Claude Laval III interview

Item

Transcript of Claude Laval III interview

Title

eng Claude Laval III interview

Description

eng President of the Laval Corporation. Talked about growth and change in the field of water technology, and how technology developed here in the Valley has been used all over the world.

Creator

eng Laval III, Claude
eng Holyoke, Thomas

Relation

eng Water Archive Oral Histories

Coverage

eng California State University, Fresno

Date

eng 11/2/2012

Format

eng Microsoft Word 2003 document, 8 pages

Identifier

eng SCMS_waoh_00024

extracted text

>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay, well we are interviewing Mister Claude Laval III this
morning. But I think I would like to probably start off talking a bit about
Claude Laval Junior, your father.
>> Claude Laval III: Okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Development of the camera -- I guess it's the camera that -was invented to basically go down inside water wells. Can you tell us a little
bit about sort of your father's history?
>> Claude Laval III: Well, my father was -- grew up in Fresno, and went to
Fresno High and then went to work at the Fresno Republican as a photographer,
because my grandfather was a photographer in this area, and out of that -- that
was probably almost the last real job he ever had. The rest of his life was
spent working on inventions, his -- he invented -- when he passed away he had
about 75 U.S. and Foreign patents that were active. He never actually operated
any of the businesses that grew out of his -- patents, people would bring
problems to him and he would work on the solution and if he was successful, then
he would get a patent on it and he would give it to his patent [Background
Sound] lawyer who then would license the rights to that patent to other people.
So that's what he did as a living, he had a big workshop in his home that most
of his inventions were -- and his inventions were in many different fields and
he didn't work them out theoretically, they were all worked out by building
models and testing models, he had a big swimming pool that was full of pumps and
various other things that he could run tests on. He -- besides the camera and
the filtration products that we make today, [Background Sound] he also invented
the original methods for corralling oil spills, he had some medical devices, he
had some cereal production equipment, he had toys, he had all kinds of different
things. But people would just come to him and that's really how the camera came
about. The people from Peerless Pump, here in Fresno, had a pump stuck in a well
on the West Side and they were trying to get the pump out, and the only method
of doing that at that point in time, believe it or not, was to take a bar of
Ivory soap, on essentially a piece of string -- heavy duty string of course, and
drop that bar of soap into the well and then you'd pull it back up and there'd
be all kinds of scratches on it. And then these old hands would stand around and
look at that bar of soap and they would agree that that must mean the pump is
this way or that way and -- because the job was to figure out a tool that would
go down and grasp the pump to pull it out of the well, because you couldn't use
the well with the pump, or whatever was in it. All right. And many wells on the
West Side, then and even now, if there's an earthquake, tend to collapse so you
got to figure out what the situation is so that you -- whether the well is
usable or not. So they asked my father if he could invent a camera to go in the
well so they could see what was going on. And the first camera he made was of
course a still camera; this is a long time before the invention [laughs] of
television. And he built what he thought was a strong enough housing, but he
really didn't calculate properly the pressures and so the first couple of
cameras that he made were actually crushed by going deep in the well, so he just
kept working that out until he had developed actually a three dimensional camera
that took stereo pictures of the object in the well. And that's kind of how this
all began, then he licensed that product to First Food Machinery and then Lane
Wells and a whole succession of different people, today which is next year will
be 65 years since that occurred, we own that company again, I mean we've owned
it and sold it and owned and sold it a number of times, but we now make cameras
that sell the whole complete thing which used to cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars, now sells for 12, 13 thousand dollars and can be put in the back of a
pickup truck so times have completely changed, and of course it's television
now. One of the things that they found right away with the pictures is that not

