Walter O. LeCroy made a capital
career out of helping EEs do
their jobs. The digital and analog
oscilloscopes that LeCroy
Corp. manufactures allow engineers
to test and measure signal
voltages. But he found help and
a key component for oscilloscopes
in the most unlikely of places - not in a dream or
from burning the midnight oil, but in a toy store.
"I knew it could be done and I was noodling with it,"
LeCroy said. "Then I was in Toys R Us, and there it was,
already done."
Vectrex, a video game console with a built-in monitor
from the 1980s, served as an inspiration for his company's
oscilloscopes. Assimilating the Vectrex's magnetic
deflection technology, LeCroy created oscilloscopes that
could perform tests and draw results on screen for engineers
to evaluate.
But that unusual inspiration is only a piece of the pie
that is Walter LeCroy. When he was a boy, his parents
gave him a chemistry set, and his uncles gave him a camera.
Though he didn't necessary neglect his tubes and
beakers, he spent his adolescence and young adulthood
behind a lens. He has been snapping shots since he was
10. In fact, he still is a photographer.
He took pictures for an Alabama newspaper
while he attended high school. At the University
of Alabama he planned to become a "missionary"
of photography. But after freshman year, he
realized that photography was not in the cards -
at least not as a vocation. So he returned to his
other childhood fascination, science.
"Certainly, you have to be born with certain
propensities, and those have to be nurtured," he
said. "Engineers are people who like to know how
things work. Someone once asked me what the
most important question to an engineer is. 'How
does it work?' is what I said."
Leaving the south to attend Columbia University,
LeCroy earned a bachelor's degree in physics
in 1956. "If I were a native of New York, I wouldn't
have made the cut," he said. He may have
squeezed into admissions, but Columbia found
an engineering savant in him, and he eventually
became the chief electronics engineer in the
physics department.
"My interest in electronics came from working
in the physics department lab," he said. "I could
actually do electronics. I got a kick out of that. It's
a great way to learn. Maybe the best way."
Out of the Frying Pan, Into the Laundromat
Testing the waters of entrepreneurship, he
opened a lab to create modules for capturing and
analyzing signatures of
subatomic particles in
1964 - out of a conver
ted laundromat.
LeCroy Research Systems
earned enough
to eventually move out of the laundromat and
landed offices in New York and Switzerland.
Though the company prospered in capturing
and analyzing subatomic particles for laboratories
in the highly specialized markets of nuclear
and particle physics, LeCroy felt that the narrow
field's window was closing. So right around his
life-changing visit to the toy store, the renamed
LeCroy Corp. shifted from particle and nuclear
physics to high-end oscilloscopes.
"After about 10 years or so, we realized we had
the technology for a digital oscilloscope," he said.
"What we didn't know was whether the world
would accept scopes from an unknown. We were
not known in the bigger world."