Lights, Camera, Nanosecond Action!

Hand Built From Scratch


Sid Nebeker has been running the Cordin company since the early ’60s, when he bought it from its founders, both of whom had been his classmates at the University of Utah. Cordin’s headquarters are located in an industrial section of Salt Lake City, far removed from the gleaming downtown familiar from Olympics coverage. Cordin, which today has about 30 employees, resides in a large, low warehouse that’s divided into an area of spare offices and a sprawling workshop. The office decor is unrelieved engineer-drab: wood-grain paneling, linoleum flooring and, in some rooms, ancient wall-to-wall carpeting.



I found the senior Nebeker in the engineers’ work space, standing, sleeves rolled up, beside a young engineer at a workbench, the two of them tinkering with the circuitry in a camera headed for a South Korean defense lab. Nebeker, 73, is good-looking in a jaunty, square-jawed way, the patriarch of a company referred to as DadCo by his children, three of whom work at Cordin.



Tinkering was a childhood passion. Sid grew up during the Depression on a 20,000-acre sheep and cattle ranch in northern Utah where “the big thing was horses.” Young Sid, however, was more interested in the old machines. At the age of eight he rebuilt a broken-down 1-cylinder engine from a hay gang and used it to power a car.



Ranch life was not for him: He left to study engineering at the University of Utah, spent time in the Air Force, attended Harvard Business School, then returned to Salt Lake City in 1958 to look for work. “There were limited opportunities in Utah for a business-engineering major,” he says. Nebeker spent six months at a fledgling technology company that was going nowhere. In 1959 he met an engineering school classmate named Earl Pound. Pound was part of the faculty at Utah State University and had formed Cordin a couple of years earlier, when the Manhattan Project camera technology was declassified. Cordin had made just one product, the 1956 camera that the Navy bought for use at a weapons facility in Maryland. Since then, Cordin had been dormant: no employees, no customers, no business plan.



Nebeker proposed that the company be re-started, then spent several months at Cordin without pay. He perfected the original camera design, making it “extremely reliable and extremely accurate.” Several months later an order came through from the China Lake Naval Weapons Center, in California. Weapons development is, within the club, a word-of-mouth business, and the camera, along with the China Lake technician who operated it, “became our sales force for the next four or five years. People from the defense industry would call to inquire about our cameras, and we’d say, ‘Talk to Roland Gallup at China Lake. He’s got one.’ He was a marvelous photographer. They’d talk to him and he’d show them some of his work and they’d be sold.” (China Lake still uses Cordin cameras.)