only could they see what they were doing, and at the same time they could what
the quality of the work as far as the well drilling. Well drilling was a very
imprecise science up until the '50's and '60's and sometimes the wells weren't
quite what that were reported to be, this showed people exactly the conditions
and how far the casing really went, as opposed to what they thought it was, so
it was kind of an important breakthrough in terms of improving the quality and
the integrity of the well drilling business. But one of the things they found
out right away is that, with the three dimensional pictures you could see all
this sand that was floating around in the well and clearly that was what -there was a lot more sand than anybody expected and that was causing the pump
efficiency to deteriorate. So one of the next products he made was a separator
that you actually installed beneath the pump, so that the sand was separated
before it went into the pump and its purpose was to keep the sand out of the
pump, keep the efficiency of the pump up and to protect the pump, and that's a
product that he developed and patented and licensed and that's really the
original product that this company is based on and was a product we still make,
nobody else in the world makes a product like that. [Background talking] And
from that product then all the units that are made, the largest proportion of
what we make here now are, filtration devices that go on the discharge
[Background Sound] of the pump to protect whatever the water is going to. The
first product however was the one that protected the pump itself by going in the
well and that was an outgrowth of the camera. [Background talking] The next
product in that line of thought was now they had the way to see what the
conditions were in the well, they -- other than just putting a cap on the well
and drilling a new well, which on the West Side, [background talking] even in
the '60's and '70's could cost a half million dollars and today cost twice that.
They needed something to fix the wells, so he developed a hydraulic swaging tool
that is still used all over the world, that went down and pushed the casing back
into its original shape and then you put a sleeve back in and essentially
annealed that to the well casing so that the well was back to its original size.
Before that, if they had a cave in or something, they would put a smaller pipe
inside the larger pipe, which it at least allowed you to use the water -- some
of the water, but greatly reduced the productivity of the well. So this was
quite an innovation in terms of [background talking] making -- getting the well
back to its original condition. That was sort of the end of his involvement in
water industry, I mean he developed then a whole line of products that, as an
offshoot of the down hole unit, but the larger -- the discharge side products,
but then about that time -- and it was just about this time of year all the
raisins were [background talking] spread out all over the landscape and we had
torrential rains that went on for days and the whole raisin crop was moldy, so
his next -- he just moved right from his water projects into finding a method
for getting the mold off the raisins and it's still used. And it was -- I have
forgotten who it was licensed to now, but his whole operation was to work on
somebody's problem and then license somebody else to do the actual work and just
take a royalty.
>> Thomas Holyoke: When he made his first camera for the well, you said that was
well next year would be 65 years ago, so 64 years ago now, that puts us in the
late 1940's?
>> Claude Laval III: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And that would be at a point in time when most agriculture in
the valley was dependent on well water, because I think the big surface
irrigation systems like Central Valley Project hadn't come online yet.
>> Claude Laval III: That's correct.

>> Thomas Holyoke: So was there quickly a big demand then for his project -- I
mean for his work?
>> Claude Laval III: Well two answers to that actually, [background talking] you
know, right away obviously anybody that had a well that had a problem [laughs]
in it, wanted -- it was operated as a service business by Food and Machinery in
the beginning. And they had cameras stationed around during -- because it wasn't
just -- didn't just apply here to agriculture many parts of the United States
get their municipal water as we do, primarily from wells, so they had cameras in
Texas, cameras on the East Coast -- I mean there was a whole business of -service business of going out and taking pictures [background talking] and
giving reports to people about the conditions and then recommending what could
be done with those. On the other side of it there became a big part of that
business, in those days was involved with verifying that particularly with
municipal wells that what had been delivered by the well driller was what the
customer had expected and paid for. And I can remember as a kid, my father
talking about going to the National Ground Water Association meeting which was
in California that year and, you know, its 60 years later I'm going to that same
tradeshow in Las Vegas in a month or so. But he went and made a presentation on
the camera and the results, to a bunch of well drillers and they booed, because
nobody -- it was like a doctor having somebody come around and examine the
patient after you'd finished the operation and they weren't a bit pleased about
that. So there -- it, you know, it wasn't an overnight success because if you
had a domestic well that was only -- it was very small in diameter and maybe
only 100 feet, it wasn't economically sensible to spend the money to have a
truck come all the way out and take the pictures. But it was immediate -- I mean
people stopped using impression blocks, which is what they called the soap,
right away, because now you could actually see.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So while I can understand that well drilling companies would
not be thrilled about a project that essentially checks up on the quality of
their work, but to farmers dependent on wells, this would be very important.
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, well obviously if -- and it was just sort of, you
know, well water came to the Central Valley -- a lot of this area was –- when I
was a small child, the West Side was mostly desert, and it was -- there was
plenty of water suddenly and nobody really gave much concern to productivity,
but as the agriculture as we know it now began to develop even in the late '50's
and early '60's, people suddenly began to notice if their well productivity -there was less water from the same size well. This allowed you to actually not
just look for things that were in the well that were causing a problem, but to
look at the -- to do an inspection of the whole well, to look at the
perforations to see if they were -- had become blocked, or there were some, you
know, you could actually see why there was less water and then make a
recommendation on what to do about it.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So do you, then, remain deeply involved with organizations
like the National Ground Water Association, the California Ground Water
Association?
>> Claude Laval III: Sure, yeah, we're very [laughs] involved in all of that and
I think we probably are one of the largest users of the water and energy
technology lab at Fresno State, we do all our testing there, we're -- I'm a past
president of the International Irrigation Association, it's where I'm going this
weekend, to their conference, which is in Florida. We're -- our -- the company

