When I joined Polychrome R&D in Oct. 1965, the lab was headed by Mr. Ibert Mellan, a kindly white haired gentle person who authored books on solvents and corrosion resistant inorganic materials. His background enabled him to patent a zirconium based interlayer system as contrast to 3M's silicate system. Polychrome used this "C" coating extensively not to infringe 3M patent. Nevertheless 3M sued Polychrome for an infringement and Polychrome counter sued. I remember in 1988-67 period, couple of 3M research chemists along with lawyers descended on Ashburton ave. lab for preliminary fact finding mission with court appointed intermediary, then Columbia University professor Dr. Linford. (who later joined Polychrome as the research director) When we argued we did not use silicate but used zirconium compounds, they countered saying they could still detect silicate as silicate is naturally contained in the tap/well water. The suite lasted more than half a year but ended up in settling out of court. Our standing joke then was, we received $900.000 from 3M but we paid our lawyer $1M and he promptly retired with his secretary in Florida!.
The first member of the lab I met was Sidney Augarten as he was the one who picked me up in the morning to go to the lab. but he passed away within a year or so before I was able to get to know him well. Al Taudien came from Argentina and formulated numbers of processing chemicals. #303 and #305 were developing lacquer for the wipon plate. When I asked him why he had so many seemingly nonfunctional ingredients in the formula, he replied "so that we could confuse competition." Gene Golda was a plate coating formulator and often brought Simon Chu's idea to practice. Dr. Delos Bown joined Polychrome in 1966. He came with an impressive credentials such as PhD from MIT and work history at Exxon Research but turned out to be a very hand-on practical person. When we learned the new positive diazo possibility from Fuji, it was Dr. Bown who worked over time, Saturdays and Sundays to synthesize suitable compounds and then to make enough for production trials. Working along with him I developed severe lash on my body so I asked Dr. Bown what I should do. He replied " go home and have a drink, it will go away in the morning." I dutifully went home and had a glass of beer and the lash was gone the next day. Later, however, I learned that Dr. Bown was a devoted Mormon and when he said "drink" he meant milk not beer! Within a year he made me his assistant so that in my late twenties, I had an impressive title of Assistant Director of Research. Little I knew that this title would not change for a long time.