CONTROL DOCUMENT
prints
by: Michael Sullivan Smith
Tweets by @MSullivanSmith On line, an RSS feed tracks the art's Twitter provenance from a 2014 grudge on centralized platforms on up to the present.
The above Facebook page chronicles the exchange of a print for a signature and then twenty-five years later uses the print to verify authenticity of ownership with the signature. The mechanism's role is complementary to the artificial intelligence algorithm that today digitally recognizes the face of a print and matches both the object and the signature location to an address in a Facebook archive.
Two examples of this generative approach to printing took place in 1994; both with images related to the Woodstock'94 event in Saugerties, NY. These are presented now as examples of how other production of images over the rest of the decade of the 1990s can be authenticated by AI “reading” a function of the Strataprinter's technology.
A broad range of ideals took form in the Strataprinter. In its time it bridged the unimaginably complex requisites that needed to come together before analog communication could bring the quest for discovery in the decades in which this began, into the realization that production control held an answer, in analog sequencing, to the digital revolution; which is the story being told today. In that sense, Strataprints are proof that what was all around in the form of the digital revolution would eventually be about the spaces between the digits.
The way “digital art” had to be imagined in those days of limited output opportunities is central to the reminiscence that is presented here; written in the years that bookended the beginning of the new millennium as the Internet gained its footing. It comes from perhaps the clearest vantage point that the formative years of the Internet could offer – between Woodstock's twenty-fifth anniversary and its thirtieth – years that built a legacy for the Strataprinter.
The
The Strataprinter
AI from a mechanism POV
I had toyed with the notion of leaving the Strataprinter in obscurity and its processes an enigma. It would actually be best for me that the technology remain in retirement. But that would likely burden my estate if things go the way they're heading now. So the less obscure, the better.
The Strataprinter evolved out of several patents I'd written for improving electronics manufacturing during the early stages of Moore's Law, back in the early-to-mid 1980s. It was a technology that was aware of the rapid trend toward miniaturization in the industry, so I kept back rights to myself, when licensing, for the exploratory applications useful to the manual arts.
The decade between the birth of the World Wide Web and the end of the century was the period I dedicated to this arts-based development. I still have a lot of nostalgia for this time, even though the dot-com bubble's exuberance put demands on personal computer development that moved Moore's law into a scale of electronics that forced my technology's obsolescence a lot faster than I'd hoped. And the dot-com phony investment fantasies also doused any funding potential that could have taken my own unique manufacturing sector's Strataprinter to the moon. But, in hindsight these twenty to twenty-five years later, I still have good feelings about what emerged out of going through all that at once.
The emergence of a third web is now bringing this all back. The excitement of having a large and broad distribution of production out in the wild from while developing the Strataprinter in that decade before social media moved us into the second web, has brought new uses to these unique products.
Information technology is the impetus for what I mean to fit these into the ideas those that are building a decentralized Internet use to bridge the worlds of the actual and the virtual in art. There are thousands upon thousands of individually identifiable items produced by the Strataprinter, all of which can be steeped in a kind of unique character that gives them a value only apparent since technologies became ubiquitous for gathering information from social media, and have since given pure information great value.
Taking advantage of that, I am elevating the concept of the rare sequent of the physical world to the properties of a digital image that make that recognizable as rare for the Internet. The massive distribution of these Strataprinter-made objects that already exists can be helping information technology catch up to being able to recognize digital images by their code, while benefiting the owners of objects, associating them with an identity as a valuable. No peer to the Strataprinter or its sequential color production has come forward to suggest putting this in the common imagination with such an obvious capacity to be immediately useful.
In the six years between Woodstock94 and when I finally mothballed it, Beta tests for the Strataprinter incessantly sought out contracts for popular topics such as the 50th anniversaries for WWII and the Korean War; the first International Space Station missions; marking the inductions into the Baseball Hall of Fame; and, scores more of such cameo appearances of the fine detail printing of its patents. This promoted the permanence of a keepsake meant to preserve memories worth having available to a future time, and all identified the use of the patented process.
But it is the wild array of color sequencing tests, begun in earnest with the SignOn project, I am most identifying with the Strataprinter. That was in mind when I framed the opening of the narrative in the Medium posts, of a couple months ago, with another's interest in this potential of the Strataprinter – also implying this higher level of use could have been recognized long ago – as a way of saying, just because I ran with it in no way means I exhausted it.
At present the mechanism of the Strataprinter is in its patents. That is now in the public domain and so the technology is now open source. But the soul of what I show the mechanism doing is in the prototypes and lab notes accumulated as these tests moved these unique characteristics of identification forward that the products possessed when they went into broad distribution.
What would be needed to do this again may no longer be available. My idea of inventiveness today looks more to the challenge of returning this distributed base to their order of creation, in a third web beta that makes possible exploitation of methodologies for creating the standards of an actual/virtual mix. The distributions this uses are of an earlier Strataprinter's time where it was being developed at the time of the World Wide Web's decentralized origins. Aligning this with concepts a distributed cohort of stakeholders in a blockchain space can build today may take a whole different framework.
So, this ode to the Strataprinter is a way of explaining a greater challenge to this “space” in terms of my systemic view of the present state-of-the-art of digital art. What I'm introducing here is only one of my three works that fall under the category of systemic art: the first being cryptoknot that builds sequential geometrics on the Internet; the second, the Great Knot for attracting random photo image sequences to bring attention to it on the Internet; and, these that the Strataprinter has produced as dynamic sequences of colors that image recognition technology will soon “see” as digital rarities, for their uniquely derivative “states” of calculable art. Of the three, they represent the most understandable in their use of the Internet and its use of artificial intelligence to interpret their value in terms of both digital art and the cataloging of physical collectibles.
With so much talk about transitioning to ledger-based value in goods, it is more important than ever to remind ourselves of what set the Strataprinter's small part in feeding this topic in motion. There exists from the time of the turn of the century a reminiscence that documents those heady years. The several recollections that follow, made much closer than now to the time of these important activities, are selected here to give a flavor of the era in which these ideas led to patents and they to mechanisms and that to the products that we are talking about today.
The Strataprinter
Invention
Those many years ago the zeitgeist of the sixties declared that I did systemic art. I used to joke that I was doing systemic art as I soldered the plumbing of my heating system for the derelict house I bought in Saugerties, NY when I was just beginning my twenty-fifth year. As I assembled my new septic system I was doing systemic earth works, too. Over the years I began to look at everything I did as mechanical and the skills I used as simply functional technique. My calligraphy fell into this category. So did the printing. My design work I thought of as less design than draftsmanship. Though I continually came up with more efficient ways to do a task, I always separated creative problem solving from pure creativity because I reserved that for the realm of art, not work. Art to me was a higher goal in my life, something I would be doing once I earned the right. When it came to art it did not matter if the creativity were recognized; except by me. It's not exactly that I viewed my art as a pastime. It's more that I defended its role in my life by separating it from critical scrutiny: by not making it appear to be important to my existence, my identity. In truth, it was my whole identity... which was about to change.
I fell head-long into a creative endeavor that competed so intensely with that reserved relationship; art to creativity; that I had to completely re-identify myself in order to just cope. I invented something. I didn't improve something or re-design something or upgrade something. I made something that not only did things that had never worked before but it also made things the likes of which had never been produced before. It was, in its imagining, something that was inexhaustible in its potential. It was something like my artwork; my knots; but it was not esoteric, it was practical. It was something creative that could be placed up to critical scrutiny where you didn't need a thesis and the undivided attention of a select audience for it to be accepted.
It all started one day as I was reading the copy of the current IBM display I was producing; having to do with bonding 32 layers of an electronic circuit together; when I became curious. Each layer was screen printed. Each had to be precise. In order to make the display I was given samples of the printed layers to photograph. They had obvious defects that, from experience, I analyzed as attributable solely to problems with the silk-screen process.
I asked and was given a tour of their production facility. Through the glass walls, in the perfectly controlled environment of the printing room, was a reject pile at the end of the comparitor station that was a good ten percent larger than the one there of acceptable quality prints. I had been reading technical papers on screen-printing for years and there was just nothing I could think of that would have made it any better. This printing was called "thick film" printing in electronics and its early 80's deficiencies were what helped hasten the refinement of another technology, laser, because lasers were employed to correct the defective screen prints through "trimming".
I had been reading a book on wall paper production throughout history and the idea of block printing was fresh on my mind. I was thinking that if the screen could print in the same way that a contact printer does for photographically printing from a negative then the print would always be the same "geometry" as the original film used to produce the stencil on the screen. What stuck in my mind was that two or three good wall paper prints could be pulled from one engraved wood block and that many different colors could be painted into the engraved lines of a single block and all printed at once. The potential of having a precise and efficient multi-color screen printing process struck me as being an invention.
I had a test screen I used to demonstrate the quality of my printing. It had a halftone of Einstein, various point sizes of type, resolution test wedges and other devices all arranged in a 9 inch by 12 inch page. I sealed this so it was air-tight and glued a band of surgical tubing around the bottom. When I covered the image with ink and placed it on the enclosed area of my vacuum table and activated the vacuum. I produced a perfect image on the table surface. The entire screen was sucked down to the table by the vacuum draw. I was very quick at this experiment because I was afraid, once I saw the screen touch the table, that the ink would be drawn into the small holes of the table surface and clog them. I was amazed at how short a period of time it took to make the contact and leave a print behind. And the fine quality of the print totally left me bewildered.