is all involved in the ground water business worldwide; because that's the
business we're in.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Any sense of how extensive agriculture uses ground water
today as opposed to pulling water out of, you know the San Joaquin River, Friant
Kern Canal or the Delta, what relying farmers are currently on ground water?
>> Claude Laval III: Well ground represents -- depending on the year and the
availability of surface water, ground water is the lifeline for the farming
industry, certainly the San Joaquin Valley, but pretty much all across the
country. It's the only balance you've got if nature doesn't provide and -- or
politics prevents, so, you know, you have to be a real gambler to have major -particularly permanent crop, products in the ground without the ability to
provide ground water if you need it. So what happens these days is that in years
where there's plentiful surface water, farmers use that and don't use their
wells, because the well -- mostly because of the energy cost, the well water is
far more expensive, but they have that to balance and in many cases the quality
of the surface water is deteriorated enough these days that [background beeping
sound] the only water, particularly in the Western side of the Westland's Water
District, you really have to blend your -- the surface water with the well water
to get water that's quality enough that you can actually grow product with. So
yeah without -- well water originally opened up the west side, the advent of the
Central Valley Project and all of the surface water made it what it is now, but
without the availability of the ground water, you would not be able to farm. I
actually talked to a farmer in Indiana, I think yesterday, who doesn't have
irrigation and doesn't have a well and simply this year had no crop and that
would be a very scary way to be in business, I think. I mean, when it rains you
had income and when it didn't you were in trouble and the same thing's true here
with the availability of the surface water it varies, and oftentimes you've
already planted the crop or if you've got trees, they're already growing, before
you know how much you're going to get. So you've got to be able to balance that
somehow.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In what sense is the ground water, especially out on the west
side now, not of high enough quality to be used for irrigation?
>> Claude Laval III: It's full of -- well the ground -- it depends, like
everything. Some of the water on the West Side is very saline and there's
actually a lot of water on the West Side, probably enough water so they don't -in ground water, so they really wouldn't have to use surface water, if they
could find some economic way to take the water that's in the wells that's very
saline and convert it economically. You can do it, technically through reverse
osmosis and all kinds of other processes to get it up to a quality that it's
usable, but the problem is the cost of doing that hasn't -- is prohibititive, so
that's a problem with a lot of the ground water. The other problem is that the
surface water has a lot of bacteria and chemical content that makes it low
quality, in terms of, using it straight to agriculture and in certain parts -and this is not universally true, but in certain parts you really [background
beeping] have to blend that with ground water to get quality enough so that you
get a decent crop.
>> Thomas Holyoke: As they've had to pump more ground water and the water table
has declined, this problem of poor quality ground water, has become more severe?
>> Claude Laval III: Sure.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Jumping back to your father's early years with this, so he
was deeply involved in was sort of really expanding agriculture on the West Side
because it was so highly dependent on [background talking] well water?
>> Claude Laval III: I'm sure he never gave that a second thought. I mean it was
-- he knew the – he’d lived here all his life, the -- he knew the people at
Peerless Pump, which was owned in those days by Food and Machinery and they had
a problem and he helped them solve it. I'm sure he never really thought of this
as doing good for humanity or expanding agriculture on earth. He just was
solving a current -- I mean he moved from current problem to current problem and
so -- I mean I don't -- I'd never talked to him about that, but I'm pretty sure
he never gave that a remotest thought.
>> Thomas Holyoke: The last few left -- the last few years there is -- some have
talked about the need for, you know, much greater state regulations taking
control of ground water, currently state and stated that Federal Government
regulates surface water, but not ground water, any thoughts on that?
>> Claude Laval III: Well that's pretty much out of my area of expertise. I
mean, I think this is a pretty overregulated that -- to be a farmer in
California is already an incredibly regulated business. I think it's important
that information -- and there's a new regulation that's being enforced just now
that will give the State Water Resources board information on how much water's
actually being withdrawn, because that has been available before. And I think
that's useful for the common good, but I would be very concerned -- it would be
the kind of information that could be used for [background talking] social
purposes, other than just trying to be sure we have enough adequate water to
continue to live here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Now today your company I understand sells its products all
over the world, and you probably spend a fair amount of time traveling...
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: ...other parts of the world, anything that you've seen that's
really remarkable in terms of -- technology and water use in other parts of the
United States, other parts of the world?
>> Claude Laval III: Actually no, it's the other way around, I think. People who
live here don't have any appreciation for the fact, but this is the San Joaquin
Valley from about -- Stockton to Bakersfield is the epicenter of the water
technology business in the world. There's 160 companies roughly between those
two places and all of the drip irrigation manufacturers except one in the world
are -- have their American headquarters here, four or five of the major pump
companies are here, pretty much all of the water filtration companies, including
ourselves, are here. Valves, emitters, various -- even fire hydrants and things
are made here. All the testing for anywhere in the world pretty much is done at
the International Center for Water Technology on the campus, it's considered to
be the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for water technology products. I think
the average person on the street doesn't have -- in Fresno doesn't have any
appreciation of that. So people come here, actually, to see what is on the
cutting edge of water technology, whether it's irrigation or pumping [dinging
noise] or filtration, or whatever. Sometimes other places get a lot of publicity
for that, you know. Israel somehow has created the idea that they invented drip
irrigation, but it was actually invented by a farm advisor in San Diego County
and then kind of perfected by the Israelis who then exported the whole thing
here, but this is sort of the center of all of that. In fact, there's kind of an

