I'm going to address a branch of engineering or business ethics that you don't see discussed very often. The question it answers is: what obligation does a company founder have to see that the business continues after his or her passing? To help us think about this question, I'm going to give two examples at opposite extremes: Information Unlimited and Edmund Optics.
In November of 2008, I ordered three high-voltage capacitors from a company I'd never heard of before: Information Unlimited. The company's website had an edgy vibe and featured high-voltage equipment and components that are hard to find in one place. Whoever was running the site clearly had fun in their work: many of the items appealed to the teenage-mad-scientist types and were more like semi-safe toys than serious equipment.
Over the years, I ordered hundreds of dollars' worth of supplies and devices from their website, which was simply www.amazing1.com. The most expensive item I ever bought was a 40,000-volt DC power supply which cost about $500. The main reason I favored Information Unlimited over more orthodox suppliers was cost. You can buy similar equipment at a number of other places, but for that kind of unit you can't touch the standard suppliers for under $3500 or so.
The expensive units mount in a standard relay rack and come equipped with all kinds of aluminum enclosures and safety interlocks and so on. The Information Unlimited unit was made out of a piece of PVC pipe wired to a plastic box that you had to be pretty careful with. All high-voltage equipment can be fatal if you're not careful, so the people at Information Unlimited just assumed their users would be careful with their units. And I was, mostly, until one day I overloaded it and it broke. I mailed it back and they fixed it for less than half of what I paid for it, and only in a couple of weeks.
The other day, I wanted something from Information Unlimited, but their website had vanished. It turns out that their "resident genius," as one chatroom called him, was Robert Iannini, who had passed away just a few months before. A Wired profile of him from 2012 described a teenager so intent on experimenting with explosives that he blew off his left hand in high school and never quite graduated. But he talked his way into Northeastern University, graduated with an electrical engineering degree, and in the early 1960s invented the bug zappers that you now see everywhere in restaurants and grocery stores. With the $60,000 he got from that invention, he founded Information Unlimited and sold blaster guns, Tesla coils and a series of project books with titles like Electronic Gadgets for the Evil Genius.
And that's how Iannini made a living right up until he died on April 3, 2023 at the age of 85. Sometime between then and August, his company folded—the website disappeared and no one on the Internet seems to know anything about what happened to it. Whatever good talents Iannini had for running a business, planning his succession was not one of them. Not only hobbyists, but serious scientists on a budget, plasma physicists, and educators around the world are going to miss the products that only Information Unlimited carried.
Back in 1942, a man named Norman W. Edmund took out an ad in Popular Photography for his company Edmund Salvage, which sold factory-second lenses for amateur telescope makers. Following the end of World War II, the market was flooded with surplus military gear, including expensive-to-make but now dirt-cheap optics, and Edmund capitalized on this availability and moved his operation to Barrington, New Jersey. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the Edmund Scientific catalog was a kind of milder-mannered pre-Internet version of Information Unlimited, offering scientific kits, toys, and inexpensive surplus items for both hobbyists and professionals.
The firm turned a significant corner in 1970 when Norman retired and his son Robert Edmund became CEO. By 1984, the optics end of the business had become so large that Robert made it a separate division, keeping Edmund Scientific as an educational and hobby sales organization with a retail store in Barrington. Over the next fifteen years, Edmund Optics expanded globally, adding sales and manufacturing facilities in Germany, China, Korea, Taiwan, and elsewhere.
In 1998, Marisa Edmund, a granddaughter of Norman, joined the company, and she is now CEO of a worldwide original-equipment-manufacturer supplier of state-of-the-art cutting-edge optics. It is still privately held, and its market share is miniscule, but it is a good example of an extremely specialized niche-market firm which, while perhaps insignificant from an economic point of view, is a key player in many specialty firms' supply chains.
Character is a hard thing to pin down, and anything I say about Robert Iannini should be tempered by the goodwill I hold for his memory and for the many useful and cost-effective items I bought from his firm.
But the kind of personality it takes to start a company is often different than the personality or character needed to let it grow in ways that will serve a wider public. The fact that Information Unlimited was unable to outlive its founder by more than a few months tells me that it was in some sense an extension of Iannini's personality. Some leaders are unable to change the way they do things to adapt to changing market conditions or the need for competent staff who can run and even grow the business in your absence.
Clearly, this was something that Norman Edmund understood, as he stepped aside in favor of his son Robert when Norman was only 55. Not every founder has offspring who are interested in the family business, but Norman was fortunate in this regard, and now the firm he began continues to serve thousands of customers around the world. I wish I could say the same for Information Unlimited, but Iannini's legacy will live on in the Tesla coils and high-voltage power supplies he made. Still, I kind of wish I'd bought a blaster gun while I had the chance.
Sources: I referred to the 2013 Wired profile of Robert Iannini at https://www.wired.com/2013/01/information-unlimited/, Iannini's obituary at https://www.smith-heald.com/obituaries/Robert-E-Iannini?obId=27660790, a blog mentioning the end of Information Unlimited at https://www.eevblog.com/forum/reviews/what-ever-happened-to-amazing1-com-(aka-information-unlimited)/, Norman Edmund's obituary at https://www.cbsnews.com/philadelphia/news/n-w-edmund-founder-of-iconic-south-jersey-scientifics-firm-dead-at-95/, and the Edmund Optics timeline at https://www.edmundoptics.com/company/about-us/80years/.
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