During a Remarkable Century of Research, Innovation and Creative Tinkering, Visionary Arnold Beckman Seldom Found a Problem He Couldn’t Solve. Until Now.

Arnold Beckman tries but it does no good. There’s a short somewhere, something wrong with the switches, and the memories just won’t come. Glimmers are all he can muster, frustratingly quick flashes that don’t connect with each other, don’t connect with anything, that just flicker and sparkle and then go out.

Problem is, the machine is shot. And Beckman, who turns 100 on April 10, knows it. Time keeps going but the body and mind don’t, and there’s not a damned thing he can do about it. That’s the unavoidable reality of biology. Beckman, an inventor and the founder of Beckman Instruments Inc., could have charted the phenomenon in one of his research labs. One line climbs as time fills the mind with experience and knowledge. A second line starts high and drops, tracing the erosion of the body.

“He’s so frustrated,” says his son, also named Arnold. “His mind was so active and so intelligent. It just frustrates the hell out of him.”

That active mind gave birth to such laboratory staples as the pH meter and the ultraviolet spectrophotometer, allowing instant chemical analysis of objects. Those devices, which Beckman concocted by re-imagining and reconfiguring existing technologies, led to a staggering personal fortune. Beckman and his late wife Mabel pocketed an estimated $500 million when SmithKline Corp. bought his instrument company for $1.1 billion in 1982. So far, the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation has given away more than $350 million--and through investment growth it still has more than $400 million in assets. Nearly all of the donations have gone to scientific research, including the creation of more than a dozen research centers at places such as the City of Hope, UC Irvine and Caltech, where Beckman serves as emeritus chairman of the board of trustees.

But as Beckman nears his 100th birthday, it’s increasingly obvious that his impact on the 20th century has gone far beyond his financial legacy. In a sense, the 20th century was Beckman’s century. He moved through it as a Zelig-like character, touching many of the major scientific and social developments that shaped today’s world, from the atomic bomb to our earliest understanding of smog in the Los Angeles basin; from Jonas Salk’s discovery of a polio vaccine to measuring the effect of space travel on the human body. An alphabetical list of honorees of the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio, places Beckman between the inventors of the transistor and the telephone.

Through it all, Beckman has retained a near-unanimous reputation for honesty and integrity, diligence and reliability--a rarity in the cutthroat world of American business. He’s famous among his admirers for his Seven Rules, a list of aphorisms that reflect his moral code. In large part, Beckman’s admirers say, he built his reputation by adhering to Rule No. 5: “There is no satisfactory substitute for excellence.”

But it’s Rule No. 7 that today underscores the predicament of this quietly witty man: “Never take yourself too seriously.” Beckman has always had a natural storyteller’s appreciation for the ironies of life, so you have to figure that he’s smiling somewhere in the fog at the dilemma of a fabled inventor with an unsolvable problem: He’s trapped inside a machine he can’t fix.

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the man who helped shape the future lives in a house that’s vintage ‘50s, a single-story and L-shaped 3,700-square-foot home at the end of a cul-de-sac atop the cliffs of Corona del Mar. Bright flowers, impatiens and violets mostly, lighten the ground beneath mature pine, palm and melaleuca trees near the short driveway. It’s a tranquil spot, the ocean a lulling constant as Beckman drifts in and out of sleep in the combination dining and TV room. He’s reclining in an automatized chair that rises as he sits to ease the strain on his nearly 100-year-old hips. His legs are wrapped in an afghan.

The shades in the room, which overlooks the pool, are drawn, the yellow glow of a table lamp staving off the dusk. A black dog sleeps in the living room, where the shades also are drawn, sealing off a breathtaking view of rocky coastline and a pink-cloud sunset.

Beckman is living out his life in a far different world from the one into which he was born in the spring of 1900, when the hallmarks of the 19th century still held sway. The agonies of the Civil War remained fresh, as Union and Confederate soldiers and former slaves reached their 60s. Marxism was only a theory, the robber barons were still alive and William McKinley was running for reelection to the presidency of a still-gestating nation--Oklahoma, New Mexico, Arizona, Hawaii and Alaska had yet to become states.

Beckman’s youth has taken on legendary dimensions in Beckman corporate histories, which portray him as Horatio Alger incarnate. His father was a blacksmith, one of four competing for business in Cullom, Ill., a rural village of some 70 families in a region slowly converting from farm horses to farm machines. The son helped the father in the blacksmith shop and early on showed a bright intellect and curiosity. Beckman has said his passion for chemistry was fired one day in the family attic where he stumbled across “Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry,” a primer from the late 19th century that included do-at-home experiments.

