{"id":2316,"date":"2016-08-30T12:42:54","date_gmt":"2016-08-30T16:42:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/?p=2316"},"modified":"2025-01-28T09:18:48","modified_gmt":"2025-01-28T14:18:48","slug":"the-man-with-million-dollar-ideas","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/2016\/08\/the-man-with-million-dollar-ideas\/","title":{"rendered":"The Man with Million-Dollar Ideas"},"content":{"rendered":"

Named an Inventor of the Year in 2015 by the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, Walter Alina \u201956 transformed entire manufacturing processes with his visionary concepts<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The silicon wafers used to manufacture electronics in the early 1960s were the size of cookies, and to turn the wafers into semiconductors, ranks of women sat at benches in RCA\u2019s Somerville, N.J., plant, <\/span>peering through microscopes and tweezing small indium dots onto them like sprinkles. It was slow and laborious work, straining the women\u2019s eyes and tendons. The process strained RCA\u2019s profit margins, too, in a competitive electronics industry. <\/span>Walter Alina \u201956 thought there must be a better way.<\/p>\n

Alina was just a few years out of Seton Hall and a rising star at RCA who had already appeared on the cover of a trade journal, Product Finishing<\/i>. An idea of his \u2014 to tin-plate transistor shells rather than coat them with solder \u2014 had won a national competition the magazine sponsored, and had cut costs for RCA by 80 percent. He had made himself into an expert on electroplating \u2014 using chemical baths and electric current to, as he says, \u201ctake a cheap piece of metal and put a coating on it that will do the job of a very, very expensive piece of metal.\u201d<\/p>\n

One afternoon, he had an idea about how to get those dots onto those wafers without a battalion of squinting, tweezer-wielding women. \u201cSo I\u2019m saying to myself, it just came to me one day, there\u2019s no reason you can\u2019t electroplate this,\u201d he says. \u201cSo I did some experiments to show it was feasible.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was indeed feasible, and over the next several years he refined the process he had envisioned, which was patented in 1965. \u201cRCA said this is so valuable to us we\u2019re going to file this in 16 countries. The old record was 11,\u201d he says, paging through a folder of patent documents in multiple languages in his home in the Lakewood, N.J., retirement community that he shares with Lucille, his wife of 62 years. \u201cThe patent belongs to RCA but they had to take me out to lunch and they gave me $150.\u201d<\/p>\n

The process allowed RCA to make semiconductors more quickly and cheaply, and to keep abreast of its Japanese competitors. \u201cThis is the most important thing I have ever done in my life; that little brainstorm from one afternoon saved [the company] millions,\u201d Alina says.<\/p>\n

And it was the achievement cited most prominently among his many others when he received an Inventor of the Year Award from the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame last October. \u201cMr. Walter Alina was responsible in a major capacity in developing and implementing ideas well ahead of his time,\u201d wrote the late Evan P. Zlock, engineering manager at RCA, in the letter nominating Alina. \u201cHis contributions were beyond the normal scope of manufacturing patents and improvements and resulted in millions of dollars of savings, higher quality, shorter delivery cycles. All of this at a time when competition was hottest and heaviest.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his acceptance speech at the black-tie banquet in Hoboken, Alina invoked his father, a dentist. \u201cI remember when I was a little boy, my father once told me that he had been fortunate to have lived through a time period that had the greatest scientific transformation the world had ever seen,\u201d he says. \u201cI often thought about how fortunate I was to be able to participate and contribute to help shape some future transformations throughout my lifetime.\u201d<\/p>\n

But if not for his father, Walter Alina might never have shaped anything.<\/p>\n

Alina was born in Vienna in 1931 and grew up there in a decade when Jewish families like his felt increasingly threatened by the rise of the Nazi faction in nearby Germany. \u201cMy father saw the handwriting on the wall,\u201d he says. \u201cHe couldn\u2019t convince any of our family to get out. They thought it was going to blow over. Of course they all perished, the whole lot.\u201d<\/p>\n

In early 1938, just before Germany seized Austria, Alina\u2019s father managed to get three visas for Finland. Walter, an only child, and his mother left first, followed a month later by his father. The first year was peaceful, Walter learning Finnish, and his father, who couldn\u2019t work as a dentist there, carting garbage in a hospital. But then the Soviet Union invaded, and bombs started falling. Sponsored by an aunt and uncle who had long lived in New York, they sailed for America in March 1940 on the SS Bergensfjord.<\/p>\n

