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’Tis the Season…to get the Calendar out!
December 18, 2009
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Winter holiday traditions, decorating the tree, exchanging presents, mailing the Meyer Tool calendar… A few years after our founding, Frank Meyer started sending out calendars to customers. Rather than using a mass market calendar with our name added, Frank chose to use photographs from key or interesting projects worked on during the year to publish our uniquely Meyer calendar. In the 1970s and until the late 1990s, this process required the taking and developing of actual film, a physical layout of the hardcopy photographs, and the arcane processes of offset printing. A "first article" calendar would be printed for approval before the production run. Since the printer had no idea what the photos represented, this led to some interesting typos on the titles, though you do probably have to be an engineer to find typos such as "Comical" Vessel for Conical Vessel and "FIDO" Assembly for FODI (Final Optics Diagnostics Instrument) to be hilarious.
Technology has certainly changed the process; it is all digital now, from the photographs to the pdf “first article”. However. some things haven’t changed. We still take photographs throughout the year, but instead of sifting though hardcopy, we review jpegs. After picking the most representative and best shots of the previous year’s work, we still print out review copies and cut and paste a physical layout. Now though we scan the layout and email the jpegs to the printer. The actual printing process has, of course, been totally revolutionized. |
1992 Meyer Tool & Mfg. Calendar
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Unfortunately copies of the earliest calendars are lost. I started at Meyer Tool in 1989, for the first few years it didn’t occur to me that the calendars were recording history. At the new year I’d take down the old calendar and cut out the photos from the calendar base and save them. In 1993 it finally occurred to me to start saving the entire calendar base with the photographs. Even then it wasn’t until around 2000 that I thought to frame and hang the calendars in chronological order in my office.
In retrospect the photos on these calendars are amazing. They record not only a history of Meyer Tool, but also some of the most significant programs in the physical sciences during that time span. Photos on the calendars we’ve saved include components for the Superconducting Super Collider, the Advanced Photon Source, the National Ignition Facility, the Spallation Neutron Source, and the Large Hadron Collider among others. They show an evolution of industrial cryogenic and vacuum equipment with liquid helium cold boxes, nanoparticle reactors, crystal growth chambers, and semiconductor process vessels. A senior engineer at a national laboratory once mentioned that he saved the photos from Meyer calendars. He uses them to illustrate what the actual hardware looks like to new engineers.
It is hard to choose the photographs for the calendar. We try to pick ones both visually striking and representative of our work from the previous year. Some times some of the best photos don’t make the calendar because of customer restrictions. Sometimes the most intricate or difficult projects don’t make the calendar because the photo is just plain boring. Developing and executing the manufacturing process for the 200+ NIF Mirror Housings to meet the critical tolerances and the intricacies of assembly was an exciting challenge, unfortunately the photo of a housing was pretty disappointing. It looked like, well, an aluminum box.
When I visit a customer I usually see one of our calendars hanging in his or her office. The people we interact with at our customer sites have almost exclusively technical backgrounds. Not surprisingly they find the photos on our calendar as interesting as we do. A point of pride with me is when a customer tells me how excited they are that their part appeared on our calendar.
So while we continue our holiday tradition of busily stuffing the new calendars into mailing tubes for 2010, we’d like to offer a retrospective of calendars from 1992 to 2009. At the moment we’re just putting up the images of the calendar backing. Over time we hope to expand the information and history connected to the individual photos. So if you recognize a photo and have a story or anecdote to relate please send us an email at [email protected]. If you don’t presently receive our calendar and would like to, please sign up on Meyer Tool's contact page. Request the calendar in the "Question" field and be sure to include your mailing address.
In retrospect the photos on these calendars are amazing. They record not only a history of Meyer Tool, but also some of the most significant programs in the physical sciences during that time span. Photos on the calendars we’ve saved include components for the Superconducting Super Collider, the Advanced Photon Source, the National Ignition Facility, the Spallation Neutron Source, and the Large Hadron Collider among others. They show an evolution of industrial cryogenic and vacuum equipment with liquid helium cold boxes, nanoparticle reactors, crystal growth chambers, and semiconductor process vessels. A senior engineer at a national laboratory once mentioned that he saved the photos from Meyer calendars. He uses them to illustrate what the actual hardware looks like to new engineers.
It is hard to choose the photographs for the calendar. We try to pick ones both visually striking and representative of our work from the previous year. Some times some of the best photos don’t make the calendar because of customer restrictions. Sometimes the most intricate or difficult projects don’t make the calendar because the photo is just plain boring. Developing and executing the manufacturing process for the 200+ NIF Mirror Housings to meet the critical tolerances and the intricacies of assembly was an exciting challenge, unfortunately the photo of a housing was pretty disappointing. It looked like, well, an aluminum box.
When I visit a customer I usually see one of our calendars hanging in his or her office. The people we interact with at our customer sites have almost exclusively technical backgrounds. Not surprisingly they find the photos on our calendar as interesting as we do. A point of pride with me is when a customer tells me how excited they are that their part appeared on our calendar.
So while we continue our holiday tradition of busily stuffing the new calendars into mailing tubes for 2010, we’d like to offer a retrospective of calendars from 1992 to 2009. At the moment we’re just putting up the images of the calendar backing. Over time we hope to expand the information and history connected to the individual photos. So if you recognize a photo and have a story or anecdote to relate please send us an email at [email protected]. If you don’t presently receive our calendar and would like to, please sign up on Meyer Tool's contact page. Request the calendar in the "Question" field and be sure to include your mailing address.
