Pullman’s Schweitzer Engineering Labs keeps the lights on around the world
Ed Schweitzer’s father dropped out of Northwestern University to launch his own business, eventually employing 100 workers and holding nearly as many patents.
Schweitzer himself holds 184. The company he founded in 1982 has more than 4,300 employees, half of whom work at its Pullman headquarters. And plans call for more than 850 hires in Pullman during the next several years.
Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL) started out in Ed Schweitzer’s Pullman basement, building devices that would interrupt electricity flowing through a utility’s power lines when there was a fault, and also pinpoint the fault.
Since then, SEL has expanded beyond protective relays into metering, communications equipment and cybersecurity, and is on track to reach $1 billion in annual sales within five years.
In July, the company will unveil new electric power system protection that Schweitzer said is four to 10 times faster than current technology.
Innovation is only part of SEL’s story.
Schweitzer began selling the company to his employees in 1994, completing the sale in 2009. Each employee receives a yearly bonus of SEL stock equivalent to about 15 percent of his or her take-home pay, redeemable after the employee leaves the company.
Twenty-two years ago, a share of SEL stock was worth $50. That same share today is worth more than $1,000.
Schweitzer said, “We have people who started as assemblers who are retiring as millionaires.”
That may partly explain why SEL has made Fortune magazine’s list of 15 best workplaces in manufacturing and production the past two years.
At age 68, Ed Schweitzer maintains a busy schedule as company president, spending a third of his time traveling worldwide – often aboard one of SEL’s five Citation corporate jets. During a recent interview, he expressed no desire to slow down.
When asked how he relaxes, Schweitzer replied in all seriousness, “I’m not sure I do.”
An early interest in tinkering
Born in Evanston, Illinois, and raised in Northbrook, a Chicago suburb, the future industrialist and philanthropist constantly shadowed his father at the family’s upper-middle-class home.
“Whatever he was doing, I was interested in it,” Schweitzer said. “I took apart clocks and vacuum cleaners and old radios. And, of course, my father encouraged it.”
His father – Edmond O. Schweitzer Jr. – had attended nearby Northwestern one year before dropping out.
“One day in a physics class, the professor was trying to demonstrate electrostatic induction, and he blew the demonstration. My father knew why, so after class he went up to the professor and said, ‘I believe the experiment would have worked properly if you had done such and such.’ The professor looked at him and said, ‘Run along to your next class.’
“Afterward, my father thought, ‘I’m not getting anything out of this,’ so he quit and thereafter described himself as a college dropout. Yet he was a true Renaissance man who could build virtually any kind of machine.”
Years later, Ed Schweitzer III merged part of his father’s company into SEL. Subsequently, one of his father’s longtime employees recounted how once, many years earlier, she had left her car in the company parking lot overnight. When Schweitzer’s father asked about it, she explained that the water pump had broken.
“If you go get one, I’ll put it in for you,” her boss replied.
“The next day she came to work with a water pump, and my dad slithered underneath her car and replaced it for her.”
Schweitzer’s favorite high school classes were physics, chemistry and math. He went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in electrical engineering from Purdue “because one of my sisters went to Northwestern and another one went to Illinois, so I figured I’d better go somewhere else.”
After graduating in 1968, he spent five years working for the Department of Defense before joining a small Bay Area defense contractor. But Schweitzer wasn’t content, so his father – the college dropout – suggested he go back to school.
“I really wanted to learn more about electric power,” Schweitzer said, “and Washington State University had maintained its expertise in electric power systems. So that’s how I ended up as a doctoral student in Pullman in 1974.”
‘Why can’t we put all three together?’
His introduction to the Palouse occurred during spring break, when he drove north from California to check out the campus. “I’ll never forget coming up through Walla Walla and Dayton, crossing the Snake River, and being absolutely overwhelmed by the beauty of the area. It was love at first sight.”
His reintroduction to academic life at WSU was equally inspiring.
“I remember going over to the bookstore on a Friday night after registering, and spending the weekend absolutely intrigued with a book about electric power system protection by (Albert Russell van Cortlandt) Warrington, this British guy.”
