William Dahlgren -- engraving pioneer Michael Taylor, Chronicle Staff Writer
Saturday, April 9, 2005
William Dahlgren, a self-taught inventor who revolutionized the engraving industry a quarter of a century ago and was recently fiddling with computerized player pianos, died in his San Francisco home Wednesday.
Mr. Dahlgren, who was known as Will, was 60. The San Francisco medical examiner said the cause of death was under investigation. Ted Claire, Mr. Dahlgren's business associate, discovered the body Wednesday morning when he showed up at Mr. Dahlgren's home in the Outer Mission District for another day's work on the player piano computer project. Claire said Mr. Dahlgren appeared to have died sometime in the past 36 hours, possibly of congestive heart failure.
Born in Hollywood and raised in the Bay Area, Mr. Dahlgren grew up loving magic -- as a young hippie in the 1960s, he played coffee shops in San Francisco as "Willie the Wizard" -- and was insatiably curious about computers.
"He started in computers when you had to have 10 punch cards to get the computer to add 3 plus 2," his sister, Kathy Mummert, said Friday. "He grew up as a tinkerer."
By the early 1970s, Mr. Dahlgren had moved to Boonville (Mendocino County), where he was making dulcimer kits. It was that kind of time and place -- long hair, homemade musical instruments. For Mr. Dahlgren, however, life, was about to change markedly.
"Will was walking down a street in San Francisco in the late 1970s, and he went into a trophy shop," said Mike Davis, publisher of the Engravers Journal, the Michigan-based trade organ for the engraving industry. What caught Mr. Dahlgen's eye was a machine called a pantograph, a manual device harking back a century or two that was used to engrave plaques and trophies.
Essentially, a pantograph operator "had a big box full of letters, and you pull them out, letter by letter" to make up the words for the trophies, Davis said.
Mr. Dahlgren thought he could do better.
"He built himself a small computer and started putzing around," Davis said. The putzing resulted in a computer-controlled machine that could easily outperform the existing crude technology.
Mr. Dahlgren called up Davis and said he "wanted to become the largest job shop for engraving in the world." He ran some classified ads in the monthly magazine, saying he could do "computerized engraving for the trade."
"A bunch of people contacted him and said, 'We don't want you to do engraving, but where did you get your machine?' " Davis said. One such engraver pleaded with Mr. Dahlgren for a machine, and when Mr. Dahlgren asked how much he would pay for such an item, the guy immediately said, "$15,000."
With Claire and another man as his partners, Mr. Dahlgren began building the engraving machines in his factory-cum-apartment in the Mission District, where Mr. Dahlgren slept on the floor and took showers by standing in a plastic Flintstones kiddie pool and pouring pitchers of water over his body.
At some point, Mr. Dahlgren took a machine out to Michigan for a trade show, and when professional engravers saw it, "they were in total awe," Davis said. "It was just like a computer: Sit down at a keyboard, type in text, push a button and then it would engrave the plate for you.
"People couldn't get their checkbooks out fast enough," Davis said. "They'd give him a deposit, and eventually he got hopelessly backlogged. He couldn't build them fast enough."
The whole business skyrocketed in just a few years. Bigger companies started to compete, and finally it all caught up with him.
"He liked the inventing part," Mummert said of her brother, "but he was having to get too involved in the business part. It took the fun out of it. They eventually sold it."
The firm, Dahlgren Engraving, was sold to a Peninsula businessman and then to a series of other owners and is now owned by an English company.
For a couple of years, Mr. Dahlgren fooled around on a big sailboat he bought with his share of the engraving company sale. Then he built a huge machine to churn out his new product -- brass business cards. But not many people wanted to hand out brass business cards, and the venture "didn't work out that well," Claire said.
In the mid-1980s, Mr. Dahlgren and Claire formed a new firm, Piano Automation. "We were trying to make an improvement on an existing player piano system," Claire said.
Mr. Dahlgren, Claire said, "had a passion for making machines move, using computers to control them, anything to do with the computer control of physical apparatus."
At the time of his death, Mr. Dahlgren was involved in designing a system that would allow a computer, instead of those old player piano rolls, to tell the piano what to play.
Mr. Dahlgren was such a tinkerer, Claire said, that around 1970, he made an electric-powered motorcycle, using a Harley Davidson frame.
Mr. Dahlgren is survived by his sister, Kathy Mummert, of North Highlands (Sacramento County). She suggests donations to the San Francisco Exploratorium, Exploratorium Development Department, 3601 Lyon St., San Francisco, CA 94123- 1099.
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