Brains for Sale

For the U.S. Air Force, which can operate out of some 250 worldwide bases, one of the biggest problems is how best to deploy its forces in an emergency. Sudden situations--such as last week's Congo airlift, in which U.S. planes played a significant role--call for quick responses. Last week the Air Force took a step toward more effective emergency responses to even bigger crises. It announced a $40 million contract for an automatic global communications-computer system that will keep constant tab on its men, missiles and planes, tell how best to use them.

The system's manager will be an old hand in building military hardware. International Business Machines Corp. But the company that will teach IBM's computers how to solve the Air Force's vast logistic and strategic problems is tiny (1959 sales: $3,400,000), little known Technical Operations Inc., whose product is what might be called "the big think." Tech Ops is one of a growing number of new companies that provide theoretical solutions to the enormously complex problems now confronting business and Government.

Hypothetical Wars. Tech Ops has built its reputation with the armed forces and other Government agencies as an outfit to consult for answers to the far-out problems of space travel, radiation, communications, etc. It has contracts for such theoretical tasks as simulating a hydrogen bomb blast in outer space, and figuring out a defense against missiles systems to be used ten or 20 years from now. Tech Ops also set up a computer system in Washington by which hypothetical wars can be fought and generals trained to fight them.

Tech Ops is even doing something about the weather. "The trouble now," explains Tech Ops' President Frederick C. Henriques, 43, "is that you call up the Weather Bureau and receive a forecast of 'fair and warm' only to look out the window and find it's raining. That's because there is now a six-hour lag between forecasts." To cut weather forecasts to only a 20-minute lag around the nation, Tech Ops has joined with United Aircraft to develop a semi-automatic weather forecasting network for the Air Force, the Federal Aviation Agency and the Weather Bureau at a cost of more than $100 million. Linking a series of computers in major cities, it will digest temperature, pressure and cloud formation data, come up with speedy and accurate forecasts.

Solution Studying. In technical jargon, Tech Ops' principal job is "systems analysis." This means that it studies dozens of possible solutions to a problem, often combining physics, mathematics and engineering skills, suggests the most efficient solution.

While much of the company's work is theoretical problem solving, some of it is quite practical. Sample: How do you find out how much fallout there is on a house from an atom blast without exploding a bomb? Tech Ops' answer was to build a scaled-down city, surround it with plastic tubing through which radioactive cobalt 60 is pumped, and then measure the fallout. The results are projected to a full-scale city. Through such experiments for the Office of Civil and Defense Mobilization, Tech Ops will make recommendations for realistic civil defense measures.

A New Film. Tech Ops was formed in 1951 by Henriques and a group of young scientists who broke away from Tracer-lab, one of the firms along Boston's scientifically busy Route 128 (TIME July 13, 1959). The new company got a big boost in 1956, when Western Union and American Broadcasting-Paramount bought 50% of its stock for $500,000. Today, in its own new quarters along Route 128, Tech Ops' sales are running at the annual rate of nearly $5,000,000, and the new Air Force contract is expected to add $8 million to $10 million over the next three years.

Tech Ops' hope is always to remain a think company. But when any new product results from its studies, it sets up a subsidiary to make it. Work on a lightweight missile power supply resulted in Power Sources, Inc., which makes transistorized power packages for TV cameras and missiles. Tech Ops Chemtrol Corp., which processes Kodachrome film, grew out of the technique developed on an Air Force film project. Another project was to test out an instant developing, dry (i.e., nongelatinous) film for the Air Force. Tech Ops believes it now can turn out a cheaper and better dry film for photocopying than anything now on the market, and plans to set up another subsidiary to produce it by year's end. Eventually it hopes that ordinary box cameras will use dry film, which will make inexpensive, instant pictures that need no negative.

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