Engineer took a timing chance 50 years ago

Martin Bloch was only 25 years old in 1961 when he was working as chief engineer at Bulova, the giant watchmaker, at its Jackson Heights facility.

But that same year he decided to quit and start his own company.

"Everybody thought I was nuts," Bloch, now 75, said earlier this week. He had no money, but with some investors raised $143,000, and opened Frequency Electronics Inc., in a garage in Astoria.

The company was to build timing devices to help military aircraft and ships navigate through the air and the sea. Six weeks after opening, FEI won a Naval Research Lab contract for a few hundred thousand dollars. "It was life or death," Bloch said. "We had only 16 weeks left" before running out of money.

In December, FEI, now at Mitchel Field in Uniondale, will celebrate its 50th anniversary. Sales are now about $50 million a year, and the company has 500 employees, about 200 of them on Long Island.

"I envisioned that timing would be a key ingredient of everything we do," Bloch said.

Almost all of the top management players who started in the early 1960s are still with the company. Alwin Michaelson, who says he is "well over 70," now calls himself "just an employee." Michaelson, a Wall Streeter 50 years ago, helped secure the early financing. Manufacturing timing devices "is an area that is so special, and not many people are good at it," he said.

In 1969, FEI took a major step forward when it acquired the Atomichron product line from National Radio Co. for $733,000 in cash and notes. NRC helped develop the atomic clock, which is accurate to within one billionth of a second. FEI later provided atomic timing devices for satellites as well as aircraft and ships.

But the sailing has not been all smooth. In August 1993 NASA initially believed an FEI timing device was responsible for the loss of the billion-dollar Mars Observer satellite. That belief turned out to be wrong, but not before FEI's name was splashed across newspapers nationwide.

In November 1993 the company was indicted on charges of bilking the government through a false billing scheme. FEI pleaded guilty to one felony count and agreed to pay $6.5 million to settle the case.

Bloch voluntarily stepped down as chief executive, installing a retired Army general, Joseph Franklin, to take his place. Bloch became chief scientist. He stepped back into the chief executive post in 1998.

Bloch, born in a small town in what is now Belarus, said he hid from the Nazis in a forest along with his mother and brother from 1941 to 1944, before emigrating to the United States. M"The war made us strong," he said.