Sorry for the long period of time that has passed since my last blog entry. I realize this is not good if I want to see traffic growth to the MicroChuck blog and I will redouble my efforts to make a new posting once a week.

I have been traveling extensively this last month, because of foreign trade shows, and the need to visit certain vendors. I am writing this from Australia where it is summer, and not from West Chester (suburban Philadelphia) where it is terribly cold.

But today was quite exciting for me and worthy of comment to others who would have similar interests. I spent the day with Dr. Vivian Robinson, the inventor of the Robinson Backscattered Electron Detector. I marvel at how as a university “lecturer” (in some countries, he would have been called a professor) he decided that in order to pursue his passion for his invention of the backscattered electron detector, he felt he should not be spending his time writing proposal after proposal in the hopes of getting funded by some government agency, but should just go on out there, have confidence in his own abilities and start a company to make the detectors commercially.

As they say, the rest was history. The Robinson Backscattered Electron Detector is a household word among the worldwide community of SEM users. But what impressed me was that Dr. Robinson did not start out with a public stock offering, and he did not seek government funding and subsidy to start his business. He just rolled up his sleeves and did it. He has spent much of his entire professional life since the late 1970’s building and improving his own design of a backscattered electron detector. It was fascinating to me to see what he has been able to design and produce literally with his own two hands and genius. His firm is known worldwide as ETP-SEMRA Ltd.

In days when graduates with technical degrees seem to be pre-destined to end up in laboratories of big academia or big business or big government, it is refreshing to see that even “down under”, in Australia, where the domestic market is really not that large, someone with good ideas, ingenuity, and belief in themselves can succeed in the competitive world of technology. It has for some time been a fascination of my own why more persons with technical backgrounds don’t take what they know, and start small enterprises as Dr. Robinson did thirty years ago. Perhaps it is time for universities to start showcasing successful technical entrepreneurs like Dr. Robinson so that their own graduates might better appreciate that there are opportunities as a small manufacturer. Perhaps some universities already recognize the career potential for at least some of their students as entrepreneurs and inventors; it would be interesting to hear how they are doing that and how they are getting some of their students interested in such non-traditional career paths.