effort to brand that as the Blue Tech Valley, and there are conferences here for
people in this business that attract people from all over the world, and it's a
very international business. If you think about the drip irrigation
manufacturers, for instance, Netafim's headquarters in the United States, which
is the largest manufacturer in drip irrigation, is about a block from where we
are today; that's an Israeli company. Jane is an Indian company; they're the
second largest there at the south end of town. A company called Eurodrip is in
Madera; that's a Greek company. There's an Italian company that's building a big
factory near Chestnut and McKinley. So, you know, look around this -- Grundfos
is a Danish company, this is a very international center for water products, and
I think most of the innovation, the water business moves very, very slowly.
Things don't happen in a revolutionary sort of way in this business, but what is
going on is pretty much focused here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What sort of big changes have you seen in the water industry
the last 10, 20 years, great inventions?
>> Claude Laval III: People pay attention, you know. A third of the energy
that's used in California is used to pump water. And 30 years ago no one cared.
I mean, we had plenty of energy and we had plenty of water, there's a big focus
now on that water-energy nexus and being more careful with the water we've got,
and developing products that do the same job with less energy. Our focus here is
as a company is on finding ways to do finer and finer filtration with less and
less energy to do it. And that's true -- and if you kind of think about when the
camera was being developed, all the watering, all the irrigation in Central
California was done in furrows. You just dumped the water out on the ground and
60% of farming in California is still that way believe it or not. And it was
very inefficient, particularly where it gets as hot as it does. I mean,
evaporation alone was a terrible waste and putting all that water in -particularly into a desert environment created all kinds of salt problems and
other problems that man has caused. So today we've shifted from wasting water,
you can grow more stuff with less water, and put it precisely where you want it
and how much you need, and there's all kinds of technology and instrumentation
now to only water when the plant needs it, and that's kind of where we get into
agriculture because if you're going to put water in little tiny drops next to a
plant, you got to have the water clean or you plug up the little tiny holes and
the little tiny drops. But so this is all evolved where it's -- that's the same
story is true of sprinklers, when we went from dumping the water onto the ground
to having sprinklers set on posts that sprayed the water into the air, that was
better than dumping it on the ground, but most of it was blown hither-thither
and yon so that it never really landed where it was supposed to. And now even
people who use sprinklers have sprinklers that are right on the ground and put
little tiny sprays right around the surface of the plant, it helps with -- it
eliminates the need for a lot of herbicides and other chemicals that are put
onto the land, because if you only water where you need the water for the plant,
you don't grow all these weeds and other stuff. So it's a slow process, you
know, there aren't revolutionary changes from time-to-time, but it's
evolutionary if you look over the last -- I mean this business has been in -this is our 40th year, so if you look at the last 40 years of making filtration
equipment, we've moved from essentially getting rocks out of water, to getting
particles that are fine enough you can't see. So it's taken a long time, but it
-- and you have to adopt -- sometimes technically you can do things that nobody
wants to do, so you've got to kind of stage your development so that it matches
what the customers are interested in. But people look to the San Joaquin Valley,
particularly for agriculture, for the current techniques and what's -- and
that's been driven by Fresno State's Ag Program, the U.C. Program, Cal Poly. I

