Today we’d like to introduce you to Dietmar and Erik Schoeffel.
Dietmar and Erik, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
D.M. Schoeffel’s 45-year affiliation with McPherson, and the company’s 65-year involvement in scientific instrument manufacture and design, has resulted in a product line serving the world with precision analytical tools. We’ve always worked in an inch wide, mile deep niche of specialty light measuring tools for spectroscopy. Over the years we have sold directly to end users in the USA and all over the world. These days more than half our sales are international. Everything we make is built in our shop here in Massachusetts. Our customers are typically research scientists at university or large government laboratories. Think Brookhaven National Lab in New York, National Institute of Standards in Maryland, CERN in Switzerland, and Princeton Plasma Physics in New Jersey and so on. Most of our inquiries come are from technical articles or word of mouth.
During the 1950s, I first started making optical assemblies, light sources and monochromators in the basement. That was a small company called Schoeffel Instruments in New Jersey. The products were for spectroscopy and especially for high pressure liquid chromatography. It was a new technique at that time. The fluorescence detectors and spectrofluorometers we built were very sensitive and state of the art. They sold well. The company grew and was eventually sold to Kratos, a firm with a larger stake in the new chromatography and related analytical instrument field. This facilitated the family’s involvement with McPherson and move to Massachusetts. At that time McPherson, whose founder Paul McPherson died in the early 1970s after the small airplane he was piloting crashed into trees near his home in Stow, was held by GCA Corporation. GCA was an early player in the semiconductor market. They were large and didn’t quite know what to do with the small McPherson division. GCA divested McPherson to Schoeffel in 1981.
From then till now, we’ve built thousands of instruments and developed a vast experience in the vacuum range. The instruments we build for the soft x-ray and extreme ultraviolet are not available anywhere else. We continue to design unique solutions for customer and also sell more routine catalog instruments. Our experience in the ultraviolet help us branch into the manufacture of components specifically for the vacuum industry. You will find our manufactured vacuum systems, penetration welded components, and cold stages and mechanisms throughout the industries that employ vacuum and ultra-high vacuum technology too.
Overall, has it been relatively smooth? If not, what were some of the struggles along the way?
Selling to scientists working with fundamental or basic research means our customers often depend on government or other grant money to buy equipment and do interesting work. There are times when the political climate influences and shrinks, or grows, spending for science and related infrastructure. Boom times occurred during the space race and end of cold war. For the past few years though, the trend is to reduce money for NASA, NIST and other science concerns here in the USA. This is one reason our international customers are important. While other countries also have cycles in science spending, they rarely align with our domestic market. The interaction does a lot to stabilize our business environment.
McPherson – what should we know? What do you guys do best? What sets you apart from the competition?
McPherson makes monochromators and spectrometers as well as optical systems for spectroscopy.
We design, assemble and test instrumentation for many wavelengths; from soft x-ray and extreme ultraviolet, through vacuum ultraviolet and UV-Visible, and up to the long wave infrared. Our systems work in many applications and many science disciplines. We offer imaging spectrometers for high temperature plasma physics, Raman systems for physical-chemistry, HPLC fluorescence detectors for pharma, spectral calibration stations for astrophysics, and several types of spectrophotometers for material characterization.
Ours is a product line complete with accessories for those who do it themselves. We offer light sources, detectors, filter wheels, specialty filters, fiber optics, telescopes, and collimators. Most of these are also available for vacuum and ultra high vacuum applications.
What is “success” or “successful” for you?
I think we are successful because people keep calling on us to do this work. We are proud of our high performance, durable products. This is an old company and we routinely help customers who have machines we built forty years ago. It is a point of pride here. We have excellent relevance, staying power and this is proof we make ‘green’ machines. They last a long time, through many user generations, and can usually be fixed and updated rather than discarded. But otherwise, we engage in risky behavior!
We work with people who want to try new things in new ways – scientists. Turning one team’s vision for an experiment into precision hardware is not easy. When we build customized instrumentation, it can be difficult to recognize success! Some special instruments are break-even propositions at best. So the bottom line might not be a reward. Our future depends on shipments reaching customers, who can then do more novel work in science applications and publish the results. The work might result in new types of materials or products. More likely, other science groups see the work and need to reproduce it or improve it. We know we’ve done well when the instrumentation reaches the customers laboratory, works as intended and allows new science to be done and resulting in new curiosity about what comes next.
Contact Info:
- Address: McPherson
7-A Stuart Road,
Chelmsford, MA 01824-4107 - Website: http://www.McPhersonInc.com
- Phone: 1-978-256-4512
- Email: MCP@McPhersonInc.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/spectrometermachine/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Spectrometers/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/McPhersonVUV
Image Credit:
All photos property of and taken by McPherson except “247m22-wendelstein-germany” that was taken by German photographer Thomas Struth https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Struth
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