Electronic Brainpower

In the primitive mountain kingdom of Nepal, crunched between India and China, there are only 250 telephones, most of which connect the palace of 38-year-old King Mahendra with those of the Ranas, hereditary Prime Ministers. For the rest of its communications, Nepal depends on foot-runners, drum flourishes which announce major events, and one broadcasting station. This week Chicago's Cook Electric Co. was signed up by the International Cooperation Administration to bring modern communications to Nepal. Under a $1.5 million contract, Cook will set up a 1,500-line telephone system and a 50-station high-frequency radio-telephone network. High-powered radio transmitters will link Nepal with Calcutta and New Delhi.

For fast-rising Cook Electric, the Nepal contract is the kind of offbeat challenge on which it thrives. Building its growth on tough jobs that discourage competitors, Cook has pushed its sales from $350,000 in 1939 to $30.1 million in fiscal 1958. Along with sales, it has also built one of the top scientific organizations in the U.S. Says Cook's energetic President Walter C. Hasselhorn: "I don't get excited over assets. I get excited over men, abilities and talent."

Buck Rogers Inc. Cook's brainpower has taken it into dozens of fields. The company devised the recovery system for the Army's Jupiter missile nose cone (TIME, June 9), has presented the Defense Department with a plan for a manned space platform. Cook engineers are working on recovery systems for Atlas and Thor missiles, and on the triple-nosed Cree rocket, designed to eject parachutes at altitudes up to 150,000 ft. and speeds as high as 3,040 m.p.h. The goal: parachutes that will permit the return to earth of a man-carrying space capsule. In Cook's sprawling research labs, another team of engineers is working with its big cobalt 60 facility, testing for lubricating oils and ceramics that will withstand the heat and radiation produced by atomic aircraft. One of Cook's biggest jobs is to test missile and other weapon components. Explains one Cook engineer: "If you have two components, each only 90% reliable, your circuit is only 81% reliable. Some missiles have 300,000 parts, so you get the idea."

Not all of Cook's activities are space-age. Its Cinefonics division makes documentary films both for Cook and other companies; the Air Mod division reconditions Air Force planes and repairs electronic gear.

Drive & Direction. Chicago-born Walter C. Hasselhorn was a successful management consultant when he was asked to Cook in 1939 by the Edwards family, which controlled the company (it still has about 51% of the stock), but was concentrating on its castings business. They liked Hasselhorn's program for pulling Cook Electric out of the doldrums, made him president.

He gave Cook so much drive that it began underbidding big companies for contracts during World War II. developed a specialized technique for welding Monel. a nickel alloy needed in atomic reactors, after several corporate giants had given up. After the war. Hasselhorn sent teams hustling around the U.S. to recruit brainpower, signed up several employees himself after delivering his pitch over the ham radio he operates as a hobby.

It has taken time for Hasselhorn's team to turn its brainpower into profits, but research is paying off. Last week Hasselhorn announced that earnings for the first six months of fiscal '59 were $706,823 on sales of $18.3 million, up 567%. With a backlog of more than $20 million, he expects fiscal '59 sales of $36 million, earnings of more than $1.5 million.

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