If it was that easy, why wasn't this being done already? I was using enamel ink for this experiment and that was essentially the same base as the fluids used for the electronics printing. Why wasn't this method of screen printing at least used in this industry?
I cleaned off my table and then got some vinyl contact material, covered my whole table top and then cut out an area that exposed the holes inside the tubing but outside the print area of the screen. I repeated my experiment and ended up with the same results. I cleaned off the vinyl I printed on and did the experiment again only holding the vacuum draw for a much longer period of time. The deposit of ink was noticeably thicker.
Then I had an idea. I put a photographic emulsion on a screen that I had attached the surgical tubing to and had drilled a whole through for attaching an air tube. I used the vacuum pump of my exposure unit to draw the screen down to the glass against a film of the images of the layers of the circuit of the IBM display. Then I exposed and developed this image onto the screen. I inked this screen and printed it the same way as the earlier experiments and left the print to dry overnight. The next day I overlaid the film used to make the screen on the dry print on the table. The images were exactly the same size. Then I cleaned the screen and compared the stencil on the screen to the film. The stencil was a good sixteenth inch smaller than the original art.
What I had discovered was a method of controlling the distortion that is inherent in any printing done with a resilient diaphragm. And this method also controlled deposition by time instead of by stencil thickness. I was certain that this was the holy grail in electronics production, the glory industry of the eighties.
Within another day or two I had worked out a way to print on individual sheets of coated paper so I could keep the results of my experiments. During my next visit to discuss an IBM job I carried these with me and mentioned in passing what I had been doing. The people I was dealing with were graphic designers and art directors and had no knowledge of either my technology or the ones used by their employer. I was, however, cautioned about divulging anything to IBM. Over lunch I was told many tales of stolen ideas and frustrating communications with "corporate legal". That meant the easy way was not open to me.
I contacted a patent attorney and wrote a description of my invention. In it I drew pictures of how I wanted it to work, not how I had actually made it work. I had an interview and the attorney felt that there was a likelihood of one patent and possibly more. Because I had presented it as a method, it was a method patent that would be first approached. Wishing to prove out all the aspects of the method based on a potentially protectable technology, I immediately began to design equipment and devices that could additionally be patented. I began by working out the sequence of operations that would make it function and asked a friend who had done electro-mechanical circuit design to make me a box that could cycle the vacuum on and off and keep time. This box was the size of a small television. On vacation that summer I read "Soul of A New Machine" by Tracy Kidder and got really excited about being in the middle of something new.
The Strataprinter
Fitting a Market
I was learning about writing patents and filing for patents but I knew I couldn't do anything along the lines of learning about marketing patents until I at least had a "patent applied for" that I could tack onto my offering. So while doing all of this I also took on another IBM contract that was going to prove useful for providing income during the period of development of the invention that followed. This time I was called into a local lab and not by the graphic designers but by the engineering staff. They needed to design a pattern of targets that could be printed on a clear plastic sheet. This was to be taped to the face of a computer monitor and used to align the guns of the cathode. It was called a 5080 Alignment mask and was to be an engineer's tool to be packed in with every workstation. It was even to have an official IBM part designation and its own print. I produced the prototypes for this, then the pilot production and when it came time to ship the workstations, I was designated as the sole approved vendor. Every few months thereafter I would get an order for five to eight thousand of these.
My initial idea was to print alignment masks with the new process. I considered this to be a perfect opportunity to prove out the operational characteristics while making money at the same time. Printing the masks proved to be impractical but I did manage to use the invention to print the contents panel and part number on every envelope used to package an alignment mask for over seven years. This was the first production use of the process and also its longest continuous use. I would set up a video camera and record myself printing these large envelopes as fast as the conveyor could carry them away. I even printed them right off a stack. These pictures were among the applications shots I assembled into a video late that year after my first patent application had been registered with the patent office.
Shortly after I had the application registered I was introduced to a person who said he could get me a buyer for my patent. One of the earliest things he did was to examine the market. That meant finding businesses that were using similar technologies it would be in competition with. This fellow returned one day and said he found a company that would apply the technology as a test site but first they wanted to know if I knew the business. To prove this they wanted some screens made. So, a year after I had done my first experiments I found myself spending nearly a solid month in the darkroom perfecting a special method of controlling the emulsion thickness on a screen. I made ten engineered screens, all precisely matched to a specific function of a multi-layered circuit and supplied them to this electronics printer in Connecticut. The verdict was that these were the best set of screens they had ever printed with. Every print was perfect.
So, in the process of making these screens I had solved the waste problem I observed when I was first inspired to do the invention and I didn't even use the invention to do it. I was in a quandary as to what I should do now to promote the benefits of my patent. I had my patent attorney include what I developed for producing these screens into the claims of my patent and then I went out to see if I could compete with the half dozen or so companies that made these specialized screens in this country. I went to visit one and, seeing the overall lack of sophistication in their operations, concluded that it wouldn't harm them a bit to lower their prices and squeeze me out of the business if I went in this direction to get in the industry. The electronics printers were used to trimming the poorly printed circuits anyway. I became confused about which way to turn.
On my drive home I remembered a report I saw on the television about the next good technology investment. Bar codes were just being introduced to merchandising and precision printing was needed because of the state of scanner technology. Developing to do spot printing of bar codes would place the technology in the marking equipment market. This was a down-and-dirty market and just the opposite of the high precision electronics market I had directed my patent toward. But, if the bar code made it necessary for them to get high tech, then maybe there was a place in this market for me.
I was annoyed at the fellow that had put me in the darkroom for over a month and didn't even tie down a commitment for testing a machine afterward. He had also brought some fellows up from New Jersey that wanted to use the technology as the basis for a National Science Foundation seed grant to start up a business for making equipment and special formulas of inks for conductive circuitry. Again there was no follow-up to inform me on the state of their proposals.
I decided to try marketing the patents on my own. I composed a video tape with my own voice-over and called the CEOs of two or three large manufacturers of marking equipment. They were immediately interested. Engineers flew in from Pittsburgh and drove down from New Hampshire. I had more activity in three weeks than I had over the whole previous half year.
The company from New Hampshire had a patent that they said conflicted with mine. It hadn't appeared in the search and so I read it, decided I was different and had my attorney add it to the citations. The company from Pittsburgh was interested more because I challenged the company from New Hampshire than because they had a need for a new technology. For over a year and a half I negotiated with them, making several trips to Pittsburgh to demonstrate the operation of the technology and discuss its cost of development with their executives.
For the production of the Woodstock'94 tags the experience with these was simply expanded into a stricter record keeping process. The “spirit” of Woodstock as a festival of arts was planned to be captured in the different multicolor compositions by having each come from an artist's imagination. Each “edition” is a distinctly different “painting” of five to seven colors, nearly all done by the artist Vladimir Bachinsky.
While all of this was going on I was immersing myself in Radio Shack books on circuit design and all the catalogs available for miniature pneumatic components. As I began to see the possibilities of logic circuits I started to design multiple functions into the controlling circuitry. Soon I had something that matched the design I had imagined and presented to the patent attorney nearly a year and a half before. This was a complete system made up of many modular parts all based on the same controlling circuitry. By the time I was into my second office action with the patent examiner I was already adding more sophisticated operating technology to both the text and the "figures" for a follow-up patent. When I made my first trip with the technology to Pittsburgh it was a complete printing system small enough to fit in an attaché case as carry-on luggage.
The Strataprinter
Licensing
While I waited to hear back from Pittsburgh I spent my time digging fence post holes, planting the posts in even ten foot centers and joining them with four evenly spaced rough sawn boards. This was forced separation. I had shown a working system to Pittsburgh and all they had to do was agree to manufacture it and sell it. I did not want to do any more to change the situation. But I kept getting back agreements with no time schedule and no oversight. I was waiting them out by surrounding a ten acre field with fences.
I was finally told their commitment was going to be 3 years and ten engineers and end up costing 5 million dollars before they could make their first cent back. I was sent a license agreement signed by them to sign. I was uncomfortable. Three years seemed like a very long time to me. I put the nicely bound legal document in the same file folder with all the notes from their hundred or more phone calls and closed it in a drawer. I opened a pad of graph paper and began to design my circuit board.
The device I took to Pittsburgh, the one I opened for them to show how efficiently the components fit into its shoebox size, had inside three smaller black boxes. Inside each; one labeled timer, one labeled logic and one labeled triggers; were perf board-bound electronic components with dozens of wires jumping and crossing over, under and around them. The boxes were stuffed so tightly with this spaghetti that only prayer prevented a short. To have the controller be marketable this had to be refined into a circuit board containing all the functions. I approached this as one of my knots. I did trial and error, arranging and rearranging the chip packages to get the most effective paths between their gates and the timers and the other network items. I fit power and regulators and solenoid triggers and I did it with my children on my lap, at the dinner table and even in my sleep. I remembered how I could see blackberries in my sleep when I would spend the whole day picking them as a boy. Finally the pages of chart paper were reduced to two tape films and I made my two sided board and soldered onto it all the Radio Shack parts. And it worked and it didn't take any of the five engineers time at all.
At this point I made two fateful mistakes. The first was in assuming that I would be traveling to Pittsburgh once an month. I had bought on time a nice little sport truck to leave at the airport. The second was in borrowing ten thousand dollars from my mother-in-law. I felt so certain of the value in my solid-state controller I was sure everything I developed would translate into a more powerful negotiating position and mean more money for me when I signed the agreement. I was ready to sign that agreement.