Beckman’s father built a work shed for his 10-year-old son, a sanctuary where the boy began conducting experiments of his own. Two years later, Beckman’s mother died. His father, who had sold the blacksmith shop to become a traveling hardware salesman, moved his four children to Normal, Ill., a Bloomington suburb where Beckman entered high school.

His own adopted children, in their 60s now, know little about their father’s family. Son Arnold remembers meeting his grandfather once during a family cross-country car trip. Daughter Pat doesn’t remember ever meeting him. In oral histories collected at the Caltech Archives, Beckman mentions stopping in Illinois during his honeymoon trip through the Great Lakes “to see the folks.” But there are no details. It’s as though once he left home, he rarely looked back.

After graduating from high school in 1918, Beckman joined the Marines. He missed being shipped overseas at the end of World War I by one place in line, an example of what he often described as a life kissed by luck. He served his stint in the Brooklyn Navy Yard and, again by a stroke of luck, attended a Red Cross-sponsored Thanksgiving dinner where he met a young volunteer, Mabel Meinzer, who became the love of his life.

Their courtship was conducted largely long-distance as Beckman earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees at the University of Illinois. He spent a year at Caltech working on his doctorate before he ran out of money and patience with his cross-country romance and moved to New York to work and spend more time with Mabel.

They married in 1925 in Bayside, N.Y., while he was working at Bell Labs. His job at the time involved little actual lab work, though. Beckman said he “missed the association of being with chemists and the smells of the laboratory and being able to do things with my hands,” according to an oral history interview in 1985 with Arnold Thackray, co-author of an upcoming biography commissioned by the Beckman Foundation, and Jeffrey L. Sturchio, then an adjunct professor of science history at the University of Pennsylvania.

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The couple moved to the west coast in 1928 so beckman could return to college. His return to Caltech was the next step in a lifelong relationship. In the era when Beckman was a graduate student, Caltech academics were trying to push science to new theoretical levels. At the same time, cranks and would-be tycoons from Los Angeles were showing up with ideas they wanted the professors to work on.

“California at that time was the focus of oddballs,” Beckman says in the Thackray/Sturchio oral history. “It still is. But we had more goofy people coming in and we just had to be happy every now and then that a legitimate person came along. . . . with a legitimate technical problem.”

Beckman’s roving intellect took him to unexpected places, and before long attorneys were seeking him out as a professional witness. He testified in court on everything from fraud schemes about making gold from lead to the suspected doping of a race horse at the Santa Anita track to an oil-refining scam. At the same time, Beckman, Caltech’s irrepressible tinkerer, was working on a series of devices that he never marketed, little mental sorties by a chemistry professor into the land of inventors. He developed a device that would signal a driver when his car exceeded a preset speed, a lead foot’s attempt at self-moderation. He also invented a method for holding mosquito netting over a bed and a bell that would ring when a typewriter was running out of paper.

Ink, though, got Beckman started in business. Among those seeking his advice was a company--National Postal Meter--that needed an ink that wouldn’t clog its machines. Beckman hit upon the proper ink formula and in 1934 started making it in a Pasadena garage as the National Inking Appliance Co.

He was still teaching, using gag experiments and theatrics to keep his students attentive. Young Mr. and Mrs. Beckman straddled the student and professorial worlds, throwing informal parties for his students and joining a social circle of Caltech academics. Their children recall dinner parties in later years attended by Nobelist Linus Pauling and other Caltech luminaries.

In 1934, a friend and chemist for the California Fruit Growers’ Exchange approached Beckman with a problem. He needed to devise a fast and effective way of measuring the acidity of lemon juice. In what has become a legendary story in inventor circles, Beckman used existing electronic technology to create the first pH meter, setting in motion events that would make him one of the world’s leading instrument makers. In 1953, he became the first Caltech alumnus named to the Board of Trustees, which he would chair from 1964 to 1974.

He has been generous, donating millions to fund a theater--where the memorial service for Mabel was held after her death in 1989--an academic building and a chair in chemistry. Beckman also donated many of his personal papers to the Caltech Archives, but they only tell part of his story.

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Pat Beckman, sitting at a small kitchen table while her father rests, remembers chapters not found in the corporate literature. She remembers her father traveling a lot when she was a young girl, usually on prewar trips to New York to organize financing for his growing company. The business end of things was his least favorite part, she says. He loved the inventing, the technology.

“He doesn’t like to make decisions,” she says, and so he let Mabel raise and discipline the children at the family home in Altadena while he built the company in Pasadena. “His job was to go out and get new business, find what was cutting edge,” Pat recalls. “He had the vision. . . . He seems to have a way with people and doing what’s right.”

