http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...AGOBC5R381.DTL


William Dahlgren -- engraving pioneer
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 9, 2005






William Dahlgren, a self-taught inventor who revolutionized the engraving
industry a quarter of a century ago and was recently fiddling with
computerized player pianos, died in his San Francisco home Wednesday.

Mr. Dahlgren, who was known as Will, was 60. The San Francisco medical
examiner said the cause of death was under investigation. Ted Claire, Mr.
Dahlgren's business associate, discovered the body Wednesday morning when he
showed up at Mr. Dahlgren's home in the Outer Mission District for another
day's work on the player piano computer project. Claire said Mr. Dahlgren
appeared to have died sometime in the past 36 hours, possibly of congestive
heart failure.

Born in Hollywood and raised in the Bay Area, Mr. Dahlgren grew up loving
magic -- as a young hippie in the 1960s, he played coffee shops in San
Francisco as "Willie the Wizard" -- and was insatiably curious about
computers.

"He started in computers when you had to have 10 punch cards to get the
computer to add 3 plus 2," his sister, Kathy Mummert, said Friday. "He grew
up as a tinkerer."

By the early 1970s, Mr. Dahlgren had moved to Boonville (Mendocino County),
where he was making dulcimer kits. It was that kind of time and place --
long hair, homemade musical instruments. For Mr. Dahlgren, however, life,
was about to change markedly.

"Will was walking down a street in San Francisco in the late 1970s, and he
went into a trophy shop," said Mike Davis, publisher of the Engravers
Journal, the Michigan-based trade organ for the engraving industry. What
caught Mr. Dahlgen's eye was a machine called a pantograph, a manual device
harking back a century or two that was used to engrave plaques and trophies.

Essentially, a pantograph operator "had a big box full of letters, and you
pull them out, letter by letter" to make up the words for the trophies,
Davis said.

Mr. Dahlgren thought he could do better.

"He built himself a small computer and started putzing around," Davis said.
The putzing resulted in a computer-controlled machine that could easily
outperform the existing crude technology.

Mr. Dahlgren called up Davis and said he "wanted to become the largest job
shop for engraving in the world." He ran some classified ads in the monthly
magazine, saying he could do "computerized engraving for the trade."

"A bunch of people contacted him and said, 'We don't want you to do
engraving, but where did you get your machine?' " Davis said. One such
engraver pleaded with Mr. Dahlgren for a machine, and when Mr. Dahlgren
asked how much he would pay for such an item, the guy immediately said,
"$15,000."

With Claire and another man as his partners, Mr. Dahlgren began building the
engraving machines in his factory-cum-apartment in the Mission District,
where Mr. Dahlgren slept on the floor and took showers by standing in a
plastic Flintstones kiddie pool and pouring pitchers of water over his body.

At some point, Mr. Dahlgren took a machine out to Michigan for a trade show,
and when professional engravers saw it, "they were in total awe," Davis
said. "It was just like a computer: Sit down at a keyboard, type in text,
push a button and then it would engrave the plate for you.

"People couldn't get their checkbooks out fast enough," Davis said. "They'd
give him a deposit, and eventually he got hopelessly backlogged. He couldn't
build them fast enough."

The whole business skyrocketed in just a few years. Bigger companies started
to compete, and finally it all caught up with him.

"He liked the inventing part," Mummert said of her brother, "but he was
having to get too involved in the business part. It took the fun out of it.
They eventually sold it."

The firm, Dahlgren Engraving, was sold to a Peninsula businessman and then
to a series of other owners and is now owned by an English company.

For a couple of years, Mr. Dahlgren fooled around on a big sailboat he
bought with his share of the engraving company sale. Then he built a huge
machine to churn out his new product -- brass business cards. But not many
people wanted to hand out brass business cards, and the venture "didn't work
out that well," Claire said.

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Dahlgren and Claire formed a new firm, Piano
Automation. "We were trying to make an improvement on an existing player
piano system," Claire said.

Mr. Dahlgren, Claire said, "had a passion for making machines move, using
computers to control them, anything to do with the computer control of
physical apparatus."

At the time of his death, Mr. Dahlgren was involved in designing a system
that would allow a computer, instead of those old player piano rolls, to
tell the piano what to play.

Mr. Dahlgren was such a tinkerer, Claire said, that around 1970, he made an
electric-powered motorcycle, using a Harley Davidson frame.

Mr. Dahlgren is survived by his sister, Kathy Mummert, of North Highlands
(Sacramento County). She suggests donations to the San Francisco
Exploratorium, Exploratorium Development Department, 3601 Lyon St., San
Francisco, CA 94123- 1099.

Page B - 5

Pardon me for being dense but, do we as in the readers of this group,
know Mr. Dahlgren? I don't recall his name and a Google search of
groups turns up only this article.

The other, more disturbing, aspect of the post is that Mr. Dahlgren
was only three years older than I am. Geez Louise. That is a bit
scary!