I called the old number in Pittsburgh that had been calling me continually only six months before. My contact there had left to take up a career as a minister. The company had shifted management positions and the vice president that had signed the agreement in my file drawer was now not even in that division. The iron that had once been hot was now as cold as a February morning.
I continued along without breaking my pace. With the money I had borrowed I budgeted incorporating the business, buying components for making ten controllers and buying a computer for doing the correspondences, spreadsheets, projections and doing the blueprints for the machines. I was going to do a technology business all by myself. It was then that I found I had lost control.
The patents kept costing more and more as I was filing in Europe and having translations done into Japanese, I had borrowed money from friends, started handing out subscriptions to my company stock as guarantees to my suppliers and those I was using for consultants, and, in lieu of wages, signed over my half ownership in an old house we had bought to the employee I had printing the alignment masks... and the bills were still stacking up.
At this time I had a call and an immediate visit from the people from New Jersey. These were the same people I had last heard from when they were applying for a National Science Foundation seed grant. Now, without any indication of how that went or what they had been doing in the intervening year, they put a licensing agreement in front of me that was to merge my technology into an Initial Public Offering they were forming. They didn't even have a name for the company chosen. After a few questions and glowing answers I signed the license. They then decided to have a name that had "print" in it instead of "chem".
It seemed that public companies that were in the electronics processing equipment market were hot right now and that my new patent would add considerable value to a new offering. Time was of the essence. The market is a very fickle source of startup money. For the next five months I followed the process as they filed their forms and prospectus with the Securities and Exchange Commission. They had a powerhouse of a expediter that pushed this through and nearly had the entire offering sold before its approval.
Once it had its money the company played bonding authorities against each other and finally narrowed their headquarters selection to a toss-up between Utah and New Mexico. They settled in New Mexico but kept regional labs in New Jersey, Michigan and in Utah. I was shown pictures of Taos and there was talk of moving me. I seriously considered leaving behind my home. I knew I would eventually loose this place, short of extreme financial success, and would never have 7000 square feet of space to live and work in again.
The success of the offering gave me enough money to pay off some bills and get current with my attorneys. I had a steady income promised in the agreement as a consultant. Most important to me was that I retained supply rights for all the controllers that would be used for the special application printers they would be developing. This gave me a good reason for continuing my developments of the technology parallel to theirs and I made a decision not to suffer the setbacks that would come with a move.
The Strataprinter
Illigal Activities
Cracks had already started to appear in my relationship with the licensee company when payments had become sporadic into the second year. Communications were not returned. Day and night I received phone calls from a fellow in Utah that was a subcontractor to a company owned by one of their principle shareholders. We shared frustrations. In mid-March I was flown out to Salt Lake City to get the controller working. It had been two years and they had not yet used it for testing. When I arrived I was introduced to the promotions they had been doing. All of their money was being spent on hyping the management team, making them look like Einsteins. They did color pages in Business Week and spots on the financial network of television. Without compunction they took full credit for all my technology. I was told that investors would not believe it if they allowed me to represent it. I had spent two weeks trying to explain on the phone atmospheric pressure, altitude and resistance settings in a sensor input and the Einsteins weren't understanding. It took me three minutes to trim the circuits for the 5,000 foot altitude. Then everything worked like new; which it was. The rest of the time I visited Park City and other late winter attractions. It was actually only the second time I had ever flown in my life and I was quite grateful for the paid vacation.
Upon my return that I began to write grievances down to pass by my patent attorney. The word that had been started when they couldn't figure out how to operate the technology was that it was no longer capable of fulfilling their mission. They were flying trial balloons about micro-lithography and vapor deposition, much more complex and costly technologies than mine, and way outside the description of their product. I began to believe they were sniffing too much of their chemistry.
The main thing that raised my ire was that they said I could not hold a fine line in production. I decided I would showboat on this. Saugerties has a lighthouse. That year was the 200th anniversary of the national Lighthouse Commission and there was going to be a ceremonial lighting of the newly restored tower. I had done an intricate line rendering of the lighthouse that, when reduced, had consistent lines and spaces between lines of one mil in width. These were the extreme parameters for thick film printing in electronics at the time. I printed 150 of these drawings on normal size ceramic tiles using alkyd enamel ink. I packaged these in envelopes that I again printed with the technology. What I printed on the envelope was a description of the new technology and its application for electronics that was proven by the production parameters of the lighthouse print. I gave away 120 of these to dignitaries from the local, state and federal governments that attended the celebrations. The remaining 30 I sent out to the Board of Directors meeting, along with a description of how many officials were aware of the technology and its usefulness. Also I included my bill for unpaid periods of consulting and for expenses related to making special printing devices to do medium size printing. They sent me the payment.
Very shortly after this I got a call from a securities investigator who asked a lot of questions about the length and depth of my involvement with the company. I was forthcoming with my answers. He called a second time and asked if I would mind giving a recorded deposition for an inquiry into certain unlawful activities related to those involved in the Initial Public Offering of the company. I told him I had no problem so long as he had no problem in telling me what those unlawful activities were about. Mail fraud and racketeering was the answer.
For a day the large library table in the great room of the studio was filled with recording devices and stacks of exhibits. Upstairs I had the computer I had used for as long as I had been having correspondences with the company. I used the dated files on the hard drive throughout the day to verify the dates of creation and revision of all the letters in my file to the company. There were many. I had better documentation than anyone he had ever before interviewed. When he had finished and was packing the gear he told me that an insider shareholder had implicated me in a conspiracy to hide the involvement of a major shareholder that had been convicted of crimes that disqualified him from involvement in the securities offering.
I called George, Mr. "procuring cause", as he had used the term to get me to agree to the license. I asked if he knew what he got me into. It was only then that I got the whole story. The woman that was so efficient at spiriting through the public offering was an ex-spy, a double agent he said, and had only been a woman for the past fifteen years since having a sex change. The fellow with the convictions got them from selling phony government oil leases; in the US Mail no less. Yes, he had five degrees, all in law and business and all from Ivy League schools.
At the end of the third year, the first full year when they had to pay the minimum royalty, the moment the year was up and no check had arrived, I had my patent attorney rescind the license.
The Strataprinter
Silicone
The period of patent examiners, attorneys, and licenses was at an end. I knew now where I stood and it was time to begin anew. All of my patents had been issued, three in the U.S. and the one in Europe in Germany and the U.K. I had an invitation for the third year in a row to exhibit at an annual show for inventors. It was in Pittsburgh.
This was a totally fun experience. The other exhibitors were showing chip clips, steering wheel locks, mood stones, auto trunk organizers, bungee jumpers and shoes with springs, and we all got the best pre show marketing advice seminar I'd ever attended.
I'd printed a big banner on Tyvek with a picture of the printing system and, in big letters, "printing in a suction cup". It matched the prevailing “gizmo” theme. I had a nice six page illustrated handout for those interested in licensing. I printed the lighthouse on a die-cut plastic pieces for the attendees to take home. I later could boast that I distributed tourist information about Saugerties as far away as China and Australia.
This show was really a relief valve. But at it I had a chance to meet people that recognized the technology as the one hyped over the past two years by the company I had licensed to. They wanted to know why I could make it work when that company couldn't deliver on its promise. This show was actually a few months before the license would be terminated and I was not prepared to comment. There was always the chance that a miracle might happen. the most important thing was that the invention was actually seen in public printing when, for all those years, it had only been talked about.
I came away from the show with a medal and a certificate. This gave me something to use as publicity – a prize in an international inventors show. This got me a partner.
I was still doing follow-ups trying to secure a manufacturing partner from the show contacts when I was called by a local machine shop I had used to make the molds for vulcanizing my printhead seals. It was a query on if my printer could be used for irregular shapes. I had been asked this by many at the show, too, and said, it depends on how much you want it to. If we work together it can. I already had a design in my head for a printing module that would offset my screen print from a silicone bladder. I worked out a deal to develop this as their exclusive add-on to my patented controls if they produced my designs.
Having a manufacturing partner became the catalyst for a series of events that dominated the decisions I would be making for a long time. The world had changed. Not just my world but all the world around. Three years before, I was instrumental in getting the place computerized. I came in with drawings from my computer for a mold design. The geometry was pretty complex and they were still working from punch tapes coded from an Apple IIE. Instead of being able to directly transfer the design off my disk I had to go back and notate all the dimensions. It didn't phase them in the least having drawings from computers brought in from their IBM clients but when I brought mine in and questioned why they had to do the work twice, within two weeks they had three computers installed and the punch card kid was learning to do CAD-CAM. That experience told me that the owner, Jimmy, knew the future when he saw it.
Now, after three years, all of their machines, except for the two old lathes that the owner and an old fellow in his 80's used, were connected to a design computer in the office from which instructions were sent over special wires. This was called CNC or Computer Numeric Code machining and Jimmy's operation was state-of-the-art for his size.
The first thing I did was to develop a protocol for transferring designs I did in my studio in AutoCad so that they could go directly into their MasterCAM for tool path codes. Being able to do this would mean that all of my components could be duplicated easily by simply calling up a program and sending it to a machine with the proper size raw material. This also meant that I didn't have to spend hours explaining the function and reason for each component and each dimension of each component. People trained as machinists love to spend their time understanding how machines work. I didn't want to take the time to do this.
