If you came of age in the 1960s or 1970s and then later became an EE, chances are you’re more than casually acquainted with Heathkit. Many engineers started their budding careers by building one or more kits made by the Heath Company. I certainly did. When I stumbled across a brief interview with Chas Gilmore, who joined the Heath Company in 1966 as a design engineer and worked at the Heath Company on and off for more than two decades, eventually becoming VP of product development, marketing, and sales, I knew I needed to interview him.

One day in October, I spent two hours on a Zoom call with Gilmore, and I’m publishing large excerpts from that interview in this 5-part article series. Part 1 covers the Heath Company’s founding and post-war entry into the electronic business. Part 2 covers the Heath Company’s and Heathkit’s heyday in the 1960s and through the mid-1970s. Part 3 covers the Heath Company’s entry into personal computers in the late 1970s. Part 4 will cover Zenith’s acquisition of the Heath Company in the 1980s and the eventual demise of the Heath Company’s electronic kit business in 1992. Part 5 concludes with Chas Gilmore’s final thoughts from the interview.

In this first article, I asked Gilmore about the Heath Company’s origins and about his life leading up to his joining the Heath Company as a design engineer in 1966.

Steve Leibson: They started as an airplane kit company.

Chas Gilmore: They did. One of the Heath engineers, a fellow by name of Terry Perdue, has done a lot of work on the original history of Heath. He published a book. There are a number of people that have written different stories about Heath. Terry’s is, as far as I can tell, by far the most accurate, so they’re probably as good a resource as anything for that history. I think about 1918, maybe even somewhat earlier, a guy by the name of Edward Bayard Heath got Heath going. He actually bought an existing “aeroplane” company.  And yes, Heath was an airplane company in the beginning—kit aeroplanes. Then Heath died in an airplane accident—a prototype Heath aeroplane crashed.

Heath Parasol airplane (circa 1926-1932) at the Oshkosh EAA AirVenture air show in 2003. Image credit: FlugKerl2

The Heath Company was bought by Howard Anthony out of bankruptcy somewhere around 1935. He moved the company to Michigan, I think probably because he lived there, to a place called Niles, Michigan. Then he moved the company to Benton Harbor, Michigan. Benton Harbor and Saint Joe are Twin Cities, on either side of where the Saint Joseph River goes into Lake Michigan. During World War II, when the United States Government was scrambling to find anybody who had anything like aircraft in their name, they called what I think was called the Heath Airplane Company at that time, or something like that, and the company started making various and sundry airplane components, including a bunch of equipment that was electronics. We get to the end of the war, and, of course, everything downsized tremendously and…

Steve Leibson: And put a lot of surplus parts on the market.

Chas Gilmore: Oh, a ton of them. Indeed! Well, the company, basically, had two partners at that stage of the game. One guy took the hardware parts, the landing gear and all that stuff, and went off and formed another company. Howard Anthony kept the electronic side of it and fished around for something to build. One of the very interesting stories of that aspect is that the government was auctioning tons of electronic surplus. Apparently, Anthony bid on a batch, which turned into something like three or five boxcar loads of stuff. And the story I heard from some of the people who were around at the time, was that he’d kind of forgotten that he bid on it when the station master at Benton Harbor calls him up and said, “Mr. Anthony, you’ve got four or five railroad cars filled with electronic parts that you bought and you’ve got a week before the demurrage fee sets in on the boxcars.” He went into scramble mode, talked to all kinds of friends, anybody he could, anybody who had a big barn or similar storage space, anything of that nature. Stored all this electronic stuff. And one of the items in this batch, in quantity, was the 5BP1 – that’s a 5-inch CRT.

The Heath Company’s first kit was the O-1 oscilloscope, which incorporated war-surplus electronic parts including the CRT and sold for $39.50. This ad came from the November 1947 issue of “Radio News.” Image credit: Heath Company

Steve Leibson: I suspected that we’d get into oscilloscopes quickly.

Chas Gilmore: Well, an oscilloscope was his first kit. The O-1 sold for $39.50, I believe in about November of 1947. And by 1952, 1953, maybe even 1954, they were selling four or five million dollars’ worth of kits per year. The kits just started flowing like mad. And one of the things that was happening was that every time they ran out of some particular part, they would find a substitute somewhere along the line and change the model number of the kit. So, you got the O-1, O-2, O-3, O-4, in very rapid succession. And, of course, they added a VTVM very quickly, then some audio gear. I think it took them into the early fifties before they got into any amateur radio products, the first one being the A-1 transmitter.

A vacuum tube voltmeter (VTVM) kit quickly followed the success of Heath’s O-1 oscilloscope. This ad also came from the December 1947 issue of “Radio News.” Image credit: Heath Company

Steve Leibson: So let me ask you about the oscilloscope, because…

Chas Gilmore: Yeah?

Steve Leibson: Right after the war, an oscilloscope was a pretty new instrument, even for the highest tech companies. So how did a Benton Harbor kit company come up with an oscilloscope design?

Chas Gilmore: Well, I actually, I think he looked at a magazine article and copied it. I think Howard Anthony was very pragmatic. He was one of the people who would have said, “You know, don’t design it if it’s already been designed.” But further, to your point, there are two things that that brings to mind.

