About Laird Durham A Business Autobiography If it were not for The Calculus, you would not be reading this. I fell in love with science and technology in high school. A wall-sized foldout of the periodic table replaced pictures of B-17s, P-38s, F4Us, and Varga Girls on my bedroom wall. I made hydrogen gas in our garage by putting scraps of aluminum in a solution of household lye to launch explorations with five-cent balloons. When we dropped the A-bomb on Japan I committed myself to becoming a nuclear physicist. My freshman year along my career path at Colgate University went well, but in my sophomore year I ran into an insurmountable barrier. It was called The Calculus, and it was essential to describing nuclear reactions. I was so inept at this higher mathematics that after three weeks of daily tutoring by my calculus professor he declared it was hopeless. "Mr. Durham," he said. "I'll make a deal with you. If you resign my class immediately I will give you a'D'. If you continue I guarantee I will give you an 'F'." Meanwhile, another professor, who chaired a department in English Literature, had begun to turn my head in a different direction. So with some pain at leaving physics behind, I became an English major, and found my true love in writing. When I was graduated I took a job as a press agent. If you had been watching The Today Show in July of 1952, you might have seen a Civil War battle reenacted between Union and Confederate soldiers in Atlanta. The weapons for the battle were snowballs made in Detroit in January. Had you opened The Cincinnati Enquirer with your morning coffee a year later you might have read about the largest loaf of rye bread ever baked in Cincinnati being skyhooked to the top of a 20-floor hotel. I staged and wrote about those events, and I planted news and feature stories about operas performed at a zoo, a mysterious appearance of the Hope Diamond, startling Chiropractic testimonials, and couturier fashion trends (remember Dior's A-line?). In 1957 General Electric's Flight Propulsion Division was seeking a publicity writer. I applied, and got the job. For the first time, I was able to combine my love of science and technology with my love of writing. I wrote feature stories, movie scripts, newsletters, and sales literature about the birth of commercial jets, powerplants for space exploration, and the development of exotic new materials. When my boss at GE moved to California, he recruited me to write for him at Aerojet-General Nucleonics (AGN) which was on the leading edge of advanced applications of nuclear energy. AGN was developing a mobile nuclear powerplant that rode on a truck, was trying to make rocket fuel from household ammonia using nuclear fission, and was struggling mightily to contain thermonuclear energy in a magnetic bottle to power a spaceship to Jupiter. My job was to make our proposals clear and persuasive, and our reports clear and interesting. Those wild projects seemed like good ideas at the time, but when they proved impractical I joined Arthur D. Little as a staff consultant. At ADL I continued to research and write about new applications of advanced technology -- this time for private sector clients. Five years later I left to start my own practice. Altogether, over the 50+ years since my press agent days, I have written some 10 million words about the future of some of the newest and most exciting inventions and ideas of the past half-century. I have researched and written about the birth of semiconductors and personal computers, new developments in medicine such as MRI and laser surgery, the beginning of electronic publishing and broadband services, the beginnings of ocean farming and aquaculture, the expansion of optical communications, the development of genetic engineering, the discovery of new oil exploration techniques, the invention of new tools for TV journalism, and applications for artificial intelligence. Most of my work has been privately published for clients, who have invested more than $500 million in new ventures or new products I researched and wrote about for them. A few of those clients are IBM, Hewlett Packard, United California Bank, Sony, Memorex, and ITT. Many of my other clients have been startups or early stage companies. My work helped them raise venture capital. Some of my business writing has made the covers of magazines as diverse as Business Week and Telephony. I've written a book on how to choose a career that was published by Prentice-Hall, and, for fun, I have written a half-dozen articles on cruising under sail for boating magazines, including Yatching and Cruising World. Also for fun, I write a private journal and publish an occasional BLOG. And one of these days I hope I will get a letter to the editor published by the New York Times. Because the best way to learn about a writer is to read what he has written, I have put a few of those 10 million words on this website. I hope you will find them clear, interesting, and persuasive. Perhaps my work will suggest a business research and writing project I might do for you.