When I'd finished all the mechanics and all the operating systems and everything worked perfectly, There was only the silicone pad to tackle. This was designed for a multi-pour, multi-cure structure with three different precise formulations of silicone. One was for the transfer surface. The second was for the envelope and clamping rim and the third was for the soft fill that made the transfer surface conform around an irregular surface. These were all assembled in a mold with precise cure times so that the completed pad was one unit. As I was designing this I had continual visits from the manufactures of the silicone materials. They had never encountered someone designing silicone to be structured in this way. Once I perfected the method of manufacturing this pad we made dozens of them, all workable.
Components for 50 full systems were made and 25 were assembled. I designed a brochure. Promotions began in magazines and two regional trade shows were done. The system was introduced in an international exhibition that fall and a salesman was trained to do field demonstrations. A marketing company was hired to do a mailings.
There was a great deal of interest. The few that were sold functioned flawlessly and were in perfect places for bringing in endorsements. But when there was a general business slowdown in early '93 the support for me as a developer could not be paid and funding for marketing ceased. I took it upon myself to handle this and started to independently work on a new business plan to sell the inventory.
The Strataprinter
Multi-color Printing
During the last months of the project with Jimmy I spent every day testing one ink and then another in response to a potential customer's inquiries. Each ink had a special affinity for a special material and no ink was specifically formulated to work in my unique process. I had to adapt the inks that I got as samples with silica fillers to thicken them and then test print them with my printer for the specific manufacturing function. It was the difficulty and time involved with the broad variety of these demands that eventually cracked Jimmy's marketing wherewithal. My patience was wearing thin too. When I left I had tested one ink that came close to working straight from the manufacturer and it was the function of this ink that I wanted to direct the next development of my technology toward. The ink was a baking epoxy and this opened up the possibility of doing permanent prints on metal and glass to place the technology in the crafts market – one I could relate more to than industrial marking.
I had made a firm decision five months before I left Jimmy's. I would not spend one more minute developing the offset printer. When I thought about the years I spent in this project I slipped into frustration. I wanted to avoid this feeling and the only way was to avoid this side of the technology. All the while I was working on it I felt that most of what it was meant to do could be more efficiently done with direct printing. I wanted to do a parallel development for this but Jimmy wouldn't hear of any new designs or demands on his machine time. Now this direct printing and printing on ceramic tiles in particular were the only things on my mind.
I was anxious to try out an idea. Eight years back I had done an experiment with multi-color printing. I mixed about eight colors to be the same thickness and dabbed them on a screen covering the image of a cow. The cow was standing next to a pond bank and there were grasses and flowers under its feet. My cow was done in browns and black. The grasses, flowers and water made up another five colors. Using my process, in its earliest, prototype state, I printed 300 of these cows on PVC plastic before the ink in the shadow under the belly of the cow gave out. I did these in less than three quarters of an hour and estimated that if someone were always cleaning and re-inking a screen, two people could produce an equivalent to a production rate of 2,800 per hour because no other printing process could print all the colors at once. I wanted to develop a product line of multi-color printed ceramic tiles that applied this idea.
The first time I tried printing on tile was for the lighthouses. After that I did Pete Seger's Sloop Clearwater for the local Sloop clubs to sell as fund-raisers. This was all done three years or more ago. And the prints were one color and in alkyd enamel ink. They were breakthrough products because of the quality of the lines being held but they weren't dishwasher or detergent safe so as a quasi-utilitarian product that may be used as a trivet in the kitchen, they were not yet ready for prime time.
The discovery of the baking epoxy offered me two new technical opportunities. The first was the durability of the cured color. The second was the fact that this ink seemed to never dry in the screen. If an screen was laboriously "painted" with a dozen or more colors it could sit around in that "wet" condition for upwards to two months and be able to be printed with just as if it had been freshly prepared.
I designed a product idea. I had a cabinet maker make be some frames that the tiles fit into. Then I developed a concept that would make the framed tiles into collectible products. The frames could be linked together with clips from underneath. The object was to have one of these purchased at each vacation spot and when there were enough different images they could be combined together to make things like tea carts, mirror frames and mantle inserts. The furniture kits could be made by the cabinet maker and be promoted in a booklet attached to the single tiles for mail-order purchase.
I immediately set about designing two themes. One was based on historical images. I went to wood engravings from the 1870's and selected images of steamboats and Hudson River landscapes. The second theme was a throwback to my Christmas card venture. I selected pictures of Santa Clauses and Christmas Trees and even reduced my penned Night Before Christmas down from 16 inches to fit a four inch tile. My Saugerties Lighthouse rounded off the line. I had an even dozen ready to sell by November. I put a display in a window of a card shop on Main Street and Irene sold some to the Airport gift shop. It was her first approach to selling things I had printed and she mad a lot of good contacts.
At about this same time a 25th anniversary of the Woodstock Festival on a Saugerties farm in 1994 began to be talked of. I found tickets from the original concert, copied them and printed a multi-colored image of this on a tile. This was designed to look like an art print with a title "Will's ticket" written on the bottom. These sold everywhere.
It was Christmas time. By New Year's the talk of the town was the Woodstock event and I was well into seriously planning to use the technology for something to do with it. All my friends were active in the community and there was lots of talk about the benefits that the publicity from such a large gathering would bring to the town. Everyone agreed that I should be printing something like I did with "Wills ticket" for people in the community to sell when the crowds arrived.
For the next month or two I worked on another idea. I wasn't willing to speculate on whether or not there was going to be a festival. My motivation now was to establish as many graphic applications as successful products for my printer as possible. If the Woodstock festival gave me an opportunity, then I would be ready to do it. For now, I was working on advertising magnets.
I had a die that was made for cutting papers that slipped inside the screen cartridge to keep the ink from shifting. I used this to die cut playing card size pieces of magnetic sheeting. I had expanded my selection of 19th century wood engraving images of scenes from the Hudson Valley and it was my plan to sell these to businesses as advertising specialties. I actually designed these to market to stores as souvenirs to sell from a counter display but I had trouble getting the displays made and put this idea aside. I had brought Vladimir in on doing the coloring of these and for selecting a standard palette. He bought old postcards and did some drawings of historic sights from them also. We had done a local business expo and were starting to get orders when the activity related to the Woodstock Festival began to heat up.
I immediately switched to the Woodstock plan. I wanted to print the tickets that would be sold to the anticipated 350,000 person audience. My purpose was to prove out a unique aspect of my technology. When the colors are painted onto the screen and printed all at once each arrangement of colors is unique, like the iridescent rainbow pattern of an oil slick. Two years before I had long conversations with a researcher at the Pentagon about the usefulness of this for counterfeit-proofing. I wanted to make collectible concert tickets that were unreproducable. I worked out the prospects with Jimmy of having all the work done in his shops, from making the raw metal shapes to printing to handling the security concerns. He was surprisingly enthusiastic. I wrote up the proposal and tried to find the right party to present it to.
This was a good idea and if I had stuck to it I may have been successful at getting it done. But there developed such a dazzling array of other opportunities, all connected to the same main theme, that it became impossible to pass up any one of them without feeling that something major would be missed out on. I wanted to do everything and there were only three months till the festival.
Four years before, when I had done a stint as Saugerties Town Historian, I became involved in an economic development presentation to attract tourism to the region. As part of this I had researched and written a Master Plan proposal for the Town. The festival now represented a prime opportunity to implement certain suggestions in this proposal. I had anticipated the need to have tourists information kiosks where the major highway from New York City and Canada enters the town. I decided to make sure there was something like this for the millions of visitors that would be attracted to Saugerties by the festival publicity.
I made a proposal to the government and to community organizations in which three or four small booths would be placed in business areas and manned by students who would be taught in the final month of school the information they needed to present. My plan was ignored by those with the wherewithal to finance it. Next I pared down the number of booths to one and created a plan where I could finance it myself.
This was going to be my validation of the production capability of my technology. It was also a way to get the high visibility needed to gain the most promotional advantage for my technology. I would produce and sell thousands of printed metal products using the booth for the sales. The plan was to have every visitor sign a large panel in a book and receive a metal tag that would hang around the neck with the number of that panel on it. I estimated that each panel could hold 250 signatures and that the value of the tag was $3. After the first seven panels the setup costs would be paid for and there would be money left over to build a scholarship fund and a monument.
I had done a signature campaign for IBM ten years before. I printed the 22,000 signatures they had on their panels for a display for the Corporate Board Room. My plan was to etch the signatures from the information booth into ten inch square stainless panels and to combine the panels together into a ground-plane outdoor monument. The people that signed the panels would return to the site of the Woodstock Festival in Saugerties and be able to find their signature on this monument by finding the panel with the number that matched their tag. This would be the incentive to buy the tag.
In late April I had Vladimir make a model of the monument. We held a meeting for the press in my living room to unveil it and build up community enthusiasm for what I called the SignOn to the Spirit campaign. I had printed a copy of the Woodstock Festival logo on a sample of a dog tag I had received days before and presented this as an example of what the number tag would look like if I had permission to use the logo in the campaign. A week later I took my model and presentation to a meeting of the Business Association in a local restaurant where projects and programs were being discussed with representatives of PolyGram Entertainment, the financial backers for the Festival.
After my presentation I was taken aside by the PolyGram representative that had been presenting the merchandise program. I had passed out about a hundred of the sample tags and he wanted to go somewhere with me after the meeting to discuss these. I had represented myself as an invention business wanting to use this production opportunity to prove out my new technology for the special multi-color printing that these samples were illustrating. As a professional merchandiser he had never seen a product like what I was showing. He wanted to know if I thought I could fill the demands of the customers I would be brought if they licensed me to print the logo using this technique on metal. I had not considered this but showed great optimism and returned home very late that night to a whole new level of potential.
