The Genius Factory Read Online Free PDF Page A

lessons. How he had befriended Arnold Gingrich, later the founding editor of
Esquire.
*  1 How he had spent a weekend at Frank Lloyd Wright’s house, where he had been awed to see Wright so engaged in “exalted discourse” that the architect didn’t notice he was drooling egg yolk all over his shirt and tie. In a poor man, Graham would have considered dripping egg yolk the sign of a slovenly mind. But in Wright, it meant genius.
    Graham remained determined to get rich, but he needed a new path. He was blessed with a clear-eyed view of himself. “[I] have no great gifts, but no great weaknesses, either.” He knew he was disciplined: He never drank alcohol or coffee, never smoked, never gambled. He solved problems quickly, and his hands were as agile as his mind. He loved hard work and believed in its moral virtue. With all this in mind, Graham settled on a second career: optometry. It was an odd but inspired choice. Though deeply unglamorous, optometry was a profession of gadgets—not very good gadgets. Graham relished the challenge of trying to improve eyeglasses and the tools that made them. He earned an optical degree from Ohio State in a mere eighteen months—inventing a new kind of lens along the way—and landed a coveted job at Bausch & Lomb immediately after graduation. When America entered the Second World War, Graham was a father in his mid-thirties. He spent the war figuring out how to use the optical technology in captured German equipment to improve American artillery scopes and binoculars.
    When the war ended, Graham was working for the optical giant Univis. It was a drag. Graham was a salesman, and he was good at it—gracious, elegant, smart—but his heart wasn’t in it: he lacked the salesman’s profligate bonhomie; he didn’t have the patience to explain things to people he thought were stupid. Graham liked the
tinkering
of optometry, not the salesmanship. So Graham threw himself at the profession’s number one problem: Why were eyeglasses so bad? Lenses were still made of glass, which meant they were fragile and dangerous. Thousands of Americans suffered eye injuries every year when their spectacles shattered.
    Graham saw the future, and it was . . . plastics. Despite decades of attempts, no one had been able to manufacture a plastic lens that was as reliable and scratch resistant as glass. Graham thought he could. In 1947, when Univis refused to dedicate itself to plastic lens research, Graham quit, recruited a partner, and poured all his money into starting a new company, which they called Armorlite. Graham moved to southern California, the red-hot center of the postwar industrial economy, and tried to make plastic eyeglasses. He failed and failed and failed. After a fiasco using Plexiglas, Graham began to experiment with a little-known plastic called CR-39. It had been used to make B-17 fuel tanks during the war.
    CR-39 was a disaster, too. It shattered the lens molds, and it shrank too much as it dried. But Graham persisted with it and perfected CR-39 lenses at the end of 1947. Armorlite’s lenses revolutionized the optical business. In the 1950s, Armorlite thrived but still served a niche market. Then fashion came to Graham’s aid. Large lenses were the vogue of the 1960s, and they could be made only of lightweight plastic. Armorlite boomed. Graham employed five hundred workers at his Pasadena factory. He marketed his product aggressively and was a great showman: When he gave a speech, he would yank off his Armorlite spectacles, fling them into the air, let them fall as the audience gasped, and then pick them up, unscathed. Graham kept on tinkering—he helped perfect contact lenses, developed the first antireflective coating for plastic lenses, and manufactured the first UV-protective lenses, among other inventions. He was a hero in his small corner of American business. Optical societies rained medals down on him. The National Eye Research Foundation dubbed him “The Man Who Made It