She also remembers her father as entertainer: birthday parties and card tricks, books read aloud and stories made up on the spot.

Her brother has similar memories. The father took up sailing and the son was a regular hand on the boat, which Beckman moored at Newport Beach even though the family lived in Altadena. The Beckmans moved to the coast in stages, buying a summer home there while the kids were young, then moving permanently around 1960 after Pat and young Arnold were grown.

The son, who now lives in a remodeled and well-appointed bungalow in Costa Mesa, remembers the perks of having a father with his own factory. Skis hand-made by the company cabinetmaker. An outdated lathe moved into the basement for a young boy’s entertainment. Despite the business’ success, the children say their parents never lavished gifts on them. When the son was ready for his first car, the father helped him buy it but also insisted that the son quit smoking, go to work and make loan payments.

After graduating from high school and a brief stint attending a junior college, the son worked a minimum-wage job in one of the Beckman plants. His father laid him off, though, after he decided to get married at age 21 to the 17-year-old daughter of a union business agent.

“They didn’t like that I got married so young,” he says. But he sees the layoff less as retribution and more as an attempt by his father to teach a life lesson. “I asked him for a raise because I couldn’t support a wife and family on minimum wage. He told me there were people who already had families who needed the job I had.”

The couple had two children before the marriage dissolved. With the help of his father-in-law, the son became a union electrician, a decision he believes rankled his father, a staunch opponent of unions. But he says his father never criticized him for it.

Pat Beckman believes the family roles were largely defined by her mother, a social and political conservative who kept a copy of the John Birch Society’s “Blue Book,” the founding principles of the virulently anti-communist right-wing organization. Mabel Beckman had worked as a secretary before she married and settled into the traditional role of housewife. The father steered the daughter toward college.

Pat was interested in English and history but went to Mills College to study occupational therapy, a choice she believes was subtly influenced by her mother. The daughter worked as a therapist for nearly a decade before going back to school to become a registered nurse. She built her own life elsewhere, first in Palo Alto and then in Denver before returning to Southern California.

A housekeeper helped tend to Beckman after Mabel’s death; when the housekeeper retired in 1994, Pat assumed most of the duties. In retrospect, she wonders if she was groomed for the role by her mother. “I don’t know if that was ever spoken,” she says as dusk settles outside the quiet house. “But I think I was meant to be a caregiver of sorts. When I look back, everything I’ve done was to prepare me to care for him.”

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In 1954, Arnold Beckman built himself a new factory. The plant was notable for where he built it--in a former orange grove in Fullerton.

That decision put Beckman among the first wave of businessmen to decamp from Los Angeles County for Orange County, hastening the area’s conversion from farm country to suburban sprawl. Around the same time, Beckman, as president of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce, put together a research team to analyze one of Los Angeles’ internationally recognized traits: smog. They discovered that it came primarily from cars rather than factories, setting the stage for emissions controls and landing Beckman a seat on Richard Nixon’s Federal Air Quality Advisory Board.

Beckman became active in conservative political causes in the mid-1950s, helping to shape Orange County’s national reputation for conservatism, a reputation that endures even as the area’s demographics and political climate change. In the Cold War drive to improve hard-science education, Beckman hit the national stage in 1956 when U.S. News & World Report excerpted one of his speeches to the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce in which he criticized the “pernicious softening of the curriculum.” He also savaged the tenure system as part of a creeping socialism that “tends to destroy competition and eliminate free enterprise and destroy individual initiative.”

As a co-founder and former president of the county’s conservative Lincoln Club, Beckman was a backer of both Nixon and Ronald Reagan. Beckman’s personal papers filed at Caltech include a thank-you note from Nixon for help in the 1968 election. The Lincoln Club has gone on to play a key role in bankrolling the successes of dozens of Southern California conservative candidates.

Work, though, was the primary focus of Beckman’s life. And while he considers himself a man of science before a man of business, he helped steer Beckman Instruments to a dominant position in its field. Louis Thayer worked at a small side company, A.O. Beckman, in the early 1940s making oxygen analyzers. He remembers Beckman as “a great guy to work for. He tried to point a direction. . . . He got the most out of his people. Everybody worked 24 hours a day, it seemed like. We never got there early in the morning because we were always there late at night. It was a lot of fun when we were trying to get things off the ground.”

One of Beckman’s few business mistakes came early. Among his top engineers in the late 1930s was Howard Cary, who helped Beckman design the DU spectrophotometer, a device that revolutionized laboratory testing by allowing researchers to analyze chemical compounds in seconds. It was a big money-maker for Beckman but Cary thought he could redesign it and make it better.

