A mind for business: Schjeldahl's ingenuity helps keep bread fresh, hearts safely beating
By Gerry Gilmour
The Forum - 09/11/1999

As a boy, Gilmore Schjeldahl was free to wander and wonder.

Born in 1912, the steam thresher repairman's son roamed his home town of Northwood, N.D., watching blacksmiths, Model T mechanics, engineers, newspapermen and movie theater projectionists ply their trades.

"Northwood was a different town in a different era," says Schjeldahl, who is living in the Twin Cities today. "It was sort of a paradise for someone with my interests. There was a lot to dream about."

To dream of great inventions.

Thank Schjeldahl when you prepare food which was frozen in plastic. Thank Schjeldahl when you use an airliner's airsickness bag. Thank Schjeldahl for helping the United States get ahead in the space race.

The fertile mind shaped in Northwood shops produced patents for everything from a bread-bagging machine to a plastic balloon-tipped coronary angioplasty catheter.

Schjeldahl never completed his high school education. He never graduated from college, yet holds honorary degrees from both North Dakota State University and the University of North Dakota.

Along his long and rich career, he's had his share of failures - maybe more failure than success.

He founded five companies. And he's found and lost fortunes.

"He's a typical entrepreneur," says Bruce Gjovik of the UND's Center for Innovation. "They believe that if they made it once, they can do it again

"Setbacks? They're not averse to those. They see them as an opportunity to perfect their skills."

By his own account, Schjeldahl was inattentive in school, a daydreamer who often looked out the window.

He attended North Dakota State College of Science and NDSU before being drafted into the U.S. Army. He was initially assigned to a special scientific project, but when it was terminated found himself with the 84th Division in Europe. Schjeldahl served in three battles, including the Battle of the Bulge.

After the war he joined Armour & Co. of Chicago, where he began working with polyethylene.

Schjeldahl recognized the plastic product's potential. In his home laboratory, he developed a technique and machinery for using it to seal food products in polyethylene sheets.

While working for a company in Minneapolis, Schjeldahl founded Herb-Shelly - named in part for Herb Harris, a salesman who invested $100 in his venture - and on nights and weekends began producing food bags in his basement. He also perfected a lamination technique and produced Northwest Airlines' first airsickness bag, featuring a plastic liner.

Herb-Shelly moved into a Farmington, Minn., shop in 1949 and by 1954 employed 50 and generated more than $500,000 in revenue. Schjeldahl sold Herb-Shelly in 1955. He was retained in corporate capacity, but tired of that and soon struck out on his own again.

G.T. Schjeldahl Co., a bag- and balloon-making business, was more promise than profit. Schjeldahl enlisted the help of venture capitalist and Bismarck, N.D., native John "Jack" Robinson. He remembers a particularly embarrassing presentation they made to two investors.

"I remember they had a black Cadillac and identical black hats," Schjeldahl says.

All of the bugs hadn't been worked out of Schjeldahl's new bag-making machine - he was experimenting with new steel parts - but he reluctantly agreed to a demonstration.

"I turned it on and it shattered," he says. Pieces flew all over the room.

When they were taken to the Schjeldahl Co.'s warehouse to see balloon operations, Schjeldahl was surprised to find that shrews - attracted by a corn starch used to keep plastic sheets from sticking - had chewed through the balloon fabric.

The investors asked for, and received, their $5,000 investments back - investments which would have been worth $50,000 within three years, had they held on.

G.T. Schjeldahl Co. in the mid-1950s began using Mylar to produce atmospheric balloons. In 1956, the University of Minnesota launched a Schjeldahl balloon that reached a world-record altitude of 142,900 feet.

In 1957, his company had contracts to manufacture balloons for three branches of the military, two major universities and one corporation involved in the nation's budding space program.

That same year, the Soviets launched Sputnik, beating the United States into space - and shocking Americans. The nation, and President Eisenhower, were under pressure.

Days after Sputnik was launched, Schjeldahl sent a telegram to Minnesota's U.S. congressional delegation, urging them "not to panic and accelerate the rate of expenditure," but to pursue a course with a "wedding of money and common sense" to catch up.

In August of 1960, Echo I was launched from Cape Canaveral. The 100-foot diameter sphere - the world's first space communications satellite balloon - was made of fabricated Mylar, coated with vaporized aluminum and held together with "Schjelbond," an adhesive developed by Schjeldahl.

Echo I created a sensation. Newspapers published schedules of its appearances. "I remember it as this moving star on the horizon," says Gjovik, who grew up near Crosby, N.D. "I remember being out in the back yard and looking for it."

Schjeldahl fondly recalls attending an outdoor play, with his wife, Charlene, and children, while on a trip in Europe.

"My daughter, Peggy, pointed to the sky over the stage and said, 'Look, Dad, there's Echo,'" Schjeldahl says. "Everyone started to point to it."

Echo I gave NASA - an agency at the time headed by Enderlin, N.D., native T. Keith Glennan - instant credibility.

Two years after its launch, the orbiting Echo I made possible the first coast-to-coast television transmission. It remained in orbit for eight years.

Years after the success of Echo I, Schjeldahl was on a cruise with the Rev. Robert Schuller, the well-known author and television evangelist. When learning of his role with Echo I, Schuller confessed he had never heard of Schjeldahl and his company.

"Maybe not," Schjeldahl replied. "We didn't get the credit, but we got the contract."

Schjeldahl in 1960 turned his attention to circuitry, and by 1962 "Schjel-clad" circuitry was being used in the dashboards of Buicks.

The G.T. Schjeldahl Co. - later renamed the Schjeldahl Co. - continued to expand through growth and acquisition, and became a leader in the packaging, electronics and aerospace industries.

As the company grew, the restless Schjeldahl continued to invent, founding Gil-Tech, a company that produced plastic containers, and Plastic Netting Machine Co.

A mild heart attack in 1978 put him in the hospital and sparked his interest in angioplasty. Working with his cardiologist, Schjeldahl used plastic to patent an improved balloon-tipped catheter for clearing arteries.

Schjeldahl's new company, Cathedyne Corp., was later sold to Angiomedics, a subsidiary of Pfizer.

He returned to his interest in packaging in 1983 when he and a friend developed the Alameda-Schjeldahl, a machine that duplicates hand-packaging of vegetables.

Schjeldahl today, with more than 1,000 employees, is one of Minnesota's largest hi-tech firms, with annual sales approaching $100 million. Its major customers include 3M, Ford, General Motors, Hewlett-Packard, Honeywell, Kodak and Motorola. Schjeldahl materials are used on virtually every space launch and in every auto produced in the U.S.

Schjeldahl serves as an unofficial adviser to the company. In retirement he has traveled extensively, including trips to Central America and South America to help feed the poor and hungry.

And the dreamer continues to dream of great inventions.

His latest obsession is the relationship between cockpit fires and airplane travesties. There are some explosive elements in the circuitry in cockpit dashboards, Schjeldahl explains.

In his Minnetonka apartment, he's developing circuitry that uses fiber optics. He says it could prevent explosions in cockpit circuitry.

Schjeldahl realizes he may never perfect - and probably not profit from - this latest pursuit. But he may have planted the seed for an invention to save the lives of pilots and their passengers.

And that's enough for Schjeldahl. It fits with his favorite quotation, from Rudyard Kipling, which is displayed on the wall of his home office:

"And they copied and copied, but they couldn't copy my mind. So I left them sweating and stealing a year and a half behind."