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It all started in the San Diego area, where the DVM seed was planted in the early 1950s by a company called NonLinear Systems. For several years, all digital voltmeters came from southern California. Then the business moved north to Hewlett-Packard Co.-in Palo Alto, Calif., at first, then to an HP plant in Loveland, Colo. Then a major part of the business gravitated even farther north, to John Fluke Mfg. Co., in Mountlake Terrace, Wash.
That company's chairman and founder, John Fluke, had been roommates many years earlier with HP's chairman and cofounder, David Packard, when the two were young engineers at General Electric in Schenectady, N.Y. Fluke and Packard became strong competitors and strong friends. Fluke died in 1984 and Packard in 1996.
The instrument was named by Andrew F. Kay, who founded Non-Linear Systems in 1952. The first engineer he hired was Jonathan Edwards, formerly a fellow engineer at Bill Jack Scientific Instrument Co., a manufacturer of aerial-reconnaissance equipment, where Kay had been vice president of engineering and Bill Jack's first employee.
Business was great at Bill Jack, which had enough contracts to last till the end of the decade, so the emphasis was on production rather than engineering. Kay liked engineering, so he left to start NLS, which would make what Kay first called a digital-readout voltmeter, then a digital voltmeter. Still later, with the added ability to measure ac volts and resistance, the instrument was renamed a digital multimeter (DMM), though many people stuck with the old name even for the extra-capability instrument.
Kay got the idea for the instrument while working some years earlier for a predecessor company, Jack & Heintz. He saw unskilled production-line people using large analog voltmeters. Because of wartime pressures, they didn't get much training, so their readings weren't dependable. Neither was their meter handling: On occasion, someone would blow up a meter with an overvoltage. And the meters were expensive and hard to come by, because of the Manhattan Project's high demand for them in building the atomic bomb.
Making reading easy
What was needed, Kay figured, was a voltmeter with unambiguous numbers that anybody could read-an instrument that would tolerate a reasonable degree of overvoltage, one with automatic polarity switching and automatic ranging. It...