What REALLY happened to DuMont Labs?

[Retrovert]

Originally Posted by jr_tech

Did DuMont actually fail to understand that he was looking at a "better mousetrap" that could demand a higher pricepoint... or was he perhaps just giving a couple of "upstarts" from the west a hard time?

If you read the excerpt I posted from the book, DuMont sounds like such a straight shooter, as well as obsessed with the delights of technology, I suspect he truly believed that the unit couldn't sell at that price.

According to this:
www.syscompdesign.com/assets/Images/AppNotes/scope-history.pdf
The Dumont 224a was $150, and the 511 was $700, almost FIVE TIMES as much. That's about $4,500 vs $21,000 today. You can imagine what bean counters at a company would say about that kind of expense.

And then we have some numbers on Tektronix's sales:

History of Tektronix, Inc. – FundingUniverse
www.fundinguniverse.com/company-histories/tektronix-inc-history
By 1950, Tektronix was manufacturing its seventh generation of oscilloscopes, the model 517. Orders were backlogged six months to a year, and annual sales had exceeded $1 million.
...
In 1956 Tektronix passed Du Mont for leadership in the market.

Note that 1 million then was about $30 million today, still a relatively small number.

But by that point DuMont had been dismantled by Paramount.

Finally, that tradeshow story about the exchange between Vollum and DuMont is oral Tek legend:

www.vintagetek.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/Tek-History-Anon-RevB-small.pdf
Some years later Company legend has it that Howard Vollum was at a show with a $3000 instrument when W. B. Dumont walked up. The Dumont Company at the time was selling a product at a lower price level. Reportedly Dumont said to Howard, "that's a nice scope, son, but it will never sell at that price".

I can't find it anywhere else, and believe me, I looked.

So it is hard to say what really happened at that trade show. Since we don't know the full conversation, which might have been more interesting and more revealing of his state of mind, or how he said it, was it snarky or with some respect and regret, we can't really say. I can very well believe a fan of technology would say, in all seriousness, "wow, that's a nice piece of gear and I wish we could sell at that price point, too bad the market is fixated on low cost not features." So we just don't know.