Schweitzer knew about signal processing from working for the government. But microprocessors were brand new. “And I started wondering, ‘Why can’t we put all three together – signal processing, system protection and microprocessors?’ ”
Voila!
Except that Schweitzer’s eureka moment would take years to realize.
After earning his doctorate, Schweitzer spent two years teaching at Ohio University in Athens, then returned to Pullman to join WSU’s faculty and develop his revolutionary technology.
Utilities relied on bulky relays that “were nothing but springs and magnets and coils,” Schweitzer recalled. “My device was one-eighth of the size, one-tenth of the weight and one-third of the price of anything else on the market.”
His first sale was to Otter Tail Power Co. in Fergus Falls, Minnesota.
“They had a troublesome line they had upgraded from 230 to 345 volts to transmit more energy,” he said. “They took an interest in my device because it was the first one that not only could trip the power line if there was a fault, but also locate the fault. For instance, if the line was 100 miles long, my device might tell them the fault was 15.5 miles in from one end.”
Otter Tail Power bought three SEL units for $6,500 apiece.
Over time, other companies began making digital protective relays. “But our product legitimized the technology,” Schweitzer said. “No longer could anyone say this was just a flash in the pan from some professor working in his basement.”
Don’t predict the future – invent it
Today, virtually every electric power utility in the United States uses SEL products, and they can be found in more than 150 countries worldwide.
“And we’re very vertically integrated,” Schweitzer said, “shooting our own plastics, writing our own software and instruction books, and building our products domestically” – much of the work done in Pullman.
When asked if local residents understand what goes on at SEL’s 103-acre research and production campus, Schweitzer replied, “We certainly make an effort of explaining what we do. When I give talks to the Chamber and Rotary, I tell them that when weather or something else creates problems with the electric system, our products trip the breakers to minimize the impact. And usually we can turn the power right back on, because most faults are temporary.
“Put simply, we keep the lights on.”
And keeping the lights on at SEL requires constant innovation. When Schweitzer launched his company 32 years ago with a $2,000 investment, General Electric and Westinghouse were the big players. Now SEL leads the industry.
Could another basement startup someday challenge SEL for industry supremacy?
“Absolutely,” Schweitzer said. “I warn our people about that all the time.
“To use a ‘Wayne’s World’ analogy, there could be two chimps on a davenport in a basement somewhere that want to do what we’re doing. If we’re not looking forward all the time, something like that could happen.”
Schweitzer said the qualities he looks for in prospective employees are integrity, curiosity and a strong work ethic.
And when it comes to work ethic, Schweitzer practices what he preaches.
He typically rises between 5 and 5:30 a.m., scans local, national and international news from a variety of sources – the Moscow-Pullman Daily News, the Wall Street Journal, Politico and the Drudge Report – answers overnight emails, “and if I’m a really good boy, I’ll spend half an hour or 45 minutes exercising.”
Around 7:30 he joins his wife, Beatriz, for breakfast, arriving at his office a half-mile away at 8. He occasionally returns home for lunch, and likes to call it a day by 6 p.m.
“I’m pretty boring,” Schweitzer insists. “I’m either at home, at work or out of town. I like to spend time with my family, or reading about economics and politics. My only hobby is amateur radio. I know nothing about sports.”
Ed and Beatriz Schweitzer have donated generously to WSU and local civic causes, as well as to the Republican Party.
When asked what he thinks of being referred to as “a small-town Bill Gates,” Schweitzer replied coyly, “I guess the small-town part is OK.”
Does he wish he’d done anything differently?
“I don’t think that way,” Schweitzer said. “I keep looking forward.”
He said he’s most proud of selling SEL to his employees, and inventing and manufacturing devices that have benefited other people. “But I never imagined I’d ever do it on this scale.”
As for what lies ahead for his eponymous company, Schweitzer concluded, “I always remind people that the best way to predict the future is to invent it and build it yourself.”
Correspondent Michael Guilfoil can be reached via email at mguilfoil@comcast.net.