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The Right Approach: Electro-Tek—A Williams Family Legacy, Part 1

There is no bronze bust in the lobby or portrait in the conference room of Electro-Tek's founder—my Dad, Charles “Chuck” Williams—so with the facility closing last year after 56 years, I feel it is time to tell the story.

Foundational Beginnings 
Chuck Williams founded Electro-Tek in 1968 in our basement, eventually moving into the second floor of an old 1913 building in downtown Milwaukee that is still standing (the first of three eventual facilities).

Unless you knew our family or worked at the company with us, it’s unlikely you know the origins of the company due to the number of ownership changes over the years after we all left. First, there was an ESOP, then various presidents cycled through with majority ownership positions, and finally, the company was sold to Sierra Circuits in 2022 and closed down on March 8, 2024. 

Sierra is a great company and I know them very well, but the facility simply no longer fit their strategic plans. When Electro-Tek was closed, I told Dad I wanted to tell the story of Electro-Tek and our family’s impact on the industry. He surprised me by saying that, coincidentally, he had begun writing his life memoirs to leave to us kids and our families, and had just gotten to the Electro-Tek phase. Most of what follows is taken from his writings and tells the story of what led up to establishing one of the early and most enduring PCB companies in the industry.

Chuck Williams, Innovator and Entrepreneur
Dad discovered an early affinity for drafting in high school while designing a house in his drafting shop class. After graduation, instead of college, he chose to begin his career as a draftsman after getting an apprenticeship with telephone equipment manufacturer Automatic Electric, where his dad worked as a professional refrigeration engineer. Back then, a draftsman was today’s equivalent of a design engineer.

A few years after completing his apprenticeship, he left for Oak Industries, working on one of the first relay logic computers before moving to the Oster Corporation, inventor of the famous “Osterizer” blender. They branched out into aviation instrumentation with a new Precision Servo Motor product, and Dad was offered a position with the new Oster Avionics division, which was located in an old schoolhouse where he needed to keep a broom handy to keep the bats and rats at bay.

An innovator and entrepreneur at heart, unsolicited, he convinced the company to let him design a 2-inch fuel management indicator that required a small precision three-gear train. There were no electronics used at this time, and all the avionics were driven mechanically by miniature precision servo motors interfaced with precision gear trains. He taught himself trigonometry, how to calculate pitch, root diameter, and tooth count, and how to use a slide rule to help create specific gear ratios. I fondly remember receiving my first calculator: one of Dad’s old slide rules.

It Began With Welded Circuit Technology
The general manager of Oster Avionics wanted to expand the avionics business, but the Oster family did not agree, so he quit and started his own company, Astronautics Corp of America, in 1959. Astronautics landed a number of military contracts and quickly offered Dad a ground-floor opportunity in the company as chief draftsman and employee number 25 (today Astronautics employs over 1,800 people).

One of the early military contracts was to produce something called “welded circuits.” Astronautics had convinced the military that Astronautics had a lot of experience in this manufacturing technology, when in fact this was a new emerging technology for them. The technology required standing components on end between two insulated sheets that had holes drilled in them and welding nickel ribbon wire to the leads to interconnect the components (also called cordwood packaging).

Printed circuits were quite new at this time and the military would not approve their use. This was Dad’s first exposure to a technology that would affect his and our family’s lives later on.

Fun Fact #1: Dad designed the Astronautics logo, a rocket superimposed over a “C,” which is still the logo to this day.

The next ground-floor opportunity came when a couple of colleagues left Astronautics to form their own company called Control Technology Corporation (CTC), again bringing Dad in as the chief draftsman to design flight cockpit instrumentation for the military. The next military contract used nickel ribbon-welded circuit technology. Due to numerous poor decisions by the owners, employees arrived at work one day to find the doors locked with a bankruptcy notice posted. 