Errol Groff




On Sat, 09 Apr 2005 16:30:48 GMT, "John Keller"
wrote:

http://sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cg...AGOBC5R381.DTL


William Dahlgren -- engraving pioneer
Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer

Saturday, April 9, 2005






William Dahlgren, a self-taught inventor who revolutionized the engraving
industry a quarter of a century ago and was recently fiddling with
computerized player pianos, died in his San Francisco home Wednesday.

Mr. Dahlgren, who was known as Will, was 60. The San Francisco medical
examiner said the cause of death was under investigation. Ted Claire, Mr.
Dahlgren's business associate, discovered the body Wednesday morning when he
showed up at Mr. Dahlgren's home in the Outer Mission District for another
day's work on the player piano computer project. Claire said Mr. Dahlgren
appeared to have died sometime in the past 36 hours, possibly of congestive
heart failure.

Born in Hollywood and raised in the Bay Area, Mr. Dahlgren grew up loving
magic -- as a young hippie in the 1960s, he played coffee shops in San
Francisco as "Willie the Wizard" -- and was insatiably curious about
computers.

"He started in computers when you had to have 10 punch cards to get the
computer to add 3 plus 2," his sister, Kathy Mummert, said Friday. "He grew
up as a tinkerer."

By the early 1970s, Mr. Dahlgren had moved to Boonville (Mendocino County),
where he was making dulcimer kits. It was that kind of time and place --
long hair, homemade musical instruments. For Mr. Dahlgren, however, life,
was about to change markedly.

"Will was walking down a street in San Francisco in the late 1970s, and he
went into a trophy shop," said Mike Davis, publisher of the Engravers
Journal, the Michigan-based trade organ for the engraving industry. What
caught Mr. Dahlgen's eye was a machine called a pantograph, a manual device
harking back a century or two that was used to engrave plaques and trophies.

Essentially, a pantograph operator "had a big box full of letters, and you
pull them out, letter by letter" to make up the words for the trophies,
Davis said.

Mr. Dahlgren thought he could do better.

"He built himself a small computer and started putzing around," Davis said.
The putzing resulted in a computer-controlled machine that could easily
outperform the existing crude technology.

Mr. Dahlgren called up Davis and said he "wanted to become the largest job
shop for engraving in the world." He ran some classified ads in the monthly
magazine, saying he could do "computerized engraving for the trade."

"A bunch of people contacted him and said, 'We don't want you to do
engraving, but where did you get your machine?' " Davis said. One such
engraver pleaded with Mr. Dahlgren for a machine, and when Mr. Dahlgren
asked how much he would pay for such an item, the guy immediately said,
"$15,000."

With Claire and another man as his partners, Mr. Dahlgren began building the
engraving machines in his factory-cum-apartment in the Mission District,
where Mr. Dahlgren slept on the floor and took showers by standing in a
plastic Flintstones kiddie pool and pouring pitchers of water over his body.

At some point, Mr. Dahlgren took a machine out to Michigan for a trade show,
and when professional engravers saw it, "they were in total awe," Davis
said. "It was just like a computer: Sit down at a keyboard, type in text,
push a button and then it would engrave the plate for you.

"People couldn't get their checkbooks out fast enough," Davis said. "They'd
give him a deposit, and eventually he got hopelessly backlogged. He couldn't
build them fast enough."

The whole business skyrocketed in just a few years. Bigger companies started
to compete, and finally it all caught up with him.

"He liked the inventing part," Mummert said of her brother, "but he was
having to get too involved in the business part. It took the fun out of it.
They eventually sold it."

The firm, Dahlgren Engraving, was sold to a Peninsula businessman and then
to a series of other owners and is now owned by an English company.

For a couple of years, Mr. Dahlgren fooled around on a big sailboat he
bought with his share of the engraving company sale. Then he built a huge
machine to churn out his new product -- brass business cards. But not many
people wanted to hand out brass business cards, and the venture "didn't work
out that well," Claire said.

In the mid-1980s, Mr. Dahlgren and Claire formed a new firm, Piano
Automation. "We were trying to make an improvement on an existing player
piano system," Claire said.

Mr. Dahlgren, Claire said, "had a passion for making machines move, using
computers to control them, anything to do with the computer control of
physical apparatus."

At the time of his death, Mr. Dahlgren was involved in designing a system
that would allow a computer, instead of those old player piano rolls, to
tell the piano what to play.

Mr. Dahlgren was such a tinkerer, Claire said, that around 1970, he made an
electric-powered motorcycle, using a Harley Davidson frame.

Mr. Dahlgren is survived by his sister, Kathy Mummert, of North Highlands
(Sacramento County). She suggests donations to the San Francisco
Exploratorium, Exploratorium Development Department, 3601 Lyon St., San
Francisco, CA 94123- 1099.

Page B - 5