They settled in the Weequahic section of Newark, where his father worked first as a dental technician and then opened his own dental lab. Alina was placed in the second grade, where the teacher soon realized he didn\u2019t belong and took him to see the principal, who gave him an impromptu math test. \u201cFortunately I was very good at math,\u201d he says. \u201cAfter I finished answering all the questions, the next thing I knew I was moved into the fourth grade.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

He was good at piano, too. \u201cMy mother wanted me to be a concert pianist, you know how mothers are, and I said to her, \u2018I can think of better ways of starving to death,\u2019\u201d he says. He chose Seton Hall for college and he majored in chemistry and minored in business, aiming for a career somewhere in the sciences. He wasn\u2019t quite sure where, except that it wouldn\u2019t be in his father\u2019s business. \u201cI told my father I needed something creative, that I\u2019d like to build something, to do something with my own mind,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He surprised his mother one Wednesday when he was a freshman, tuning the radio in their living room to WSOU-FM before taking the bus to campus. \u201cI told her, \u2018At 3 o\u2019clock just turn it on and listen,\u201d he says. He had earlier walked into the campus station and asked if there was a piano show he could play on. An impromptu audition \u2014 like that impromptu math test for the school principal \u2014 earned him his own half-hour slot, on Wednesday afternoons. \u201cAnd so from then on my mother had a lineup of chairs and dishes of candy and peanuts and had her friends over to listen. She got off my back and she realized that I was going through with my science career.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

After two years as a full-time student, he switched to part-time, taking night classes at the downtown Newark campus and working days \u2014 selling wind-up toys to shops across New Jersey at first, and then as a lab manager at a chemical lab in Newark. \u201cThat\u2019s where I fell in love with electroplating,\u201d he says. \u201cIt became my specialty, sort of by accident.\u201d<\/p>\n

He had fallen in love, too, with the daughter of the owner of the Catskills hotel where he worked as a waiter the summer after his freshman year. He and Lucille were married in 1955 and have two children and three grandchildren. After he started working at RCA in 1958, Alina went back to night school, taking classes in metallurgy at Newark College of Engineering.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou\u2019ve got to know a lot of theory; you\u2019ve got to know the basis of what you\u2019re talking about, and you\u2019ve got to study and study and study,\u201d says Alina, who has published 40 technical papers. \u201cOnce you know this, you\u2019ve got to find what you don\u2019t know.\u201d<\/p>\n

He left RCA in 1973 for a plating company in Newark, and then spent the last 21 years of his career, until he retired in 2001, at General Magnaplate in Linden, which is best known for developing and making the metal coatings used on thousands of NASA\u2019s space vehicle parts. He managed to get the company into the 1995 edition of Guinness World Records<\/i> after noticing an error in an earlier edition of the record book, which listed Teflon as the \u201cmost slippery solid lubricant,\u201d with a coefficient of friction of 0.04. Alina knew that Magnaplate\u2019s Hi-T-Lube was lower, at 0.03, and the record was corrected, with much attendant publicity for him and the company.<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201cIt was very big deal around here,\u201d says Candida Aversenti, CEO of General Magnaplate, who keeps in her office a plaque with a laminated newspaper story about the Guinness record. Attached to the back is a handwritten note to Alina from her late father, Charles Covino, who started the company in 1952. (\u201cWithout your inspiration and perseverance this record would never have been recognized by Guinness. You are the greatest in my book,\u201d it reads.)<\/p>\n

Alina keeps a copy of that Guinness book, as well as many of his old college texts. \u201cI love reading them, especially a lot of the metallurgy stuff. That doesn\u2019t change,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s what they do with it that changes.\u201d<\/p>\n

By Kevin Coyne<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Named an Inventor of the Year in 2015 by the New Jersey Inventors Hall of Fame, Walter Alina \u201956 transformed entire manufacturing processes with his visionary concepts<\/p>\n

Continue ReadingThe Man with Million-Dollar Ideas<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3428,"featured_media":2344,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,258,7],"tags":[80,77,76,78,79],"class_list":["post-2316","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-alumni","category-articles-2015-2019","category-history","tag-guinness-world-records","tag-manufacturing","tag-walter-alina","tag-world-war","tag-wsou","ratio-2-1","entry"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3428"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2316"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2379,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2316\/revisions\/2379"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2344"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2316"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2316"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.shu.edu\/magazine\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2316"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}