One, there were thousands of ex-GIs who had been exposed to electronics in World War II. So, there was a real market for lower cost stuff. The other point being an oscilloscope at that stage of the game was one expensive instrument, and you know, $39.50? You’ve got to be kidding me. I mean, that must have been a tenth to a hundredth the cost of most oscilloscopes at that stage of the game. Now that ‘scope didn’t even meet the 80/20 rule. It was pretty low in performance. I forget. It may have been as low as 50KHz bandwidth and, like all the early scopes, it had recurrent sweep versus triggered sweep. I’m not exactly sure — I could go back and look that up somewhere — and they made fairly rapid progress, to like 5MHz vertical bandwidth. You needed 5 MHz to service TVs.

When I was in high school, which would have been in the fifties, I got my Ham license. One of your questions is, how did I get to know Heath? I built a bunch of Heathkits, including an Oscilloscope – an O-12 if I remember – because I got my amateur radio license when I was in high school and I had become enamored with electronics. Which was interesting because my father was a geologist, and his attitude toward the whole thing was, “Why are you fiddling with this electronic stuff? It’s a passing fad.”

Steve Leibson: No.

Chas Gilmore: And I was quite a bit older before I realized. “Well, you know, a guy that thinks in 10,000-year increments would think that.” And so, I knew — I really knew of Heath, and when I was coming up on graduating from college, why, you know, I was shopping around for a place to work versus graduate school, and…

Steve Leibson: What college was this?

Chas Gilmore: This was Hobart College, in Geneva, New York. Oh, yeah, you asked the question, I got a BS in physics there. It’s a small Liberal Arts school. Fact is, I believe the year I graduated was the last year they issued any BS degrees. After that, it was BAs. If I had my choice I would have gone to an engineering school. I’d been a ham for a good number of years, and, like I said, I was just fascinated with electronics.

My version of the 1957 Radio Amateur’s Handbook is so dog-eared that it is unbelievable because I just pawed and pawed over that thing. I was interested in radios as well as learning basic electronic circuit theory. Although most circuits were analog, I remember building flip-flops with old type 45 tubes because, see, I got them from old radios that I got from neighbor ladies who said, if you mow my lawn you can go up to my attic and rummage. So, I’d get an old radio and take it home with me and tear it apart and get all the resistors, capacitors, tubes, etc. Well, I wanted to go to an engineering school, and my father, who had been at MIT in the thirties, said, “You can go to an engineering school, but I’m not paying for a cent of it. You’ll get a lousy education.”

Steve Leibson: That’s an interesting perspective after World War II.

Chas Gilmore: Well, it was, but remember, certainly when he was at MIT in the thirties, it was a very, very technical degree and by the time I was getting ready to head off to college he had moved from field geology into managing the whole research and development department. He was saying, “You know what? I never got any education in this area. All I got was just a solid technical education.” Since then, and even by the time I was going to go to school, the engineering schools understood that you need more than calculus and circuit design theory. I saw somewhere that you graduated from Case [Western Reserve University in Cleveland].

Steve Leibson: That’s right.

Chas Gilmore: And an interesting side note on that. The last company that I dealt with was named PPM. Three of us bought that company in Cleveland, in Beachwood, and that company had been started by a guy who graduated from Case in 1942.

Steve Leibson: Hmm.

Chas Gilmore: And he went from Case to MIT Rad Lab and spent a number of years there, and then came back to Cleveland and founded this company, which we bought from him in 2003. At that point he was 80 years old, had severe macular degeneration, and had an office staff of three people just to help him function, in addition to the engineers, technicians, manufacturing people, etc. So, he was another Case graduate, but a little bit before your time.

Steve Leibson: A little bit. Yeah, I graduated from Case in ‘75.

Chas Gilmore: Right? Okay, so but a wonderful guy. And anyway, so…

Steve Leibson: So, you got your BS in physics, and did you go contact Heath, or did they find you?

Chas Gilmore: No, I wound up sending out a lot of resumes to different places and did a bunch of interviews. There is one that I remember which made quite a difference in my career trajectory. I don’t remember the name of the company, but I know it was in Washington, DC. It was a military radio company, and they were looking for design engineers. During the interview, I was put in a conference room. Two or three engineers came in and sat on the other side of the conference table. They began peppering me with mainly strictly technical questions and I remember a couple of times saying, “Well, I don’t think I know the answer to that question off the top of my head, but here’s where I’d go to get the answer in the following reference books.” One of the guys looked at me and said, “That’s an unacceptable answer.”

Steve Leibson: No. That’s an engineer’s answer.

Chas Gilmore: Yeah. So, I went back to Hobart at that time and sat down with the chair of the physics department. And I said, “Dr. Havorka, maybe I ought to just go on to graduate school because of this experience.” He looked at me and he said, “Well, certainly you can take that choice if you want. But I’ll tell you, in three years people like that are going to be working for you.”

And then I got an interview request from Heath. They were showing at the IRE/IEEE show in New York, at the Colosseum. It blew me away, because at that time they had both sides of a full aisle in that show, and it was by far the most packed exhibition area of all exhibits – all three floors of exhibits. I was interviewed by the VP of engineering, and the guy who was the, what we called the chief engineer, at the time. He was the engineering manager of the Scientific Instruments Department. Later, they said, “Come on out to Heath and go for an interview.” And I did. Fact is, I have somewhere here the check that I bought for a round trip ticket from Geneva, New York, to Benton Harbor, Michigan via Chicago O’Hare… $57. Anyway, I had an interview there. They made me quite a good offer, and I said, “I’m going.” I started at Heath in June of 1966.

Part 2 of this article series will cover the two golden decades for Heathkits, the 1960s and 1970s. If you have Heathkit memories, please share them in the comments below.