Visionary Inventor, Entrepreneur and Philanthropist
Arnold O. Beckman, the scientific visionary whose inventions transformed chemistry and made him so wealthy that he became one of the country’s major philanthropists, died Tuesday. He was 104.
The founder of Beckman Instruments and a major benefactor of Caltech -- whose accomplishments ranged from perfecting measuring devices capable of unlocking the secrets of life to sniffing out the ingredients of smog -- died at Scripps Green Hospital in La Jolla.
A resident of Corona del Mar, Beckman had been hospitalized for a little more than a year with declining health.
Over the years, he and Beckman Instruments scientists developed instruments to instantly analyze blood, measure brain waves, help molecular biologists unravel the genetic code of DNA and perform advanced chemical tests to detect syphilis and infectious mononucleosis, among many other things.
In the late 1940s and early ‘50s, Beckman became a major force in identifying ways to curb air pollution in Southern California. Today, car factories around the world use his measuring instruments for production-line tests.
“You wouldn’t be able to live here now if it had not been for the controls we recommended,” Beckman boasted years later.
He and his wife, Mabel, also had a strong influence on Southern California through their politics and largess. They gave generously to Republican causes, and Beckman was among a small group who persuaded Ronald Reagan to run for governor. Their gifts included major contributions to UC Irvine, the Orange County Boy Scouts, the City of Hope National Medical Center in Duarte and, especially, Caltech in Pasadena.
“There are half a dozen buildings on the campus that bear Arnold’s and his beloved wife, Mabel’s, names,” Caltech chemistry professor Peter Dervan said Tuesday. “And his inventions impacted research at Caltech, as elsewhere in the world.”
Beckman was among the first to locate a firm in an industrial park in Palo Alto, which helped bring about Silicon Valley and the semiconductor, computer and Internet industries.
The source of the family wealth and influence was Beckman’s remarkable inventiveness and entrepreneurship.
Beckman’s holdings included factories around the world manufacturing what he once described as “a seemingly illogical hodgepodge.” Their output ranged from piano-size ultracentrifuges that created forces strong enough to tear metal apart, to the potentiometer, a variable electrical resistor similar to a radio’s volume knob.
Beckman earned 14 patents, including those for the potentiometer and the spectrophotometer, which allowed scientists to quickly determine the chemical makeup of a compound by measuring the intensity of wavelengths in a spectrum of light.
But it was one of his first -- U.S. Patent No. 2,058,761 -- that earned him a place in the National Inventors Hall of Fame in Akron, Ohio: the pH meter, a simple device that measured the sourness in lemons.
The meter for the first time provided chemists with a compact instrument they could purchase in the marketplace that used an electrical current to measure the chemical properties of something. It was revolutionary both because it employed a new technique that increased the sensitivity and accuracy of the measurement and because it was packaged in a self-contained box.
“Now a scientist could purchase a precision instrument and start making quick, simple, reliable measurements,” Arnold Thackray and Minor Myers Jr. said in their 2000 biography of Beckman. “The frustrations of assembly, then measurement, then mathematical calculation all vanished.... The expertise was in the box.”
Rini Paiva, curator of exhibits at the National Inventors Hall of Fame, said the pH meter “allowed chemists to perform accurate tests in a very short period of time rather than wait a very long time for results that weren’t that accurate.”
Arnold Orville Beckman was born April 10, 1900, in the tiny town of Cullom, Ill. His scientific curiosity got its first boost from some chemicals he bought at a drugstore in 1910 after reading J. Dorman Steele’s “Fourteen Weeks in Chemistry,” published in 1861.
As Beckman often recounted, the book was a guide to his first primitive experiments in a tiny shed that his blacksmith father had built for his 10th birthday in hopes that his son would pick up the family trade.
Young Beckman quickly turned the shed into a place for his experiments. One ended with an empty pickle jar being shattered over a flame, which Beckman later called his “first experience with the coefficient of thermal expansion.”
After the death of his mother when he was 12, the family moved to nearby Normal, where Beckman attended University High School. There, he persuaded teachers to let him take chemistry instead of Latin. By graduation in 1918, he had completed more than two years of university-level chemistry.
During World War I, Beckman joined the Marines but got no farther than the Brooklyn Navy Yard. He was still there after the war ended when he was asked to attend a Thanksgiving dinner put on by the Red Cross. One of the volunteer servers was 17-year-old Mabel Meinzer, who would become his life partner and fellow philanthropist.
Beckman was discharged from the military in 1919 too late to begin the academic year. He and a friend set off to see the country, hitchhiking and riding freight trains. When they got separated, Beckman went on alone, stopping in Ashton, Idaho, where he played piano in the local cinema. He said he learned from that experience that “I could take care of myself no matter what.”
He resumed his education at the University of Illinois, where he earned bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He wanted to be an organic chemist but, while synthesizing mercury compounds, fell ill with mercury poisoning. When he recovered, he changed his focus to physical chemistry.
It was at the university that he met physicist Richard C. Tolman, who wound up at Caltech in 1921 and later became dean of its graduate school. In 1923, Beckman followed Tolman west to spend a year as a teaching assistant at the Pasadena campus.
