Richard Morley, Father of the programmable logic controller
2011 IW Manufacturing Hall of Fame Inductee
The birth of the first programmable controller -- perhaps the most important innovation in the history of factory automation -- began with a hangover.
It was Jan. 1, 1968, and Dick Morley was working on a project for Bedford Associates, a contract-engineering firm that he and a friend launched a few years earlier in Bedford, Mass. Morley -- an engineer, machinist and MIT dropout -- was feeling the effects of his New Year's Eve revelry. "I had a hangover, and I didn't feel good," Morley says. "And I was late on the project."
It wasn't just the hangover that had made Morley cranky. After several years of building the same custom machine-tool controls for his clients "over and over again," Morley couldn't bear the thought of building yet another one.
"Everything was built on an individual basis," he recalls. "And I said, ‘Geez, I don't want to do this again.' That was my incentive."
With the goal of designing a controller that would work for every job, Morley came up with the architecture for the programmable controller in about a day.
It took another nine months for Morley and his colleagues to build the first one -- dubbed the 084 because it was Bedford Associates' 84th project -- and soon after, the team found investors and formed a company called Modicon, which stood for Modular Digital Controller.
General Motors Co. placed the first order for the programmable controller in 1969. Today, the PLC (which gained the "logic" in the early 1980s with the emergence of personal computers) is widely used in the auto industry and throughout manufacturing, serving as a cornerstone of factory automation.
While Morley has attained near-legend status for his role in the development of the PLC, the man is no one-hit wonder.
Morley also is the inventor of the floppy disk and holds more than 20 U.S. and foreign patents for innovations such as the handheld terminal, the parallel inference machine and magnetic thin film. As the co-founder of an angel-investor group called the Breakfast Club, Morley has helped launch more than 100 high-tech startups.
