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AUGUST 2025 I PCB007 MAGAZINE 11 Dr. Edmund O. Schweitzer III, founder of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories (SEL), has a corner office in the company's world headquarters in Pullman, Washington. Forty-two years after his SEL-21—the first microprocessor-based digital protective relay—ushered in a new era of power-system protection, he has forever changed the way the world safeguards its electric grids. In this fascinating three-hour conversation, Dr. Schweitzer reveals that he remains excited to get to work each day, unpacking the "better, cheaper, faster, simpler" mantra that's still driving SEL's inno- vation, and the culture glue that keeps more than 7,000 employee-owners rowing in unison. He's a visionary who believes strongly in creativity and refuses to rest on yesterday's breakthroughs. Barry Matties: Ed, let's start by talking about your early career. You remember the days when many OEMs manufactured their own printed circuit boards. Ed Schweitzer: In fact, I worked in one. I grew up in the Chicago area, and while I was in college, around 1966, I worked for Nuclear Chicago, a com- pany that made radiation counters, Geiger coun- ters, film badges—pretty much anything nuclear. They also made all their own circuit boards. These were the newer days of integrated cir- cuits. At the time, an op-amp (operational amplifier) and a little TO-5 (transistor package) would cost five bucks, which would be $50 today. But it was better, cheaper, faster, and simpler than trying to do it with a 12AT7 vacuum tube. If you counted every time you've said "better, cheaper, faster, simpler" in your life, there's not a calculator big enough. Probably not, but that's what we ought to be doing. What resistance did you get when you challenged conventional thinking, and how did that surprise you? When you're 25 years old and you have a good idea, you don't understand why everyone else doesn't think so. When I started a company in 1984, I also heard that nobody would ever want to remotely set or change the settings on a protective relay. Now we do it all the time. You pretty much can't sell line protection anywhere in the world without fault-locating in it. It takes a fair amount of courage when you come up with your good idea, and people say no one will like it or buy it. It's natural to think that maybe your idea wasn't that good, or you didn't really develop it, so you just let it go. What a loss. So, it takes a bit of courage to stick with it. You lived that philosophy when you started your company in a garage with $2,000. Yes, I did. There are 7,000 people who work here now, and good ideas need to come from all 7,000 of us. The challenge is how to pursue them all. It's multiple ingredients: You have the idea and you need the perseverance to take it through, repeatedly, and enjoy that process. It's the idea of invention, discovery, testing, building prototypes, talking to customers, setting up and manufacturing, solving problems, answering customers' questions, and analyzing failures. That is the entrepreneurial process. by B a r r y M a t t i es , I - C o n n e ct 0 07 Inventing the Future: An Interview With Dr. Ed Schweitzer