The Strataprinter
Woodstock'94
I was already thoroughly committed to the signature program and the information booth. It was less a matter of business than doing the right thing. It was now clear that I would not be able to use the Woodstock logo for this. That would compete with the licensed product sales being discussed. So I decided to use a symbol for this program that spoke of color I had used for showing the printed tiles as as a business card, of sorts. For that I had the image of a butterfly perched on the rim of a glass. I had colored the glass to look full of clear water reflecting the colors of the butterfly and had colored the butterfly to be absolutely psychedelic. It was this butterfly that I decided to print on the tags for the signature program.
Now we were down to three months till the Festival date and the organizers didn't even have a logo design yet to license. The publicity and the lack of a logo design caused chaos in the merchandising community. Everyone was coming up with their own designs to take advantage. The papers were filled with threats of confiscation of unlicensed products. Finally, in mid-May the logo was announced, the royalty and advance were negotiated, and on May 20th a deal memo signed. That was the extent of the license. There never was the time to put together a legal document. I heard later that contracts were being negotiated back stage with agents ten minutes before the acts were scheduled to perform. The whole thing was going to continue to be that bazaar for months to come.
I immediately made a visit to the manufacturer of the dog tag blanks. I wanted enough of them to get started and I had a printing system to trade for them. The idea was to establish a good working relationship and by convincing them that a special thickness of metal just for my printing could become a standard by being related to the Woodstock product. Within two weeks of my return I had the material on-hand to go into production just as I got the logo license. I still had to get approval from the licensor for the way I would print the logo and I didn't yet have anyone but myself who had ever done printing with the system.
I had an idea that there was an advantage in passing the word around that the printing may be able to be contracted out. I thought that if I could prove that people could be productive in this short period of time, just promoting this would be the best endorsement for the technology. I had 25 machines in inventory and thought I could have at least 20 production facilities in kitchens around the area. Most of the other products were being made in a whole different part of the country, or even the world and I could just imagine the publicity this would generate. Better still, if I could get summer stay-overs of college students in the closest college town to do this as summer jobs as just a few satellite facilities the ages of those printing would bring even more impact to the publicity.
Then there was the even grander plan where I set up a separate company under the name of SignOn to the Spirit as the merchandising company that would be marketing the Woodstock logo tags I would be producing. I had figured that since the organizations and the government of Saugerties would not go along with my information booth, that I would take the idea directly to the people, and this company would overseeing the information booth as a highly visible promotion. Thus the sales of the product of the Festival would establish a list of accounts under which a potential SignOn brand could be selling other products related to the age group attending the festival as a local brand. I formed a limited partnership so that 150 people in the community could share in this business, reasoning that the more that had the opportunity to be involved in profiting from the festival, the more the chance I'd have to continue the business of selling the printing systems afterward.
These two plans; one for production and the other for marketing; constituted my entire approach to getting something together before Woodstock happened. To get this started I borrowed $20,000... only enough to set up the information booth and stock in an inventory of tag blanks and ball chains and to have the labels printed for packaging. I was counting on the shares in the limited partnership selling and in the satellite production being enthusiastically greeted with open arms. But by the beginning of July neither had worked out and I had no time to redouble my efforts. The festival was only six weeks away in mid-August.
I made copies of the signed "deal memo" and passed it out to local businesses to show that my products would not be confiscated. I made the 4th of July festivities that always drew a large crowd in Saugerties my first opportunity to see if the dog tag product could be generally accepted. A large number of sales there was the first opportunity to show some cash flow. and this was enough to bring in retail orders the next day. There was thus enough cash flow that I could begin to look into paying salaries. I had hoped to be doing that from the Limited Partnership investments but this was working out instead.
The college town production experiment turned into an excuse to work and party all night. The second experiment set up at a friend's stain glass studio slipped also when he began to use young high school students for printing. Neither had the quality of production or output I expected. I had already worked out a production schedule centered on Vladimir each morning inking between six and eight screens that were picked up by the printers at about nine o'clock along with enough blank tags to produce 250 from each screen. Those printed tags would return around one o'clock by which time Vladimir would have more screens inked. The used screens would then be cleaned and ready for the next day. Meanwhile, someone was always in the studio printing the copyright information on the backs of the tags, either after the logos were printed or before. By mid July, I moved all the printing into the studio and put John in charge of managing the two shifts of four printers that were now working there. Vladimir spent all of his time there designing new backgrounds for the tags and painting the screens. Because all of this took place in less than four hundred square feet of space, it ended up being yet another side of the story to tell when it came time to sell the prfitability of the printing.
The designs I had submitted to the licensor were revolutionary. Normally a logo is emblematic and must be printed to exact color specifications. I gave them a concept that would have a minimum of eight colors that would change as a patterned background every 250 prints. The logo image itself was printed as a dropout in this color. The colors were represented to them as a "tie-dye" or psychedelic effect. This followed the theme of the first Woodstock Festival. But what I stressed was the artistic quality and collectibility of such individualistic products. Since the Woodstock Festival was always billed as a "music and arts" festival there was solid acceptance for this idea. Also, the sheen of the metal and the gloss of the colors worked together in a magical way that they simply could not resist.
In late June this portfolio of samples was in the offices of PolyGram Entertainment. There were dozens of other licensees' products there also, but these samples got immediate attention, taken around to the other offices where projects other than Woodstock were being organized. That got them taken down the block to the headquarters of MTV. This brought not only blanket approval for the multi-color printing concept but a request from MTV to do a special one just for them for their planned round-the-clock three day live coverage of the Anniversary Festival. A special printing of a design was also requested to add to the media passes that would be consecutively numbered from 001 to 999.
We hadn't yet sold many more than 200 and it was now beginning to look like we would be selling a thousand times that. My goal was to see what the maximum production could be and this was certainly going to be the chance. I immediately designed four differently engineered printing stations to see which one was easiest to use and most accurate. For the first two months I had been doing the printing using the same method I had used for nearly ten years. I only needed a way to simply have the material always be in the same place on a table and then positioned three stops on the table for hand positioning the printhead over the material. This was fine for doing a couple of hundred prints but for tens of thousands it was to prone to causing fatigue and required more attention than I was able to get from the average recruit.
Once the printers began to use their own particular machine design it was soon adopted as their favorite. Linda wouldn't use Jonathan's and neither would use Maya's. Winslow was the only one that would use the last design I came up with even though I thought it was the most efficient and accurate. The opportunity to observe each of them working continuously was invaluable for making the final production model. This wouldn't happen, however, until the pace of the production of the Woodstock product slackened.
At the beginning of August, with the Festival weekend only two weeks away, we were fully into running the information booth, printing Woodstock and SignOn tags and organizing a long list of anxious packagers that came into the village space I rented to pick up and deliver work. We were shipping to small shops in the mall and to large chain stores. The first order had come in for the MTV sales and the media tags were being shipped. We had already hit a delivery bottleneck because the ball chain for the dog tag could not be produced fast enough for our new use. Local organizations and merchants were positioning themselves for being first in line for the dwindling inventories of packaged products on hand. Orders for five and ten thousand packaged tags were waiting return phone calls with delivery dates.
Being a licensed manufacturer did not mean that the product could be sold in the actual Festival. The vendors with licensed merchandise were part of the PolyGram organization and special concession pricing was being leveraged from all the licensed manufacturers that supplied them. My production was so limited that I could not drop my price to a fifth of retail which was what they expected. I, instead, promised thousands of tags to a local environmental activist organization for selling in the not-for-profit education booth they had within the Festival grounds. I made the price below wholesale but not that much. This would guarantee that the tags were being sold where the crowd was. Another vendor that had negotiated selling locations at the parking lots was buying thousands more. I was positioned to have the tags around the necks of the concert goers even if I could only sell to a fraction of them.
Woodstock's underlying rationale was promotion: promotion for the potential of my printing process and equipment. I was in a win-win environment. The promoters of Woodstock were doing the same thing, only with the potential of newly introduced talent, like at the first breakthrough concert, and then, afterward, the sale of a movie and special sound-track albums that capitalized on the success of the event. I had the same motive. I wanted to come out of the Festival Weekend with lots of snapshots of young people wearing dog tags I had printed and lots of endorsements from retail businesses that profited from the sales of my printed dog tags. I had been my goal to end this episode with a trade show appearance within two months of the end of the Festival with the technology riding high on the releases of the video and the CD of the concert. I had no doubt that the power behind PolyGram Entertainment and the iconic mystique of the Woodstock logo would carry my technology on a tidal wave toward major purchases and backlogged orders. Making a profit for myself on selling dog tags was the last thing on my mind.
The original Woodstock had been organized in contentious times and was the greatest expression of those times. It was plain from the very first that the current event was planning to repeat that theme. The organizers of the Festival started nearly a year before to battle the local forces of Saugerties for their approval. Fear brought out the native hostility and the politics that ensued made the massive gathering uncertain until the last possible moment. This climate destroyed the good intentions that I had invested in my information booth as it became associated with the opportunity I was given with the license. Though my association was strictly with the people that were the backers, it was assumed that I was in deep with the organizers. In actuality, the organizers did not like my tags at all, believing their military dog tag shape went against the peace message of the festival. Regardless, a lot of the problem had to do with rivalry. Every local business, from the corner ice cream stand to the undertaker, wanted the opportunity to make money from the captive sales the festival represented inside the gate. Even though I could not be inside, I represented the inside to their “outside”. With the publicity I needed to generate for the information booth and the logo products, I couldn't help becoming a highly visible target for resentment. It was strongly evident what the real difference was between the times of the original Woodstock and these. The 25th anniversary was about the theme of the preceding decade to this; greed, not peace. The organizers, with their nostalgic symbol of peace, were, in their contemporary guises, in no way immune to this new world of greed.
