 for one backer's $2,500 original investment (the other backer, who built E. & M.'s new factory, is still clinging to his paper profits).

The only thing that really pains Bill and Jack now is the same headache that plagues many a war contractor, big or small: business is so enormous that their working capital is almost nonexistent. Under negotiation this week is a $2,500,000 bank loan to help E. & M. swing its necessarily swollen inventories. The only other time Bill and Jack ever went to the banks was in 1940, when they took out a 90-day $30,000 loan. Now they are doing so much with so little that, if the war ended tomorrow, they would have only enough cash to meet their payroll for 15 days.

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