🔒Holocaust survivor Gerber reinvents U.S. manufacturing

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Q&A with David Gerber, author of “The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber.” David is Joseph Gerber's son.

Q:You've written a biography of your father called, “The Inventor's Dilemma: The Remarkable Life of H. Joseph Gerber.” What made you write the book and what were you hoping to accomplish?

A: The arc of my dad's life brought him from a labor camp in Nazi Austria to Hartford as a penniless and fatherless refugee, and toward the end of his life to the Oval Office when he received America's highest award in technology. You have to ask yourself: How did he do this? What was the source of his drive and resilience? And how could he have remained idealistic after witnessing — and experiencing — the Nazi takeover of Austria and the events that followed?

The title “The Inventor's Dilemma” also has a policy angle. My dad's story is a lens on the rise — and fall — of U.S. manufacturing in the second half of the 20th century. My dad's career shows that inventing new manufacturing systems can help to preserve our domestic industrial base, keeping jobs on U.S. soil.

It also shows that my dad's ability to invent these systems depended upon his proximity to the industrial base. For example, visiting a factory, he might notice scraps on a workroom floor, see this as wasted resources, and work out a better approach. Or, some domestic manufacturer might call his company with a problem that he could solve through invention. As American manufacturing goes abroad, these interactions vanish, and invention — specifically, the kind of invention that improves productivity — becomes more difficult.

This is a dilemma for inventors as well as for manufacturers in America.

Q: Your dad founded Gerber Scientific while still in college after inventing the variable scale, according to his New York Times obituary. He remained active there until a week before his death. Tell us the back story.

A: My dad invented the Gerber Variable Scale in 1945, as a junior in college. Working late one night, he grew tired of performing time-consuming engineering computations with his ruler and slide rule. It occurred to him that he could solve the problems quickly and easily, if he had a “rubber ruler” whose increment marks could be adjusted further apart or closer together. He removed the elastic from his pajamas, lightly marked out a scale on it, and finished all his homework that night. He patented this device, and with a $3,000 investment, started his company.

My dad died in 1996. He was quite sick throughout the last year of his life. He was diagnosed with advanced stage cancer, but continued his work duties, including his product development. Six months into the year, he suffered a stroke. He would not return to the office, but he continued to invent while at the hospital rehabilitation unit. He never stopped inventing. I don't think he could have.

Q: A promo for the book says your father “transformed modern manufacturing.” In what ways did he accomplish this?

A: The scope of my dad's inventions, and the other engineers that he presided over, encompassed the manufacture of most of the products we use on a daily basis: cars, clothes, shoes, electronics, eyeglasses, billboards, signs, maps and reading materials, among others. Craftsmen once made these products with hand-guided tools.

Today, factories and workshops use computers and robots to design and fabricate these products. My father and his company introduced the first computerized manufacturing products for these industries. In some industries, these introductions provided an incentive and framework for other companies to enter the market.

In other industries, my dad's company itself introduced and integrated an entire suite of products that automated the manufacturing process. This entailed reinventing the way that products were made — with computer automation. As a result, quality improved and prices dropped. Clothes, for instance, are cheaper and more varied and plentiful today as a result of his automation in the apparel industry.

Q: A former vice chairman of GE called your dad a modern-day Thomas Edison. Your father was an inventor with more than 600 patents to his name. Where did his inspiration come from? What drove him?

A: My dad was a born inventor. For his sixth birthday, his parents bought him a violin. He got tired of repeatedly playing the songs, so he automated the instrument using the components from his construction set. His room at college was decorated with his sketches of bubble-domed futuristic cars.

He sometimes created and solved problems in his dreams. He loved the challenge of inventing, of solving problems. Inventing was what he once called “the game in my mind.” He loved playing that game. He also relished people telling him that a solution was “impossible.” That just sharpened his persistence.

My dad's life began with a privileged position of esteem, love and security. With the Nazis, this was lost. His life thereafter was about regaining the ideals, the position, and the mission that was imparted to him during these early years. His grandfather, a respected physician in Vienna, was my dad's role model as a youth. His grandfather instilled in him the expectation that my dad would contribute to society meaningfully through science. My dad idealized this long lost world.

Q: Your father was a Holocaust survivor. What role did that play in his personal and professional life here in the United States? How did it shape him as a man?

A: My dad fled Austria for America in the spring of 1940 with his mother when he was 15. He lived under Nazi rule for two full years. He learned to use his wit and know-how to survive. He amplified the reception of his family's radio to hear foreign news broadcasts. He devised a scheme to allow his uncle to send messages outside the country past the Nazi censors using invisible ink.

He escaped with his father into Switzerland, only to be jailed and then turned over to the Gestapo. He and his father were placed on a train headed toward Dachau, but my dad was able to figure out how to disengage a latching mechanism on a window, and they jumped from the train.

He also began to give shape to his sense of mission to be productive during this time. When his father was transported to Poland, my dad converted an old kerosene stove and used it to build a hand warmer for his father to bring on the transport.

My dad was captured, and sent to a labor camp outside Vienna, where he worked hard labor, until his family secured his release because of his young age. As he pulled heavy drums and fetched coffee for the guards, he thought about how he wanted to be productive in society, not a taker.

Much of this time was spent hiding and preparing for possible emigration, punctuated by crises, such as Kristallnacht, and opportunities that had to be seized immediately or they would be lost.

This imparted a sense of urgency and an entrepreneurial perspective on risk-taking, namely, that delay and non-action has its own risks. I also think the Holocaust made my dad a humble man, even with his ambition and self-confidence.

Q: Your father made quite an impact in his life and was even honored by President Clinton with a national technology award. What might surprise people about him that wasn't widely known?

A: Although my dad patented inventions that involved software and computer systems, he never personally used a computer in his life. He pioneered computer-based technologies for numerous industries — even computer-aided design. But he himself sketched his engineering designs by hand. He studied dress design, and produced beautiful fashion drawings, which may have prepared him to recognize opportunities to automate apparel manufacture. He was talented artistically.

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