Vol.7, No.1

EVOLUTION OF A POWER SUPPLY COMPANY

Letter of Congratulations by Mayor Rudolph Giuliani

Address by Max Kupferberg, General Manager, at Kepco's 50th Anniversary Celebration

I would like to share with you a little of the early history of Kepco whose 50th anniversary we celebrate in this issue of Currents.

Just after World War II, my brothers Jack, Jess and Ken and I came together to set up Kepco. Back then, we called it Kepco Laboratories. From our wartime experiences, we had some reasonable expertise in nuclear instrumentation and in all sorts of electronic gear. We were particularly interested in the possibilities for solar energy. We looked at all of these areas to decide what we might want to do and what sorts of equipment we might build.

We decided to address the possibilities for building teaching equipment where we had some expertise too. This is how we came to design the circuit panel we called Model 103. Students could create some 30-odd circuits on this three-tube panel using commonly available components. Cardboard overlays guided their construction. The Model 103 triple-output power supply was designed to power these 30 circuits. It featured a variable B+ supply for the plates and an adjustable grid-bias "C" supply and, of course, an a-c filament supply.

We had some brochures printed and I mailed copies to the chairman of every physics department, every electrical engineering department and every chemistry department at colleges around the country. We started to sell the panels but it quickly became apparent that more people were interested in the power supply than in the circuit panel. We recalled from our days at Los Alamos that there were lots of power supplies used at the laboratories and so we said to ourselves that this was an area where we might contribute. There seemed to be a need. From then on, we solicited power supply requirements, designed some interesting vacuum tube and magnetic-amplifier products and began to deliver to the academic and industrial communities.

When transistors became practical, Kepco "transistorized" its power supplies and pioneered such concepts as the programmable power supply and 4-quadrant power supply.

In the mid 1970s, Kepco participated in the work of the IEC (International Electrotechnical Commission) writing safety and testing standards for the power supply industry. In that same period, Kepco began to produce IEEE 488 programmable power supplies and the analog instrument gradually became digital. Today they work with microprocessors, keyboards and you need a password to adjust their calibration. They still work pretty good... which may be why we're celebrating our 50th anniversary. We're a member of the VXI plug&play alliance and produce a wide variety of power supplies that can be linked directly to a VXI controller.

There are hundreds of companies in the power supply business now, a half century after we helped to invent an industry. We're not the largest, but a lot of customers have given us their business over the years and we're delighted to have earned their trust.