HP in Corvallis: History of Inkjet

To understand my HP career, it helps to understand how HP and Corvallis and inkjet printing came to be the focal point that provided most of my HP career opportunities.

In "Bill & Dave: How Hewlett and Packard Built the World's Greatest Company," Michael Malone said that moving the Advanced Products Division to Corvallis was "a dreadful mistake" that plucked the division out of the ferment and plopped it in the backwoods.

From a computer-centric point of view, that may be true. But HP owes it's single largest and most profitable success to the HP people in Corvallis who were at the heart of Thermal Inkjet (TIJ) printing. From my point of view, putting HP in Corvallis was a brilliant move that gave me 20 years of work and helped us raise our family where we wanted to live.

Two blog posts by Tom Kraemer, a former HP Corvallis technologist, discuss HP's impact in Corvallis and provide a great history of TIJ. The TIJ history is from Tom's "History of HP inkjet printers" in American Heritage Invention & Technology. I have a pdf of the original TIJ history article in case the link fails.

This quick summary of TIJ in Corvallis comes from HP Computer Museum:

In 1985, the InkJet Components Operation (ICO) was established under Tom Hassell. In July of 1989, ICO was promoted to division status. The Inkjet Components Division was responsible for the development of inkjet printheads in Corvallis and San Diego. Dana Seccombe was appointed general manager. This business activity was to become the primary profit driver for HP in the history of the company. ICO had sales of $15M in 1986. That revenue grew to over $120M in 1990.

HP's handheld calculator success generated a need for low power printing. Printer research had been a part of HP's calculator development work since the beginning. In the early 1970s, the engineers at HP's advanced research laboratory in Palo Alto, California, who-designed the HP-35 also built a prototype "pocket plotter" to output graphs. HP engineers then invented "grit wheels" that could move paper in both X and Y directions. Building on this success, in 1978 managers of HP's Corvallis facility started a project to apply the grit-wheel idea to calculator plotters.

Here is the account from Tom's American Heritage article:

The inkjet project began in the fall of 1979, when Corvallis's engineering manager, Ernst Erni, was promoted to direct the engineering of integrated circuits (ICs), liquid-crystal displays (LCDs), and thermal print heads for calculators. Erni later explained, "We needed more products to fill up our manufacturing capacity. You have to run your fab [i.e., fabrication] at full capacity to maintain quality and make a profit." As part of his reorganization plan, Erni asked a member of his management staff, Frank Cloutier, to investigate improvements in print heads and displays.

Frank Cloutier would later be my GM for laptops and my direct CTO boss even later.

Quoting Tom again:

Cloutier traveled to HP's central advanced-research laboratory in Palo Alto to look for new ideas. While he was there, an engineer named John Vaught demonstrated his idea of using thermal heating to eject droplets of ink through a tiny orifice to print text. The idea of inkjet printing was not new in itself; it had been used as early as 1950 in instrument recorders and other specialized applications. Later it was adopted for jobs like the highspeed printing of custom date codes and magazine labels. But Vaught's mechanism was the first one Cloutier had seen that looked suitable for use in a mass-produced consumer product. Cloutier recalled, "By making a pen low enough in cost, I realized that you could make it disposable. Our decision to make it disposable turned out to be essential, since we were unable to build an inkjet pen reliable enough to last longer than one fill of ink." Cloutier took Vaught's idea back to Corvallis and began to develop it into a working prototype.

The first one-dot prototype that Vaught had shown Cloutier at HP Labs consisted of a plate with a groove in it and a thin-film resistor aligned over the groove to form a tube. Ink was fed into one end of the tube, and when the resistor heated up, the ink would boil and spit out the other end. Cloutier recalled, "1 realized how difficult this would be to manufacture, since cutting a precision groove and carefully aligning a resistor over the top of it would involve a tot of tabor. I then thought of how integrated circuits are manufactured, by building many of them on a single wafer and cutting them apart when they are done. If we built a large sheet of print heads at one time, the cost of labor to align the orifice hole over the resistors would be less.

"I took a piece of thin brass shim stock, punched the tiniest hole I could with a sewing needle, put it over a resistor covered in ink, and then looked at it under a strobe microscope." Cloutier applied repetitive pulses of current through the resistor, and "It worked! After a while I couldn't see anything anymore. I stepped back and saw I was completely covered in black ink. So a suit of clothes and several tries later, we had the architecture that we still use today." Cloutier saved his ink stained tie, and he often displays it at company functions. Lab coats and black jeans quickly became the clothing of choice for inkjet engineers.

After much development in mass production methods (using many of the semiconductor processes in Corvallis), in ink, in paper, and in electrical/data interfaces and what HP called "writing systems," the St. Helens TIJ cartridge ("pen" in HP terms) was ready:

All the design problems were eventually solved and soon the assembly lines were producing 100,000 print heads per month. Yet the printer's debut was not auspicious. When the HP 2225 ThinkJet printer was introduced, in Apri11984, it was barely competitive with dot-matrix printers. (The name ThinkJet came from THermal INK JETting out of a nozzle.) Its main advantages over a dot-matrix printer were that it printed quietly and could run on calculator batteries. Most calculators were connected to the Think- Jet printer via a small wire cable. The stand-alone printer required its own set of rechargeable batteries.

Inkjet printer sales did not take off until the HP DeskJet printer was introduced in 1988 for just more than $1,000. At last inkjet had a clear price advantage over laser printers, which still cost around $1,500. Today, color inkjet printers are less expensive than black-and-white laser printers.

In 1988, I left KLA Instruments in the Bay Area to move to Corvallis to join my former grad school and Intelledex colleagues at Accu-Fab. Much of my work there was on machine vision to help automate the assembly of inkjet cartridges in Corvallis and San Diego. I spent quite a bit of time at those HP sites and met many of inkjet engineers during those years. When we spun off Acumen, HP switched to our Acumen machine vision technology.

By the time I landed at HP in 1992, I had formed many solid HP connections.

Next: 1992: Getting Started at HP