George Shaw Remembers

George S. Shaw was cofounder of Radiation Incorporated in Melbourne, Florida in 1950. Many present-day Harris Corporation employees who worked with Shaw speak of him as a colorful personality and respect him highly as the foundation of the company's electrical engineering strength and inventive culture. It wasn't easy to attract some of the best engineers in the country away from established technological centers, so Shaw became actively involved in the development of Melbourne from an agricultural community of 5,000 into the Space Coast's technological and commercial hub. Shaw is retired and now lives mostly in Costa Rica, visiting Melbourne frequently.

"Homer Denius and I decided to locate the company in Melbourne so we would be close to our customer at the Cape and have easy access to service our equipment. I suppose that the reason it was relatively easy to get the company started was that corporations were so busy recovering from the disorientation from World War II that they didn't want to engage in military work. The United States was involved in Korea, and they needed us.

"The type of contract we acquired just built one on the other. That speaks extremely well for Mr. Denius as a salesman. He was without a doubt a number one salesman, and he had Bill Dodson, Jack Hartley, and others to help."

"The biggest problem I had was getting people. We were engineer-limited in the beginning, and the early development of the company was dependent on getting good people. The vehicles for doing that were the consultants who worked for us, and getting people to visit and find out what a lovely place Melbourne would be to live. The consultants kept our people stimulated. Henry Zimmerman from MIT came frequently, and we would send our people up there to visit him. Dr. Larry Rauck and Myron Nickles, from the University of Michigan, were down here often. They wrote a book on digital telemetry, and a lot of it was from papers here. Very early on, the need was seen for a school here, and so the Florida Institute of Technology (now Florida Tech) was started by Dr. Jerome Keuper and of course Radiation supported it one 100 percent. I've been a board member constantly since FIT was started, and am probably the longest-serving voting member. We have a lot of honorary board members, but I still go to meetings and vote—and not always 'yes.'"

"Homer Denius and I both had families when we came down here and started the company, and they became very active in the social life of the community. We had the Radiation Wives Club very soon after the start of the company; they got involved in the League of Women Voters and the library. Many of the wives were active in the Sweet Adelines, and we started a Toastmasters club to help our salesmen and engineers in making presentations.

"In those early days, we were sort of a company family. Six days a week we would work very long hours, and on Sundays we'd soak up the Florida sunshine and all get out on the Indian River with our families, sailing and swimming, or go to the beach.

"We could see right away that something had to be done for the community in order to make it attractive to bright, young people coming out of MIT, or Georgia Tech, or Purdue. How in the world do you get them to move to a town of 5,000?

"A first step was FIT. Another one was the hospital. The hospital was kind of like a 20-room motel down on Route One. I was on the hospital board with Jimmy Holmes, and the Holmes Regional Medical Center now exists because of our work and our pushing in that direction.

"We built the community from the inside. I was commodore of the yacht club, to give people something to do and a place to go. It was very inexpensive then, and instead of the professional chefs and fancy meals of today, the club members put on parties and cookouts. There were boats, but they were little sailboats for families to have fun with.

Then there was the matter of the bank. If there had been a pawn shop it would have had the business. It was a pretty poor bank. So Mr. Denius and a group of local businessmen started the First National Bank of Melbourne. The bank was responsible for starting the Trinity Tower development here for the elderly, and it also helped finance FIT. The First National Bank of Melbourne was sold to the Sun Group after the merger of Radiation and Harris-Intertype, and the Sun Bank continues to be one of the principal banks in the area.

"There was one crucial point of conflict with the community. We had acquired a contract to digitally instrument some aircraft to fly through nuclear tests—an extremely important contract for us. The planes could be trucked in, but after we did our work, they had to be flown out intact. The runways at the Melbourne Airport were too short. We offered to pay for extending the runways in exchange for use of some vacant World War II buildings we needed, but the city wanted us to pay rent too. One of the difficulties was that it was impossible to talk about what we were doing. The project was highly classified. All I could say was that we have to have the runway longer. I couldn't tell them why.

"Fort Lauderdale, Orlando, and Miami were willing to do almost anything to get us to move there. We wound up building our own facility for the project in Orlando, where the runways were long enough, but we almost left the Melbourne area.

"At that point, we could see that if we were to keep up with the business we were getting we had to get into some substantial and adequate facilities. Neither Mr. Denius nor I wanted to move to Orlando. The people in Palm Bay made us welcome and helped us find financing, and that's how we came to locate our main facilities there.

"We ran a full-page ad every month in Fortune magazine. We talked about digital communications and how it would lead to satellite communications, personal wireless telephones, worldwide instant communications, and extension of the American philosophy in the English language throughout the world, just as it is happening today. I guess we were thinking 30 years ahead, but that's what it takes. Some very good engineers saw those ads and came to work with us to help achieve those things.

"By the time Dr. Joe Boyd joined us, we had plenty of Ph.D.s in the company—maybe 30—so the new Ph.D. in town was not the first. And we had lots of people with master's degrees and hundreds of graduate engineers."

"We worked hard, but we had a good time too. One Christmas we gave Mr. Denius a donkey. He was pretty stubborn sometimes, and difficult, and that's probably why we gave it to him. But probably more than any other reason, we had a chance to buy a cheap donkey. His children loved it, but the neighbors did not!"