Fun Fact #2: There were no silver spoons in the Williams family; the CTC closing happened at Christmastime, and Mom and Dad put all the presents and Christmas tree on their Sears & Roebuck credit card so we kids could enjoy the holiday. Mom took a night waitress job after raising us kids all day to make ends meet. 

Winning Over the Navy
A few doors down from CTC was the Louis Allis Power Electronics company (Louis Allis), and along with some colleagues, Dad joined and was hired as a draftsman. He was quickly promoted to managing the drafting department and rebranded it as the Product Design Department. His first two projects were for the Navy. The first was a very high voltage sonar power supply that called for copper buss bars three-quarter-inch wide by one-eighth-inch thick mounted on one-quarter-inch thick G-11 fiberglass substrate.

The second was a pump drive for nuclear submarines. Due to the size limitations, Dad tried to get approval to use PCB technology, but the Navy rejected it, believing it would not pass their shock test. Their approved method of packaging the control circuits was to use an insulated substrate with turret terminals, with component leads wrapped around and then hard-wired between the terminals (printed wiring boards).

Dad got a second chance to plead his case to the Navy at the Pentagon, which finally agreed to allow PCBs with the stipulation that each hole in the board be supported with an eyelet and that every board needed to pass a simulated depth charge shock test three times. A mechanical test station was designed, and while the station hardware had to be often replaced due to the shock, the PCBs passed. 

Louis Allis won a motor control and braking contract for the California Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) system, and due to the need to minimize the size and weight of the product, Dad employed the welded circuit (cordwood packaging) methodology he developed while at CTC.

When the company launched a press release announcing this groundbreaking technology, Dad began to realize the tremendous potential of printed circuit boards and set in motion a career path that would last 34 years and greatly help shape the electronics industry.

The final product used General Electric G-10 fiberglass laminate substrate and special connectors, which Dad procured from Harry Titus of Hamlet and Smith, who represented General Electric PCB laminates and materials. This relationship would prove pivotal later on with the birth of Electro-Tek. 

PCB Design as a Steppingstone
A number of Louis Allis colleagues started yet another new company called Pillar Corp., which developed a proprietary induction sealing technology. One of the engineers reached out and asked Dad if he would be interested in doing circuit design on the side for their high-voltage, heavy copper PCBs.

Of course, he was interested. PCB design was very primitive at that time and accomplished by placing black crepe tape on a transparent sheet at a 2–4X scale. If the design required circuits on both sides of the board, one side was designed with red cellophane tape, and the other side was designed with blue cellophane tape. Filters on a camera the size of today’s drill machines would separate the sides when preparing the phototooling to manufacture the PCB.

While very happy with the design work, Pillar was having trouble getting the PCBs manufactured as there was only one local PCB manufacturer. They were not interested in such low volumes, so once again, they asked Dad if he could help them out, and of course, with absolutely no experience in PCB manufacturing technology, he said yes.

He researched the basic requirements for making prototype PCBs, purchased a couple of plastic containers for acid, and made a fixture with glass from a picture frame to produce an image. Using an infrared bulb as a light source, a small sheet of copper-clad glass epoxy, and chemicals from places like Radio Shack and Allied Electronics, he got busy. His other “manufacturing equipment” included a Dremel tool with a stand for drilling holes (Mom was the chief driller) and a paper cutter for shearing the boards to size. While the first boards turned out okay, they took a long time to complete.

Turning a Vision Into Reality
Dad was constantly thinking about getting into the PCB manufacturing industry, and as design and PCB requests continued to come in, he quickly realized that he couldn’t continue to do this in the basement as a side job. As one of the early industry visionaries, he recognized the tremendous transformational opportunity of printed circuits and the lack of available manufacturing companies.

After much consideration and discussions with Mom, he made the decision to start his own PCB company. The first step was to find a financial partner to help fund the startup. One day during a lunch with Harry Titus, Dad mentioned this, and Harry said he had some contacts that might be interested and would introduce him to them if he could come up with a business plan.