mean, pretty much all the research that people look at are -- is coming from
this area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Has it been difficult to convince farmers to adopt new
technology?
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, it's expensive, it takes a big leap of faith or the
knowledge you haven't got enough water. A lot of people have moved in the last
couple of years -- the last three or four years, maybe even four or five years,
a lot of row crops have been taken out, where they've put them in every year and
have been replaced with permanent crops. You can't afford to take that gamble if
you don't have a secure water supply, and to have a secure water supply you've
got to use the least amount of water you can get and that's caused people to
essentially get the money somehow for the -- to put in drip systems and, you
know, finer -- sprinklers, and, I mean, to really think about the resources they
have and to be sure they've got enough of those to grow your crop, because if
you've got -- have a huge investment in the trees and you can't say to the tree
I've got enough water for you for the first two years, but you'll have to wait
for the third or fourth year, it just doesn't work that way.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So what do you foresee the water industry going in the next
10, 20, 50 years?
>> Claude Laval III: Gee, I wish I knew [Laughter]. I have no idea. I mean, it's
-- there's -- it's all a matter of money, I think. Water as a commodity is
underpriced worldwide, it's undervalued, it's probably more important. More
fighting is going on at the moment over water than -- it's probably worldwide,
than it’s -- than oil. And I mean particularly the developing world, it's an
incredible problem, so I think eventually water will be priced more so that -at a higher lever so people actually have to think about it when they're using
it and wasting it, and to buy equipment and use -- do practices that prevent it
from being wasted. But I -- it's -- and the pricing of the water, I mean, the
same thing's true of you know, forget agriculture, the same things true of
municipal water, people take municipal water for granted, they just turn on the
tap and assume it's going to be great water and it's going to come out of the
tap and it's going to cost hardly anything. I don't know what the number is but
probably half the world doesn't have that luxury, and we should be careful we
don't waste it. So I think technology -- we have the capability of doing a lot
of things, but we can't do them as long as water is very inexpensive and
eventually I'm sure the cost of the technology will come down and the cost of
the pricing of the water will come up so that there's -- it meets someplace and
when that happens there'll be quite a spurt of new innovation. I mean, there is
a lot of ways to get things you don't want out of water; people just aren't
necessarily willing to pay the cost. And in many cases we don't have the energy
to do that. So, you know, I mean, you're in the political science business, you
probably understand this better than I do, we -- you need the whole national
priorities about energy got to be figured out somehow, because that has a big
impact when you get it down to the lowest level to being sure that the water
that comes out of your tap or the water you irrigate your plants or trees with,
is economically feasible, because it's mostly driven off the cost of the energy.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually have you seen the last 10, 20 years expansion of
your business into third world countries?
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, our business from the beginning has been -- third
world countries in some -- 40% of the stuff we make in this building are shipped
to outside the United States. Most of it to -- I mean, I just came back from