I had continued to lobby them for support of the SignOn to the Spirit signature program. I wanted access to every bus bringing in concert-goers for getting signatures for the panels and the monument. When the value of associating their public relations with the obvious benefits of this monument and my information booth failed to be recognized by the show organizers, I began to sense a reason. With this realization I began immediately to plan for the inevitable breakdown of order that I now felt certain they had planned for generating the same frenzied publicity event that was so impromptu at the original Woodstock, only this time organized to happen live on MTV.
I had two fronts. One was my community project. The other was what the opportunity meant to my business. First came the information booth. A phone line was installed and it was equipped with copies of all the emergency plans and the locations of all towing yards and parking lots and of the church groups and charity groups that could supply emergency aid. There was going to be no other focal point for this kind of information once the chaos was orchestrated.
Then, to be able to seize the business opportunity, I arranged to buy back all the outside sale product on its failure to sell and then, during the last three days before the gates opened I went into round-the-clock production. I wanted to have a minimum of 20,000 pieces to sell when the fences fell and the rule book was thrown out. My goal was to have tags on teens when the video was shot. I had one legal and one extension outlet ready and I was prepared to backpack the stuff in myself to make this happen.
I'd arranged a little corner of a legitimate booth in the festival for selling non-logo tags; mostly peace signs and pot leaves. They were the operator's designs. The real purpose, and the underlying reason for this operator having this prime corner location, was that the person that had it knew that the barriers would fall and that the Woodstock tags would be a perfect for selling there. He would pay wholesale pricing but delivery and manpower were my supply. For my kids this meant being in the middle of the action, not under a tent on the highway a mile away from the stage, and this corner inside, and the information booth on the outside, saw straight front-line action from the day before the beginning till three days after the end.
The Strataprinter
Tag Success
The Festival was being held at the Winston Farm. This 800 acre estate borders the Village of Saugerties, separated from it by the parallel ribbons of a toll highway and a railroad course on the map. One mile due east from the site is the Village center. A mile further and you're in the middle of the Hudson River. I had my home in the Village and the office I newly rented for carrying out this business was in the village center. They were separated by four blocks. All roads were to be closed to ordinary traffic during the Festival. Only vehicles with special colored window plaques for emergency and Festival service were permitted to be on the road. Essentially, all normal life would be suspended for five days while the world watched.
The concert site backed up on a steep, bluestone-ridged hillside on the west and the Village rested on the steep banks of the river on the east. The population in between was just as captive as the concert organizers had promised to make the ticket-holding audience inside the fences surrounding acres of pasture. The village of Woodstock, the artist colony that the Festival had been originally named after, was ten long miles of hills and barrier ridges and winding roads further to the west. If you wanted to be a part of the action, the village of Saugerties was the only real place to be. Across the night sky, two days before the first act was to perform, the lights from the high towers shinning down on the stages and the shreeks of the initial sound checks glared and rattled the Village window panes. The show was on.
Set-up day I made my curiosity visit, dutifully traveling to the designated parking area and boarding the school bus after talking a security guard into allowing me to keep my Swiss Army knife. The vendor tents were all up and everyone was busily arranging the products they had paid for the rights to sell. Everything to be sold or used for selling had to be on the site before the first day of events. No money was allowed. All attendees would trade their money for Festival coins that would be used for purchasing everything from food to souvenirs. Our SignOn banner and some signature panels were at the location that was doing environmental education and donations there were allowed in real money. It was this that I was authorized to enter the site as a visitor to see, otherwise, everyone without a vendor permit was banned.
The spot I'd secured had located a place in the fence that would allow them access with food and replenishment. We had figured from the start that we had the best-designed product ever for events like Woodstock because a thousand or more could be carried in a backpack. Also, they took up no space in the tent for having ready inventory. They sold for a third what a T-shirt sold for but didn't get dirty and hundreds took up less than a half dozen T-shirts in selling space. And one size fit all. Woodstock tags covering the halter tops like belly dancers dress weren't supposed to be for sale but there was no prohibition to showing them. The community support organization had them and was where those interested were directed for buying them.
That evening we joked about these “entrepreneurial” gestures of our teen age children as we entertained PolyGram's Licensing Director who was staying overnight in our spare room. He was supposed to stay a second night but events that were implied in that first evening's conversations prevented anything that was planned from happening anywhere after the first day. On that next day I watched some of the coverage on MTV and walked once to the information booth to make sure everything was running smoothly. I also visited a few of the vendors outside of the fence that had our tags to see how much interest there was. Things were relatively slow but this first day was scheduled for warm-up and only local acts, and relatively upcoming talent were performing. I saw that the security guards and police were fairly successful in keeping the roads clear for the buses that brought the ticket-holders. That meant there wasn't much room for shoppers to get to the products outside the gate. I didn't have a pass so I would have to wait for one of the kids to come back for some sleep to find out what was selling inside.
That night it started to rain. As if an omen or a secret sign, this event of nature signaled the eruption of that familiar cultural memory of the original Festival, and, televised around the world, the outcome was now ordained. The fences fell. Saugerties, with nowhere to go between the river and the ridge, imploded into the festival, sucking everything in for hundreds and televised thousands of miles around. Becky ran in to the house that morning screaming with excitement to bring in the tags; everything had fallen apart.
I spent that whole weekend walking back and forth, carrying a blue rucksack, delivering around 800 tags each trip. I lost track of the number of times or the number of tags. The first time I went I avoided the main gate and followed a well trodden but recent path through the fence. It led up the hill that MTV showed many times for sliding in the deep mud. At the leveling off of this hill, just where the footing was beginning to be a little more secure, was our corner. Everybody stopped and everybody bought.
The place looked nothing like it had two days before. The open space for walking between the two stages that separated the commercial vendors from the political, charity and educational exhibits – where our vendor was – was one mass of tents. The perimeter path around them was so churned that your feet sloshed to the ankles in the mud. Everywhere in the path were lost sandals and shoes. An unending stream of garbage bag cloaked humanity moved single file along this course. One time, when I was delivering, I took Vladimir along. In these elements his normal good humor turned sullen. He became terrified and began to panic with concern for his daughters who may be somewhere in the crowd. I took him out immediately, realizing that this was a place he had been before, after the war, in the refugee camps of Germany.
That was what it was like where the vendor tents were. The areas for the audiences were much worse. It was impossible altogether to transverse these places, and many of the parts of the festival that I was interested in seeing simply could not be reached because they were on the other side. There were literally hundreds of thousands of people shoulder-to-shoulder standing to see the performances. I pushed my way as much as possible through this crown to get to as many places as possible. I did this inside and outside the Festival grounds. I wanted to see how everyone was and what everyone was doing. What I remember most is that, in these worst of conditions, everyone was more civil than ever I had encountered before in my life.
Aside from having the banner swiped a few times and then returned, nothing bad happened at the information booth. Though it had one of the few direct lines in case of a crisis this was never used for overdose, mayhem or any of the other expected needs. There was a wedding, and a need for an emergency return to Wisconsin with the roads to the airport closed, and the numerous lost cars at the end. There were those who had lost their friends and were all alone in a strange place. For weeks after the last band left the stage and the litter was finally picked up from the streets, these lost souls found this the only landmark from the Festival that hadn't been towed away. Though the signatures on the panels never reached the numbers that would pay for the project, the thousands of names in the guest book and the hundreds of places they called home made the information booth a true testament to the spirit and true meaning of the gathering.
There was no time to rest or gather our thoughts into memories. While the rain and mud and crashed gates were creating international interest wherever MTV was watched, the sales were being rung up. The special double dog tag set with someone else's Woodstock Festival commemorative comic book were sold for $20. The other merchandise; the T-shirt, jacket, cap, and, of course, raincoat; were much more expensive. This was MTV's first experiment with merchandising a thematic line of products. The question was, for the X-generation, would this work. It did, and early Monday morning we were asked to deliver within a week 20,000 sets. That was the first of three similar orders that had to be done at the same time. And there was still a demand from all the local merchants for their allotment of the regular tags.
Some of the local merchants had begun doing mail order themselves by taking advance payments to be sent to the customers when the merchandise ran out. Every day there was a line at the door. In the days that followed the Festival the same people would be back two and three times during the day buying the 50 or 100 tags as they came back from the packagers. As quickly as they would buy them, they could sell them. There was no better investment within a hundred miles: sixty percent return in two hours just by standing on a bridge and exchanging a dog tag for a $5 bill that was paid for with seed money given for mailing something you had been paid for a week before.
The Strataprinter
And yet more tags
Everyone else could go to the shore for the family vacation. I couldn't leave. There were too many orders to get out and I had to find a way to account for all the cash that was coming in, and the bills that followed close behind the production. The office had been rented basically as a central meeting place for potential investors in SignOn and for receiving, packing and shipping the products. It was an old industrial loft space completely open except for two small side rooms. We had filled this space with desks and tables and shelves. As the money began to come in, it became more organized and the first money went out for networked computers, accounting programs and other organizational necessities.