“Arnold said, ‘Why?’ ” recalls 60-year-old Peter I. Lippman, a patent attorney in Montrose who later worked for Cary. Cary and a handful of other engineers interpreted Beckman’s decision as choosing profit over science. “That was the beginning of the end as far as Howard was concerned. He took off and started his own company.”

Jack Bishop, who became general manager of Beckman Instruments in 1952 at age 28, described the incident as unusual, one that Beckman immediately regretted. Cary’s company became a key Beckman competitor in the decades that followed. “Beckman was pretty upset about it, but you can’t force people to stay,” Bishop says. “That was Beckman’s mistake. He should have gone ahead and worked with the guy.”

One other misstep still echoes. In the mid-1950s, Beckman bankrolled fellow inventor and Caltech alum William Shockley in the business of making transistors. In a corporate showdown over Shockley’s abrasive management style, eight key workers asked Beckman to oust Shockley. Beckman refused. The eight walked out and formed Fairchild Semiconductor, which eventually generated more than 30 spinoff companies and helped launch Silicon Valley as the caldron for computer innovation. Among those companies was Intel, the chip-making giant formed in 1968 by Shockley defectors Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore.

Beckman’s own company has undergone several metamorphoses since he retired as president in 1965. Beckman sold the firm to SmithKline in 1982, a corporate marriage that fell apart seven years later when SmithKline merged with the British Beecham Group and Beckman Instruments was spun off. In 1997, Beckman Instruments bought the Coulter Corp. and renamed itself Beckman Coulter Inc. The company, based in Fullerton, is now one of the world’s leading manufacturers of medical laboratory equipment, with sales of $1.8 billion in 1999.

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Arnold Beckman’s wheelchair is at the head of a table for six in a private corner dining room at the Pacific Club, a wood-paneled anomaly in a spanking new business park in Irvine. Three of the place settings are for men Beckman at times has trouble remembering. Each is in his 70s and two, even in retirement, wear business suits for this meeting with their former boss.

These three men are part of the old guard. They forged their careers in Beckman’s shadow and parlayed their experiences with him into their own wealth and standing. Now the enfeebled man in the wheelchair struggles to follow their conversation. They’re here to pay tribute.

“My own father wouldn’t have done for me what this man has done,” says Bishop.

Beckman himself adds little to the conversation. When his daughter places the check in front of him to sign before the two-hour lunch begins, he looks up, pen in hand. “What is this, the deed to my house?” he asks with a wry smile. Otherwise, he’s quiet. His daughter orders for him, the seafood chowder followed by chicken on greens, and he eats as the others talk, occasionally taking in the conversation but mostly drawing inward, contemplating unuttered thoughts.

“It’s good for Dad to connect back,” says Pat, even though these connections only go back partway, to the 1940s and 1950s.

A 100-year-old man doesn’t have many peers. Of those at the table, Clayton Rasmussen has the earliest link with Beckman, having joined the firm in 1940 as an 18-year-old laborer and machinist. Rasmussen hand-built the first three Beckman infrared spectrophotometers, which went on to play important roles in the American war effort. One was used by the government to make TNT for bombs. Another was used to develop synthetic rubber, a critical ingredient in the war machine after Japanese victories in Asia cut off traditional sources for rubber. The third spectrophotometer wound up in the plane that followed the Enola Gay. Its mission: to analyze the mushroom cloud raised by the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

The conversation ranges afar as the men talk shop and revisit decades past. “When he put you in charge of something, he left you alone and let you do it,” Bishop says of Beckman. “He couldn’t stand a guy who would come in all the time and make him make the decisions.”

Robert J. Steinmeyer, who was a key member of the company’s legal office, tells of negotiating in the 1970s with Salvadoran kidnappers who had grabbed two top Beckman employees at a Central American plant. Both eventually were released after Beckman paid an unspecified ransom. Steinmeyer turns aside a question about how many $100 bills Beckman bagmen took to El Salvador. “We never have said,” he replies, turning back to the others.

The conversation goes on. Who remembers whom? When did we buy this company? When did we sell that one? Old engineering problems are trotted out again and solved again. Long-forgotten details are filled in. Is so-and-so still alive? Whatever happened to this other guy?

Bishop, hearing that yet another old acquaintance is long dead, slaps the table gently. “That’s the problem when you get to my age,” says the 76-year-old. “All your friends keep peeling off.”

The other men smile and lower their eyes. Down at the end of the table, Arnold Beckman winks.