Consolidated Engineering Corporation
| Founded | 1937 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Herbert Hoover, Jr. |
| Headquarters | Pasadena, California, United States |
| Products | Analytical Instruments |
Consolidated Engineering Corporation was a chemical instrument manufacturer from 1937 to 1960 when it became a subsidiary of Bell and Howell Corp.
CEC was founded in 1937 by Herbert Hoover, Jr. as sole proprietor. Dr. Harold Washburn was hired in 1938 as VP for Research, with a mandate to develop instruments applicable to petroleum prospecting.
Mr. Hoover was trained as a mining engineer at Stanford University and Dr. Washburn had earned a PhD in Electrical Engineering from California Institute of Technology in 1932. His thesis Professor was Ernest Lawrence, a physicist at the University of California, Berkeley. Four physicists from California Institute of Technology were hired into the Research Department. in a project to develop a mass spectrometer. The initial product was the 21-101 Mass Spectrometer delivered in December 1942, installed in early 1943, initial price $12,000, with no options.
CEC became a publicly held corporation in 1945, with Mr. Hoover selling all of his stock. Philip Fogg became President. The name changed to Consolidated Electrodynamics Corp. in 1955, because some states required that a service engineer for an engineering company be a licensed engineer in that state.
The mass spectrometer products and other analytical instrument products were separated from other product lines in a “Chemical Instruments” marketing department sometime between 1945 and 1948 with Harold Wiley as Manager for Chemical Instruments. The Chemical Instruments Department became the Analytical and Control Division in about 1959 with Harold Wiley as General Manager. This name was later changed to the Analytical Instruments Div.
CEC became a subsidiary of Bell and Howell Corp. in 1960. In 1968 the CEC Corporation was dissolved and CEC became the Electronics Instrument Group of Bell and Howell. In the mid-1970s the Analytical Instruments Div. of Bell and Howell was sold to the Instrument Div. of duPont.
Over the years, mass spectrometry proved to be a widely used and powerful analytical technique and a variety of laboratory instruments became available from several companies. DuPont abandoned the analytical instruments business in the late 1970s, however, CEC’s mass spectrometer heritage did not end there.
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