Everyone had been working for the past two months on a promise and handouts. Now they deserved a reward. Aside from the kids that were going back to college or their final year of high school, all were offered salaries. I set wage levels and pre-dated the start times and distributed the cash out as a bonus based on their wage scale and time worked. That way payroll deductions could be back-dated into their Social Security account. This was done in the first week after the Festival because of the immense backlog of printing orders for MTV and the prospects for expanding the Woodstock license into the other PolyGram properties being offered after the successful sales of the Festival.
I created positions of Director of Marketing, Art Director, Production Manager, Office Manager for the three printers that were working full time. The fifteen packagers equaled the hours of five full time workers and the information booth employees would be on the payroll until the end of September. This gave me a grand total of eleven full time and fifteen part time employees with an average weekly payroll of nearly $9,000. I decided to put this together with one other notion and act like a going business.
While we were feverish producing, I took the occasion to involve the local engineering school in observations of the production. If they took on the evaluation of the various prototypes and interviewed the operators as a mechanical and manufacturing engineering project I felt I could get access to those investors in technology because the school was involved. I communicated back and forth and finally negotiated with them for the second semester. That wouldn't help for the pressures of the moment but was promising for the future. I took this and my successes with the tag sales and wrote a business plan that projected ten times growth in five years.
When I thought I touched all the important points I took this to the local Economic Development Authority. I was an business that had gone from startup to over fifteen employees in two months. I was a technology business with patents issued. I was an arts business in a region known for the arts. I had proven products made with my technology that had brought profits to a broad range of local businesses and institutions. I was the sole supporter of a major community project whose importance was noticed far and wide and whose existence saved the governments from having to do the same thing themselves. I thought that all that would be recognized with accolades, and I would be greeted with open arms, and that my business plan would be bonding with millions of dollars to build a factory manufacturing dog tag printing systems ready to market all over the world.
Instead I got confused stares, inane questions about my background for doing this and recommendations to Business Development Counselors.
There was a system one had to accept in the early 1990s. IBM had closed down its plants locally and there were hundreds of once-well paid managers loosened into the business startup landscape. They were doing mostly service franchises and failing right and left, but they were prioritized in a State program that had promised to build up their marketability by claiming them as the backbone of an IQ New York (after I Love New York) campaign. You couldn't do anything in local or State government that didn't get you mixed-up with some consultant that had once held a high management position with IBM. The State did this as its apology for letting IBM close down. In truth, IBM closed down to shed these cradle-to-grave employees that made it so unproductive. Now they were being supported by the State for coaching businesses such as my own on how to be productive.
I had worked around these people for more than 15 years and I was not willing to carry their weight. If that was the only way to get capital for business development, then I was going to have to make a new way. I changed the plan to where I continued to build the printed dog tag business to a point where the profits would support the machinery manufacturing and sales. In the plan the income from the MTV sales could grow into licenses from rock groups and these would provide access to marketing channels around the country that would draw in other licenses. If everything worked on schedule then I would be introducing the technology at the next international printing equipment show with a star-studded array of uses that would get me a line of purchasers stretching around the block, all willing to pay in advance.
The flow of business after the Festival had made it impossible to plan going to the international show that year. If I could have made this show, as originally planned, it may have changed the pace of everything. Also, had I been able to finalize the printer from the four prototypes before that show in October there could have been many problems avoided. But this was all too much for one year. It had to be put aside for the next, which again turned out to be a long, eventful year.
Woodstock was officially dead when the video of the concert flopped and the CD ended up just duplicating the video without its pictures. The producers seemed to intentionally make a product without life and then they drove in the final nail with little or no promotion. What I had counted to sell the large inventories of tags I'd built did not materialize. I had a special deal with the company that had the contract to sell the video over television spots in those late night "blue screen" ads. I even had a special double license between NineInchNails and Woodstock for a bonus offer with these TV sales. But PolyGram shot itself in the foot by cross advertising against its contractors with lower prices for dumping the video. I lost. Everybody lost. I had over 18,000 Woodstock tags all packaged and ready to sell and no market. I began to think there must be a better way.
So we dove headlong into Grateful Dead, NineInchNails, Snoop Doggy Dog, and everything in-between. We were total novices in fleshing out the tightly held markets of the rock merchandise agencies. They were players deeply entrenched in this market and offered more products with more licenses than the one we had. It soon became evident that I would need as much money as I needed to do the technology business to buy enough licenses to also be a player in this business. I was lucky with the Woodstock license. I would never be able to afford the Rolling Stones.
The prospects that were so sure a few months before had faded away. I had tried to pull things together with this approach to marketing, but with sample printing not being converted into orders and these more expensive licenses not being in my experience, I decided to give up on rock music market. By mid-January I was fully involved in developing a line of boutique tags.
When Woodstock sold tags on MTV the other cable television channels owned by the same company began to show dog tags in their programming. We began to get phone calls every time a friends teenager saw a dog tag being worn on Nickelodeon. This free advertising indicated that teenagers may buy other tags besides licensed rock tags if they had the same colorful printing as seen on the Woodstock tag. This gave me the opportunity to tie up some loose ends in the marketing of the printing systems.
I needed to test out clip art and creating films using a laser printer. Ever since I had developed the concept of a desktop printing system the question of a source of artwork and films for imaging the photosensitive screen cartridges that didn't require a darkroom and chemical processing continually dogged me. I didn't want a darkroom required for using my printer. When showing the printer to prospective industrial users I had carried transparency film and made an image of their business card on their office copier to demonstrate screen making and printing. This solved the film source problem but the development of art was another matter. I realized that with the Draw programs there were now packaged thousands of images on a CD-ROM file made that could be clipped and combined with each other. This made quality art almost universally available to anyone with a computer and a laser printer. I thus set my goal to develop a line of 50 printed tags based on generic clip-art based themes and have them available as products, in inventory quantities of at least 200, before the Boutique Show in Manhattan in early March.
By this time I was at four employees with one person printing plus John, Vladimir, myself too, and a secretary that spent most of her time packaging. But even with this small number I reached the goal of producing this line in six weeks. This done, and the displays produced, arrangements were made to share a booth with a company that had profited greatly from selling the Woodstock tags during the Festival. Though relegated to a far corner of a booth in a far corner of a large hall we attracted a respectable amount of interest. But the real value of this show came from the feedback, and, from that, a realization about this market that would lead into a different one all together.
Except for the comments made by the Woodstock promoter, Michael Lang, and Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead, and by the Sloop Clearwater organization, it never occurred to me that the dog tag shape was anything but a readily available metal blank that I could put a print on. To call it a symbol of the military was not fair. I countered that it was an ID tag and the print on it was the symbol. But a lot of attendees and exhibitors at the Boutique show thought I should be in the military market and that there was a lot of potential for sales there.
So, instead of the tree frogs, pandas and sunflowers I had printed to show environmental and other youth-friendly themes, it was the consensus view that soldiers and guns and eagles with lightning bolts should be printed on dog tags. I was totally taken aback by this. But the drive home gave me the chance to think more strategically. It was 1995, the 50th anniversary of the end of the WWII.
In one day I had an idea fully formed. I clipped the eagle and flag symbol from the seal of the Veterans Administration and put in block letters above that the word "Veteran". Above this I put "Son", "Daughter", "Grandson" and "Granddaughter" of a Veteran... and "Spouse" in honor of the women who served. Below the eagle I put the words "50th Anniversary of the End of W.W.II". On the back I printed a Statue of Liberty with the words "In Defense of Liberty". This was my perfect answer to the youth-friendly military market absurdity that had been suggested.
There was a committee in the Pentagon for observance of the 50th Anniversary of W.W. II and samples of the "Veteran Family" tags were sent to them. I had their license to use the official seal for the Commemorative Committee by return mail and by Memorial Day I was selling in most of the Veterans Hospitals.
The 50th Anniversary program was approaching its end in 1995 when we got involved, so this was short-lived. It had been going on since 1991 and most of the activities had already played out. Had we come in at the beginning, this would have had a much better chance to turn things in this direction because there was a list of commemorative communities compiled by the committee that would have made sales a snap. As it turned out, the value in doing this campaign was the publicity it afforded.
The Strataprinter
The Grand Finale
I had set my sites on introducing a fully functional and proven system at the international show. This year it was in Los Angeles. The printer design had been finalized and was being proven out on the Veterans tags. I added designs to this line, continually, to have the production required to fine-tune the refinements. As this development reached its final stages I increased the promotion of the Veterans tags in the trade media. An excellent image of the tags was picked up by some of the most influential of these, and the coverage made the front of the magazines. There was already response and I began to anticipate a strong show.
There were two things needed for the show and only three months to get them. The first was a production model of the printer. The second was a video of this printer in action. The last time I did a trade show I had the machines working. Operating them took all my time and left me little for sales. This time I wanted a video showing all the action, and only have the machines for display along with the tags and tiles and other products they were used for. I already had my pre-show publicity taken care of and for my show promotions, planned to give away thousands of Woodstock dog tags. And finally, I'd submitted my Information Booth project to the trade association for a community relations project award. With all these publicity factors, I couldn't see how I could loose.
