Joseph Gerber

Gerber was born into a Jewish family in Vienna, Austria, and showed an early fascination with technology. By age eight, he had built radios and developed magnetic circuit breakers to preserve his batteries. Following Germany's 1938 Anschluss, he was imprisoned in a Nazi labor camp, eventually to be released. In 1940, he fled with his mother, immigrating as a destitute to New York City and soon thereafter Hartford, Conn. to work in the tobacco fields. His father would not survive the Holocaust in Europe.

In Hartford, Gerber completed high school in just two years while learning English and holding down full-time and part-time jobs. He entered Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI), Troy, New York on scholarship, and graduated two and one-half years later with a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering. In his junior year, he invented the Gerber Variable Scale, a graphical-numerical computing device that he conceived from the elastic waistband of his pajamas.

Receiving a $3,000 investment, Gerber patented his Variable Scale and founded the Gerber Scientific Instrument Company in Hartford, Connecticut, to produce and market the device. Before the widespread use of digital computers, performing computations based on graphically recorded data and curves was extremely time-consuming and complex. The Gerber Variable Scale—which used a triangular calibrated spring as a computing element to eliminate all scaling and conversions between numerics and graphics—provided means for quick, efficient calculations, and became known as "the greatest engineering tool since the slide rule".

Gerber's early life and accomplishments in America were the subject of the 1950 Broadway play Young Man in a Hurry, written by Morton Wishengrad and starring Cornel Wilde. In 1953, J. Robert Oppenheimer and other judges selected Gerber as one of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce's "Ten Most Outstanding Young Men in America." Reflecting on his immigrant experience, Gerber observed that he

learned that in USA it was true you could accomplish things if you were willing to work because then people, recognizing not only your abilities but your earnestness, will give you of themselves beyond belief to help you.

Joe Gerber presided over Gerber Scientific's evolution from a one-product company to a global supplier of intelligent manufacturing systems. From the company's 1947 founding as a partnership, through his death in 1996, Gerber was its chief executive and principal inventor. Gerber called the company an outlet for the "spirit of invention," he told Business Week.

With the expansion of its product lines, Gerber restructured the company in 1979, creating the holding company Gerber Scientific, Inc., with wholly owned and partly owned subsidiaries, each focused on its own markets:

Gerber Scientific, Inc. (NYSE GRB) (holding company)

Gerber Scientific Instrument Co. (GSI) (data reduction, drafting especially aircraft and automotive, electronics)

Gerber Garment Technology (GGT) (apparel, footwear, textile, and industrial such as aircraft and automotive)

Gerber Systems Technology (GST) (CAD especially aircraft and automotive, footwear)

Boston Digital (machine tools)

Beta Electronics of Beersheba, Israel (medical, cryogenics, defense)

Gerber Optical (ophthalmic lens processing)

Gerber Scientific Products (GSP) (sign-making, specialty graphics such as vehicle wraps)

Gerber Systems Corporation (GSC) (printing prepress)

Gerber Innovations (packaging and die-making)

In 1980, Gerber Scientific, Inc. was listed on the New York Stock Exchange. In 1996, consolidated sales were $350 million. Considering the company's systems for made to measure clothing, and its flexible manufacturing technologies for producing signs, graphics, prescription lenses, and other individualized products, B. Joseph Pine II, the author of Mass Customization, observed in 2000 that Gerber Scientific, Inc. was the only company that had enabled mass customization in multiple industries.