After researching “how to develop a business plan,” he came up with a 10-page plan that showed that the company, very optimistically, would be profitable in less than a year. Harry set a meeting with two Wisconsin companies, Hamlett & Smith (H&S) and Crown Screw and Bolt (CSB). CSB seemed like a perfect fit as it was cash-rich and looking to diversify, and H&S represented General Electric, the dominant manufacturer of PCB laminate substrates at the time. An agreement was reached with CSB, and Dad’s vision began to take shape. 

The next step was to create a name and logo for the new company. After hours of brainstorming and moving words around, Dad eventually thought it would be a neat idea to combine electronics and technology, and after many iterations and permutations, came up with Electro-Tek.

The logo was next. He had always liked the simplicity of the three downward-pointing triangles that formed the “M” in Motorola, one of the most recognizable logos of the time. Drawing from his drafting experience, he rotated the three triangles 90 degrees, reimagined the “M” into an “E,” and replaced the hyphen with a lightning bolt between the two words.

Fun Fact #3: Future owners of Electro-Tek never realized that the lightning bolt in Dad’s original hand-drafted Electro-Tek logo was meant to replace a hyphen, later rebranding the logo as Electrotek.

Electro-Tek is Born
With the funding in place, Dad resigned from Louis Allis and began to put together a list of equipment and find a building suitable for PCB manufacturing. Electro-Tek’s first announcement was a one-page flyer that had an artist’s rendering of Dad’s head with a few bullet points to highlight what they offered.

Orders were placed for the major items like an etcher, scrubber, bottom drill, router, camera, complete darkroom set-up, shear, and a plating line for copper, solder, nickel, and gold. Partner CSB was associated with a company called Vincent Supply, which owned a two-story building on Michigan Street across from Marquette University in downtown Milwaukee.

Marquette students became a major source of early employees. The second floor was vacant and became the original Electro-Tek plant, but there were a couple of immediate obstacles. 

Fun Fact #4: The current occupant of the original Electro-Tek building is Ogden Development Group, Inc., and Ogden was my maternal grandmother’s maiden name.

The first issue was that Vincent Supply was in the business of selling copper plumbing fittings, and we would be directly above them, destroying copper. The floor was wood and required putting in a reinforced, sealed sub-floor under the plating area in case of a leak. The plumber’s union also proved problematic by insisting on glass plumbing and not allowing PVC.

Dad hired a professional chemical engineer to make a case for the use of PVC, and the State of Wisconsin stepped in and finally approved it. Electro-Tek became the first industrial installation of PVC plumbing in Wisconsin. The early layout was not pretty, with the only walls being for the darkroom and a small office with a cot as Dad spent many evenings sleeping there during the beginning (Figure 3). As was typical for the time period, there was an ashtray on every desk: Mom and Dad were both smokers until Dad developed pulmonary embolisms in his legs. In hindsight, this was a blessing in disguise as they both had to quit smoking at a very young age.

Dad had to reinvent himself once again to focus on building relationships and new business development (a skill set that would be pivotal to his career from this point forward, and one he quickly mastered and passed down to Scott. Unfortunately, I did not inherit this gene). As with any startup, the early years were lean, and with apologies to my good friend Kevin Costner, who famously stated decades later, “If you build it, they will come,” that apparently doesn’t apply to PCB manufacturing.

Our first customer and PO came from Rex Chain Belt (now Rexnord), followed by the three additional anchor customers: McGraw Edison, Laboratory Equipment, and Generac. This meant that he needed managers to oversee the manufacturing operations, and he first turned to a number of colleagues from his prior employers, who understood manufacturing but not PCB technology. The company really needed help in manufacturing and was able to hire away some PCB talent from the other local PCB shop to oversee operations. As production, quality, and technology were finally coming together, the company was on the rise, but with the typical startup overhead debt, would it be able to make a consistent profit?

Next month: Read the conclusion of the Electro-Tek and the Williams family story in the October issue of PCB007 Magazine.

This column originally appeared in the September 2025 issue of PCB007 Magazine.