Jimmy's reluctance to put any more effort into this project made it necessary for me to be very efficient in my design. I incorporated components from the original offset printing module so that no new outside purchases had to be made. There were a total of 18 machined parts in the whole printer with the whole parts list only 120 including every nut and bolt. When I tallied it up, the complete system had a little over 700 component parts including those on the circuit boards and the wires and tubes. If the offset printer were included in the system the number swelled to a thousand. Still, compared to a normal printing device, this was low. When you took into account that I was essentially the sole resource for designing, assembling and remembering where each came from and what it did within the design, this was a phenomenal number. I had reached the maximum that I thought I could ever remember years before, and I still kept cramming in more.
To get the production model finished with all its paint for the video I had to fall back into my routine of standing over the machinists, coaxing them to finish my work and pleading with Jimmy to keep the General Manager away. Since the project had ended, over two years before, most of the people who were familiar with the original assembly of the controller and the offset module had left. Most of the components were distributed between storage sheds and the rafters of the buildings and the accumulation of dust made it necessary to disassemble many and test them. Weeks were spent between overseeing the production model manufacturing and finding enough system components to have enough ready to sell from the show.
I was secretly aware that I could not sell these systems even if the demand panned out. I could not mention this to Jimmy. The big picture of every new technology is that it always proves to be too complex, even if the goal is simplicity. The total novelty of the process requires that the disposable and other support components be in production for the printers to be used. The fact is that I had to have a screen cartridge manufacturing facility and an ink formulation and packaging facility along with a support network set up in order to sell to the market I had created with my tag printing applications.
This would require more money than Jimmy of anyone else in the neighborhood had. My real motive in going to the show was to link in with a major manufacturer and have my business acquired with all its great developments and markets. I was sure that with Jimmy as a ready and able producer of the equipment and with my know-how and patents that this proven package of assets would be snapped-up immediately. I saw the LA show as being on the coast of Silicone Valley where innovation was supported, not looked on with suspicion as was my experience in New York. The last show I had done was in Indianapolis in 1992, in the Midwest rust belt, where the same mentality prevailed. This one had to be different
There was something else that had to be different. My publicity for this show was dominated by the company name. My name did not appear in any of the trade promotions at all. I reasoned that the company could be made to appear more stable if it was not an inventor's development company. Having played it the other way with no success in drawing in investment, I decided to make a stab at creating a corporate image and replace my own with DiaStrata, Inc.
The technology also took a back seat to promoting the company identity. The strength of the technology was related to the company and that was, in turn, related to the products it had produced. Instead of saying that there was no installed base of the technology I emphasized that the products of the technology and the accounts of the company were PolyGram, the Pentagon and, by this time, the Kennedy Space Center. I wanted DiaStrata, Inc. to look like it contained lots of value by these associations. When the video was finished it was a 6 minute overview of all of these assets that doubled for showing how the system worked.
I went all the way. Moments before boarding the airplane for LA I had signed over a mortgage to my new house to collateralize a company loan. I had earlier in the year also taken a Small Business Administration loan when beginning the W.W.II Anniversary mailing. I figured that these debts would represent acceptance of the business within the financing community and would add show of committment during the due diligence investigation of investors. I was approaching the second year of relatively steady earnings and this was going to be the best moment for all strengths to came together in the way that financial people like things to appear.
I had also backed up myself with a trump card. I started earlier in the year to convince the suppliers I used for the tag stampings and the ball chain I used to join me in the show. I reasoned that if I could associate them with me through this I could have an added advantage of offering DiaStrarta, Inc. as a company with supplier rights to these products for all its equipment installations. Earlier I had asked them to actually partner with me in DiaStrata, Inc. but the stamping company was thoroughly involved in the new international standards certification project and the chain company had just completed two acquisitions and was thoroughly involved in consolidation issues. This seemed to be the best way to maintain their presence at the moment. The stamping company VP of marketing was actually going to be present in my booth during the show and I had free materials to give away from them. Their LA representative was also to be on hand.
From first setup, I did not feel myself achieving the goal I had set for myself in this show. The four months spent in its preparation were clearly evident for gaining the interest of the average shopper but I couldn't see this making my big connection to a major corporation once I was able to make the rounds of the hall.
There were two main reasons for this. First, this show was the first in which the trade association had linked itself with the new digital output display technologies. The hall was filled with the large equipment that was used to make those billboard-sized graphics that go on the sides of semi trailers. These inspired awe and a lot of the crowds that would otherwise have been around my equally impressive but diminutive, by comparison, technology missed it entirely.
Second, this was the year that it first dawned on the average equipment manufacturing company that, while they blinked, the big money was no longer in equipment that printed T-shirts but in the sophisticated equipment that printed the graphics on CDs. For my scale of printing, this equipment, which would cost on the average twenty times what my technology was selling for, was getting all the "hows-it-work" attention.
Three years before, in Indianapolis, there were no CD printing systems. There were only a few circuit board printers there. Now there were no circuit board printers and two dozen "high tech" CD printers. I think the crowd was reacting like the average consumer that, at this same time, wasn't going to buy any computer until "Windows95" came out. They were confused about where to best spend their money.
I sensed all this happening but could not congeal this reaction into a response and turn my presentation accordingly. I knew what had to be done. I saw this being attempted every morning in the lobby of the hotel. Large companies with large staffs at their booths were discussing their change of tactics in response to similar realizations. This was the moment when a show had to be salvaged, but even the VP and the rep from the stamping company felt completely out of their medium on this.
I returned with no connection made for a sale of DiaStrata. And over 80% of the leads for selling systems were in South or Central America or in the Orient. Since I had no real plan for supporting markets overseas, the show was a complete bust.
The Strataprinter
A Mechanism with a Creative Soul
It took four more years for me to get the point. Only after every angle had been tried did I give in to bankruptcy. I settled for being content with what the experience had taught me about business and technology.
The last real look back at the Strataprinter's history; back to the first spark of an idea in 1982; was when I put into storage all the manufacturing prints, prototypes, lab notes, customer contact and sales files, employee records, business plans, accounting books and products kept as references to the many beta tests and developments documented over its lifetime. That was in late 2000.
After 1997, I'd already recognized what I was doing was contradictory to the nature of change happening in this era of Internet business, and was readying myself to accept that the patent protection running out was a good reason to move on.
The final moves I made were all directed toward growing a presence on the Internet, and the final years of the Strataprinter were spent preparing it to be an iconic technology complimentary to what was beginning to be the digital image's dominance.
In 1997 I created a web site directed toward educational institutions. My strategy was to contact them through a medium they used, and then supply them with a program that was self contained and mobile, to fit the Strataprinter into the world of Technology Education.
Education had taken the term "technology" to where it was less applicable to tools and materials like metal and wood, and more representative of computers and "virtual" designing and construction. Budgets and spaces in schools were being taken away from “shop” and given to the new combined Math and Science departments. I had been reading this on the Internet where articles published three and four years ago were just being put on line. Tech Ed hadn't picked up on this indicator that it was endangered of going extinct, and I was going to make a mission of my web site being their source of information on this.
A conference on Standards for all the department heads and writers of curriculum put on by the education commissioner in the State Capitol was my entry into this. It was about the new higher standards for earning a diploma being put into effect. I took a month to read all the standards for this State and for the neighboring states and also for some select foreign countries and built a relationship to Technology Education consistent with their objectives. Then I created a document I called the Strataprinter Educational Use Program that covered every one of the objectives across all the standards. I applied to be an exhibitor at this conference, put all this information in folders and, with my video playing, gave out samples of the Veteran tags, gaining the interest of most of the attendees.
There was enthusiasm across the board. Art teachers and the special education teachers saw a way to have assessable learning toward the standards. The Math and Science teachers saw a way to utilize it to integrate workplace standards. The governmental agencies that were involved in work-oriented re-education programs liked it for integrating themselves into the mainstream of Math and Science education.
At a summer program that was supported by a National Science Foundation grant; a science camp for middle school students; I did a week-long program with a different group of children every day. The lead educator for this science camp then joined with me in presenting a paper on the results of my contribution to her program at the annual Math, Science and Technology Educators conference at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, the same technology college involved in the development of the Strataprinter's production capabilities during Woodstock'94. With her Doctorate, and being well published in her field, endorsing this paper, this introduced my technology into applications that were much more conceptual than anything previously done with the Strataprinter.
This was the high point. With that air of institutional acceptance I spent these last years dabbling in projects such as West Point's class lists and the entire lists of Metal of Honor recipients of the Korean War. The International Space Station missions were honored each time a Shuttle went up and every year inductees into the Baseball Hall of Fame had a tag of their own added to every year in the complete collection that they had me make for them. The last prints ever made by a Strataprinter were for the inductions for the year 2000. The Strataprinter was retired with a GSA contract posted on its web site.
The real sign that it was time to move on came in the recognition that in all these years no one else either created a competitive technology or realized the significance of doing so. The multi-color concept I'd been spreading the uniqueness of around so freely never was found worthy of being the trend that I found it so completely logical being.
In the paper written about the science camp the knowledge base built centered on producing prints that were studied under electron microscopes in a lab in the school donated by IBM. Anyone astute enough to get the ramifications of the relationship of this to the Woodstock'94 concept and its predecessor, the SignOn tag, would have seen what this means.
Hundreds of thousands of examples of individual prints that can be termed unique in their editioned reproduction of images are in the possession of would-be collectors of the memorabilia that these objects are characterized as. I put enough prototypes and overages of these in storage to fill at least fifty cubic feet. There is ten times that filled with the records of production and the systems that were used. This was all put away in the year 2000 with no expectation that it would ever see the light of day again.