One of the toughest ‘geniuses” to manage was Marcel Golay. He was a Swiss, educated in Zurich and spoke English with a pronounced French accent. He worked for Bell Labs for a few years in the 20’s, and then went to the US Army Signal Corps in New Jersey for many years. When he retired he moved to Lausanne and became a Perkin-Elmer corporate consultant. Basically, that meant that PE paid him but no one controlled what he did.

Before he came with us he had invented a detector for far-infrared radiation, which was a kind of twilight zone between ordinary infrared, which our instruments handled very well optically, and ordinary microwaves, which are detected using radio-frequency techniques. We tried using his detectors, which he had licensed to another company, to extend the operating range of our instruments, with poor results. The detectors kept failing because of obvious engineering and manufacturing problems, but the other company was very unresponsive. It was not until many years later that the semiconductor revolution came along and solved the problem in an entirely different way. Very frustrating for all those years, and we heard Marcel complaining during that entire time.

In the meantime gas chromatography became important. it was by then well known that if one filled a one meter long, 1/4” metal tube, called a column, with certain kinds of porous sand, coated the sand with squalane, a fish oil, passed an inert gas like helium or nitrogen continuously through it, and quickly injected a small sample of a gas mixture at the head of the column; the mixture would eventually come out of the end of the column and the various components would be separated in time. But there was no good understanding of the interrelationship of all the variables, including what happens when the temperature changes. A perfect assignment for Marcel. Figure it out.

And he did. He made about the simplest assumption that he could: that the column of oil-coated porous sand was equivalent to a bundle of fine-bore tubes all coated on the inside with oil, and he went ahead and calculated the expected results for one of those tubes, which turned out to be two or three orders of magnitude better than the results with the sand-filled column. With a leap of insight he reasoned “Why not just use narrow bore, oil-coated tubing?” and he instantly invented what came to be known as the Golay column. Perkin-Elmer owned the patent and tried to enforce It for a while, gave up on that but never invested enough in the concept and never made much money from the effort. But that wasn’t Marcel’s fault. He was very good at applying simple, common-sense concepts to complicated problems.

Later in his career with us, he got together with Abe Savitzky, a chemist PhD turned computer maven, and invented a mathematical technique called Savitzky-Golay filtering, which improved the results that could be obtained in both spectroscopy and chromatography. They published a short disclosure in the journal Analytical Chemistry, and for years and years it was the article most-cited in the entire field of analytical chemistry publications. There was no patent protection, but in this case PE really used the technique in many of its products and, I’m sure, profited handsomely.

Over the years he worked on lots of other projects, many of which I never heard about, but three non-technical items I do remember. One was his driving. I guess that when he first began with us he was still living in the US, because he was driving his own Mercedes sports car, of which he owned two or three. He drove in Norwalk as I have heard people in Rome, Italy drive. For example, Route 7 was a fairly busy two-lane state highway in those days, with a traffic light at the intersection where it was necessary, going north, to make a left turn into Perkin-Elmer. Routinely, when stopped 10 or 16 cars back from the light, with nothing in sight coming the other way, he would mutter to himself for a second or two, then suddenly pull out into the southbound lane and roar up the 100 yards or so on the wrong side, then down shift and turn into PE. I made a habit of not riding in a car he was driving.

That backfired once when I was assigned to drive him back to his hotel, on a day when he was flying back to Switzerland. I didn’t know it but that was always the day when he did his shopping. We stopped at several places along Route 7. Our final stop was the supermarket, where he intended to buy about a dozen lobsters to take back home. Of course they had to be the right size and color and alive and packed in ice. He negotiated with the clerk at the fish counter for what seemed to be a half hour. The clerk didn’t seem to understand English, at least Marcel’s version. In the meantime, I had three tennis partners waiting for me in Wilton. Finally It got down to “Are they alive?” He poked them and prodded them with a pencil he borrowed from the clerk and finally decided that they weren’t moving around fast enough to meet his standards. He walked out without the lobsters, noting that he would buy them at JFK and pay three times as much, a terrible decision for a Swiss, as he was quick to note.

My last memory is a very pleasant one. We were in the middle of some sort of one-on-one discussion and I said something like “Hey, I’m just the engineer on this job.” He said “Oh no, you are a scientist.” I never had a hang-up over that particular distinction, but coming from him I knew it was the highest praise. He could be a real sweetheart when he put his mind to it.