We are often asked about our company’s 60+ years of endeavours in the weighing industry. We would like to take this opportunity to share some experiences from these years. In order to do this, it is important to start wi......We are often asked about our company’s 60+ years of endeavours in the weighing industry. We would like to take this opportunity to share some experiences from these years. In order to do this, it is important to start with the invention of strain gages in the late 30’s. In the early part of the 19th century, Lord Kelvin discovered that the electrical resistance of a wire changed with strain. Between that time and the late 1930’s, many attempts were made to utilize this principle. Edward Simons of California Institute of Technology suggested in 1938 that by using a piece of fine resistance wire, cemented to a piece of steel, it could measure impact forces from a pendulum. Unaware of Ed Simon’s results on the West Coast, Dr. Arthur Ruge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology on the East Coast was studying the response of structural models to dynamic forces. He conceived the idea of unwinding a precision resistor wire and binding it to the structure under test. Again, he measured the resistance change as a measure of the applied strain. The strain gage invention by both parties simultaneously was to have a profound influence in the way we measure many physical quantities such as force, weight, and pressure. Arthur (Mike) L. Thurston is credited with the invention of the first strain gage load cell. Born in Portland , Maine in 1891, he received a BS degree from Worcester Polytechnic Institute in 1914. His first love was aviation and during World War I, Mike Thurston was a Project Engineer on a Curtis Airplane Project that achieved a record breaking speed of 164 miles per hour. His later innovations in the aircraft industry included the first U.S. built wind tunnel and a very early retractable landing gear intended for use on the U.S. Navy aircraft. In 1938, he joined Cox and Stevens Aircraft Corporation located on Long Island . This company evolved from a Naval architecture firm, was later named Revere Corporation of America and is known today as Revere Transducers. Mike Thurston recognized the need to develop a portable device to weight aircraft. This was particularly important during the war years as military aircraft needed a center of gravity calculation for the purpose of maintaining flight during combat operations. Mike Thurston made a sketch of the first multicolumn load cell and included it with a letter to Frank Tatnall from Baldwin Southwark on June 9, 1942 . Frank Tatnall was the contract for a strain gage manufacturer. It was Thurston’s idea to integrate a strain gage into the structure to result in a load cell. Thurston engaged Ruge (one of the inventors of strain gages) and Foxboro instruments as the instrument manufacturer. The contract with the Ruge was to assist in producing the load cell he had in mind. The contract at Foxboro was to have produced a suitable readout instrument. Thurston provided a technician for Ruge to assist him with the testing. Ruge ultimately did not succeed and told Thurston that he needed to abandon the idea of multi-columns and go to a single tube-like structure. Disappointed, Thurston canceled Ruge’s contract and brought the technician home. He then went on to successfully develop his own multicolumn load cell idea. Based on his design, Thurston was able to successfully demonstrate the four column load cell designs functioning in an aircraft weighing kit at the Dutchess McHenry Field in Wright Field. The U.S. Army participated in this demonstration with great enthusiasm. By June 10, 1944 , Thurston filed for a load cell patent which was eventually awarded to him on November 15, 1949 as U.S. patent #2488349 with rights assigned to Cox & Stevens Aircraft Corporation. Mike Thurston continued his passion for electronic weighing by installing the world’s first livestock scale at the Kansas City Stockyards in 1948 for the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Similarly, he developed and installed the first railway freight motion weighing system in 1949 at the Pennsylvania Railroad Jersey City Yard. His numerous patents that cover not only load cells and load cell scale design but aircraft navigation and performance computers, give testimony to his broad technical knowledge. It was Mr. Thurston’s tutelage, coupled with his warm and patient personality, that allowed Revere ’s activities in the load cell disciplines to expand from the single proposed aircraft weighing kit to the range of activities current today. Mike Thurston passed away in 1973. In 1983, he was posthumously awarded the Technical Excellence Award from the International Society of Weighing and Measurement In the early 50’s, Revere employed Charles W. Silver with the daunting task of beginning the marketing and sale of load cells as components. He claimed that these pieces of steel with electrical wires protruding from the side were able to measure weight with a high accuracy. Mike Thurston, while being a great technical person, was not skilled in selling the advantages to an industry that had only known mechanical levers for centuries. Charlie Silver played a leading role in introducing this new technolog