There were no paved roads, he recalled many years later, and he traveled across the United States through dust and mud for six weeks at the wheel of a Model T Ford. In 1924, he returned to New York via the Panama Canal to be near Meinzer, whom he married the following year. In New York, he worked for Bell Labs, where he learned more about the vacuum tube.
But Caltech drew him back and Beckman drove himself and his bride across country once again in a Model T, repairing 19 flat tires along the way. He earned his PhD at Caltech and joined the staff as an instructor. Challenged to create ink that wouldn’t gum up printers, he and some colleagues formed National Inking Appliance Co. in the rear of a Pasadena garage.
A year later, a friend at a California fruit cooperative asked him to design an instrument to measure the acidity of lemon juice, and Beckman designed the pH meter. The next year his friend came back for a second pH meter and, sensing a business opportunity, Beckman formed National Technical Laboratories -- the forerunner of Beckman Instruments -- to manufacture them.
He decided to house the pH meter, also called the “acidimeter,” in a walnut box equipped with a leather handle. To be commercially viable, the pH meter had to sell at $195, a large sum in a country still suffering through the Depression. And, as Beckman recognized, “it would be competing to some extent with litmus paper, which cost only a few cents.”
But in the first year, 440 instruments were sold. Three years later Beckman resigned from Caltech to run the new business.
Work on the pH meter led to another line, the spectrophotometer. Its invention in 1941 could not have been better timed. World War II was on and Scandinavian fish liver oils, the major source of the vitamin A needed to prevent visual and other health problems, were scarce. An intensive hunt was on for a domestic source of the vitamin.
At that time, vitamin A content was laboriously checked by feeding rats the material being tested. Over four weeks the rats would be weighed and bone formations in their tails analyzed to determine their vitamin A content. The margin of error could be as high as 25%.
The spectrophotometer became a scientific sensation when it was found that it could determine the vitamin A content in a few minutes -- with 99.9% accuracy -- by using light to measure the substances present. R. Bruce Merrifield, a Nobel laureate in chemistry, called the spectrophotometer “probably the most important instrument ever developed toward the advancement of bioscience.”
Success financed further research. During World War II, Beckman parts made radar more accurate. Development of cermets -- electrical resistors made from ceramics and metals -- led to hybrid microcircuits for missile systems, heart monitors and electronic filters for push-button telephone dialing. Liquid crystal digital displays, developed by Beckman experts for portable test instruments, spread throughout the world in wristwatches.
One invention that gave Beckman special pride was an inexpensive analyzer designed to measure the oxygen content of gases. Doctors at Johns Hopkins University were desperate to figure out why a third of babies born prematurely went blind. Using Beckman’s analyzer, they discovered that the oxygen content of the air in incubators was often higher than the normal 21%. When that level was kept above 40%, it caused retrolental fibroplasia, resulting in blindness.
Other Beckman instruments, such as ultracentrifuges, have been used by scientists in work that won them Nobel Prizes. One such scientist was Merrifield, who won the 1984 chemistry prize for developing a method of assembling the amino acid chains that make up small proteins.
During its first half-century, Beckman Instruments grew from two employees in a tiny garage in Pasadena to nearly 12,000 around the world. Sales mushroomed from $60,000 in 1936 to more than $618 million in 1981. That was the last complete year before Beckman Instruments, which had moved to Fullerton in 1954, merged with SmithKline Corp. Beckman later spun off on its own again and eventually acquired Coulter Corp., becoming Beckman Coulter.
That company employs 10,000 worldwide, about a fourth of them in California. Its 2003 revenue was $2.2 billion, and more than 200,000 Beckman Coulter instrument systems were in use worldwide.
In his later years, Beckman devoted himself to philanthropy.
Not wanting to leave it to an estate that would be subject to inheritance taxes, the Beckmans decided they could “be a little more effective than the bureaucrats in Washington.”
Their idea was to give away their entire fortune in their lifetimes but, although they donated $200 million together, they could not reach their goal before Mabel died in 1989. After her death, Beckman reconfigured his foundation to be a foundation in perpetuity. He retired from it in 1993.
Among the many beneficiaries of the ongoing Beckman largess, which has been estimated at more than $400 million -- were numerous smaller endeavors, including the Beckman Center for the History of Chemistry and the town library in Cullom, his birthplace.
But the majority of the gifts went to major institutes at the University of Illinois, Stanford University, the City of Hope and Caltech.
Decades after Beckman had left his teaching job, he kept in close touch with the Pasadena institution. He was the first alumnus named to its board of trustees. He served as chairman from 1964 to 1974, then as chairman emeritus.
Beckman wanted some of his money to go toward exploring the question of what makes humans tick. His interest led to his support of Caltech’s Beckman Laboratories of Behavioral Biology, where scientists attempt to get at this issue in a wide variety of studies, from how songbirds select the song of their own species to how humans recognize a loved one.
Tapping his head, he said: “They’ve allowed poets to say that love resides in the heart, when we know it is up here in the mind.”
Beckman is survived by his daughter, Patricia, and son, Arnold; two grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. Memorial services are pending.
Instead of flowers, donations may be made to the Beckman Young Investigators Fund, c/o the Arnold and Mabel Beckman Foundation, 100 Academy Drive, Irvine, CA 92612.
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Times staff writer Jean O. Pasco contributed to this report.
