Inside the Santa Ynez Valley Magazine Winter 2002 Edition

Molecules and Motorcycles
by Brooke Comer

Virgil Elings, maverick physicist and inventor with 42 patents in scanning tunneling and atomic force microscopes, and founder of Digital Instruments in Goleta, links those achievements to his lifelong love affair with motorcycles.

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When Virgil Elings was in high school in Des Moines, Iowa, he didn't think he'd apply to college, let alone graduate from MIT, teach University level physics, leave academia to launch a multi-million dollar company called Digital Instruments, and retire to run two large ranches and a motorcycle museum. ìI just thought I'd be a machinist,î says the inventor-philanthropist-rancher-real estate entrepreneur.

ìI went to a trade high school, where we didn't read books. We didn't read anything. I shouldn't say that; I read one book. I read The Last of the Mohicans. I had an uncle who asked me if I was planning on going to college and I said no.

But he did. Elings ended up at MIT, and discovered that he liked the academic environment. When Elings now Dr. Elings got a teaching post at UCSB, he found Santa Barbara on a map and drove out west. But he didn't like the city at first. In 1966, there wasn't much to do in Santa Barbara. Yet he remained for 25 years, teaching mostly graduate students. In 1987, while on sabbatical, he made his fortune.

Digital Instruments, the company that Elings founded with his former student, Gus Gurley, built scanning tunneling microscopes, which facilitated atomic level resolution, becoming one of the most dramatic innovations of its decade. We noticed that academics wanted to build these things, and we decided we could sell them. We did well at making them, and began selling to the industry at about $50 million a year, which was pretty good for a company that we financed out of our own billfolds. We also enjoyed a lot of freedom, because we weren't responsible to outside investors.

He did feel a responsibility to his community, and made substantial donations to Las Positas Friendship Park, now named Elings Park, and Transition House, a halfway house for the homeless, among other charities.

Eling would have continued teaching but he was asked to separate his ties with Digital Instruments, because, according to University chieftains, his company represented a conflict of interest. ìI interpreted conflict of interest as making money,íî he notes wryly. Certain people didn't like that. But I had no problem separating my ties; I left the University.

People think academia is a place where you have a lot of freedom. It's a prison. You get tenure, you're locked in. You have to stay in the same field or you don't get promoted. When I left my job, people would ask you gave up your tenure?í I'd say, I make a lifetime of University pay every year. They'd think for a minute and then they'd say, you gave up your tenure?íî

ì I found that there's a lot more freedom in business than there is in academia. In business, you can do anything you want and the only thing that'll stop you is financial ruin.

When Digital Instruments merged with Veeco in 1998, Elings found out that other people in business operate differently than I do, and there was no compatibility there. He decided to retire.|

I have this idea that you should try things and see if you like them. I had a lot of money and I thought it would be interesting to own a mansion. There are some things you can't try, or shouldn't try, but you can try buying a house.

Mansions abound in Santa Barbara, but Elings went to the Santa Ynez Valley because it's a special place. He also had a childhood connection; in Des Moines, he'd attended Grandview Junior College, run by the Danish Lutheran Church, attended by several Solvang locals including Roger Nielsen. We could always spot the ones from Solvang,î Elings reminisces. When it snowed, a few goofy guys would run outside and throw snowballs. We didn't know that they'd come from a sunny place and had never seen snow before.

Little did he know that one day he'd go to that sunny place and find a ranch (he owns a 3200 acre spread in Los Alamos) and the mansion of his dreams; a 10,000 square foot home in Santa Ynez with a lavender field, horse corrals and space for his extensive motorcycle collection. If you're a real collector, you run out of room,î he notes.

Just as Elings prepared to move his motorcycles into his new home he planned to tear out a few guest rooms to make space the Solvang Outlet Center went up for sale. Elings got it for a song,î and he parked his bikes in the former Brooks Brothers shop, where the wood floor tolerated leaking oil, and opened the motorcycle museum. He sold the famed carousel (no one ever rode it) to a Japanese buyer, rents out the 17 studio and one-bedroom apartments upstairs, while the rest of the space is becoming a business center.

Motorcycles are an intregal part of Elings's life. He saved his earnings from a newspaper route and bought his first bike, a 1939 James 125, when he was 14.

In Iowa, you could get a learner's permit at 14, that allowed you to drive a car if your mother sat next to you in the car but you could ride a motorcycle by yourself, I guess because they figured that your mother wouldn't want to sit on the back. His second bike was a black BSA, the most powerful British bike at the time. It would go 110 mph. My friends and I would race up the city streets and somehow we survived.

Later, he rode the BSA to California. My mother was pretty upset about that and I couldn't figure out why but now I understand. Today I wouldn't dare ride a 1966 BSA from Iowa to Los Angeles.

Motorcycles gave Elings more than a means of transportation. People today don't have hobbies that involve making things work,î he observes. Bikes were bad enough in the old days that you kept having to fix them all the time. So we got good at fixing them up. Figuring out how to get to the end of the problem is the thing you've got to do when you're young, and these mechanical things were our way to do that. They were our medium, just as TV and maybe computers are our medium now.

Some people would think that motorcycles like that were destructive things, but if they had been absent from my life, I'm not sure how things would have turned out.