Trak Electronics was located on Route 7, in Wilton, CT.
Trak Electronics is where I really learned what electronics was all about. Trak was a subsidiary of CGS Laboratories. I can't remember what the CGS stood for. Trak Electronics is now located in Tampa Florida, now known as TRAK Microwave Corp.We were living in Danbury at the time, about 1962-1963, so the drive to Wilton wasn't too bad. This was my introduction to transistors and boolean logic. Transistors, the humble beginnings of solid state circuitry, and logic are the heart of today's' computers. Developed in the late 1940's by Bell labs, and first put to use in the '50's in telephones, the transistor soon replaced the vacuum tube in all electronic circuits.
The point here is that in order to get ahead in the electronics field, an early start in transistor technology was very important to the rest of my working career. While working at Picker X-Ray, I had to have a suitcase full of vacuum tubes in order to be prepared to fix the many different systems that I was working on. With transistors, replacement transistors could be carried in a small bag. Eventually, the working circuit boards containing the transistors were carried, making troubleshooting and repair a snap. If you could isolate a problem to a particular circuit, then replacing that circuit board usually did the trick. Of course, you could also try every board until things worked, sometimes.
The electronic devices that were manufactured by Trak Electronics were very sophisticated and required an understanding of the logic that was at the very heart of these devices. In 1963, the US Navy was still using Morse code to send messages back and forth among ships. The purpose of these machines was to translate Morse code into hard copy printouts on teletype machines. You can guess how far we've come since those days. To me, that doesn't seem that long ago, but I guess it was. While I had been used to reading electronic schematics, that was no longer the requirement. Reading and interpreting logic diagrams was the new technology and Trak Electronics was heavily involved in that technology.
Imagine someone on a ship sending a Morse code message over a radio connection to another ship. In the old days, someone at the other end would pick up the dots and dashes thru an earphone and hand write the translated code into a readable message. But now (in 1963) a radio receiver would pick up the message, forward it to one of our machines where it would go thru a translator and print out the message on a teletype machine. The Trak translator would need to be able to do this thru all sorts of radio noise and keep up with the changing speed of the sender. Quite a trick in those days and it was accomplished quite well.
The machine had to be tested on board a naval vessel. One of the company engineers and myself were selected to do the job. We flew down to Norfolk, VA, conducted the test successfully on board one of the navy's ships and returned home. The engineer did not want to fly back, so we took the train. We bought seats in the parlor car and with meals and drinks and soft reclining swivel chairs, enjoyed one of the most relaxing and enjoyable trips I ever had. It took longer to get back, but it was a very pleasant trip.
After a while, for some reason or other, we moved to another building in the complex, in a basement apartment. It was a basement apartment to the rear yard, but at ground level in the front. It was while we were in this apartment that Robert had one of his close calls.
One day, while Robert was playing outside, I heard him scream. I also had heard the sound of a lawnmower up till then. I bolted outside and saw him holding his hands to his head, blood streaming
down his face. I knew he had been struck by something, but what and where the injury was, I couldn't tell. Therese wasn't home at the time, so leaving the other children behind, I grabbed Robert, ran to the car and raced to the hospital emergency room. There, they patched him up. The injury turned out to be not serious. Some object thrown up by the lawnmower had grazed his scalp at the hair line. A few stitches and he was OK. But the thought of that object striking his head an inch either way differently was not a happy thought. The picture to the right was taken shortly after. (They're missing the fife player.) When Therese returned home, I can imagine her thoughts when she found the other two kids alone, the doors wide open and a trail of blood leading to where my car had been. I had no time to leave her a note.
I worked at Trak Electronics for only about a year, when I looked in to a job in Bethel, the next town over from Danbury. The name of the company was Consolidated Controls Corp. and to the best of my knowledge, it still is and it is still there. This job introduced me to a completely new field of electronics, one I had never heard of before; magnetic amplifiers.
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