India, the -- I mean, we do a big business in India, the Middle East is a big
market for us. The worse the quality of the water, the worse the quality of the
drilling of the wells, whatever the making of the canals, whatever it is, the
better it is for us from a business standpoint, so much of our business is in
the worst parts of earth. And people -- it kind of goes to what we we're talking
about a minute ago, I mean, those people understand the value of the water and
understand the value of spending money -- it's just a question of what you want
to spend your money on and in parts of the world, money is being spent on
improving the quality of the water so that -- because it's the lifeblood of the
country. That hasn't quite dawned on the average American yet.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Have you enjoyed working in this field, water technology?
>> Claude Laval III: Well, I really didn't start out do this, so I did -- it
just sort of happened -- yeah, this is a very interesting -- I mean we're not
only -- it's been a successful business, it's nice to be in a business where you
do innovative -- not “me too” type products so it's made the business
interesting, it's particularly interesting to you know, this business has grown
from just the product itself to where it is now, so that in itself is
interesting. But I think it's been rewarding, because we're actually doing -when you particularly in developing parts of the world and some of them not so
nice, there's a picture on the wall behind you -- I'm standing next to an
airplane in the Libyan desert with the Minister of Agriculture and Water and -I mean that's in the beginning of the Gaddafi regime. There was no water in that
country at all when the Gaddafi came to power and overthrew the king, the water
was all out in the desert, the cities were all along the coast, there they've
drilled all these wells and built a great manmade river that brings the water
1500 miles across the desert to -- using separators at every pumping station to
clean the sand out of the water, so not only was it a good piece of business,
but we were actually doing something that was important for the people that
lived in that part of the world. Now Gaddafi himself turned out to be kind of a
madman, but at the beginning when I first started going there, he did remarkable
things in -- to bring that country into a current state, because it was back in
the middle ages, there were no roads, no telephone system, no water, poor
electricity. So yeah it's not only been good business, but it's been very
rewarding in that sense.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, I'm at the end of my questions, but is there anything
you'd like to add?
>> Claude Laval III: Nothing that I can think of. I don't know that -- what
you've got out of this, but...
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, a lot out of it, actually.
>> Claude Laval III: Really? Okay. Well, that's good.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Okay, well we are interviewing Mister Claude Laval III this
morning. But I think I would like to probably start off talking a bit about
Claude Laval Junior, your father.
>> Claude Laval III: Okay.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Development of the camera -- I guess it's the camera that -was invented to basically go down inside water wells. Can you tell us a little
bit about sort of your father's history?
>> Claude Laval III: Well, my father was -- grew up in Fresno, and went to
Fresno High and then went to work at the Fresno Republican as a photographer,
because my grandfather was a photographer in this area, and out of that -- that
was probably almost the last real job he ever had. The rest of his life was
spent working on inventions, his -- he invented -- when he passed away he had
about 75 U.S. and Foreign patents that were active. He never actually operated
any of the businesses that grew out of his -- patents, people would bring
problems to him and he would work on the solution and if he was successful, then
he would get a patent on it and he would give it to his patent [Background
Sound] lawyer who then would license the rights to that patent to other people.
So that's what he did as a living, he had a big workshop in his home that most
of his inventions were -- and his inventions were in many different fields and
he didn't work them out theoretically, they were all worked out by building
models and testing models, he had a big swimming pool that was full of pumps and
various other things that he could run tests on. He -- besides the camera and
the filtration products that we make today, [Background Sound] he also invented
the original methods for corralling oil spills, he had some medical devices, he
had some cereal production equipment, he had toys, he had all kinds of different
things. But people would just come to him and that's really how the camera came
about. The people from Peerless Pump, here in Fresno, had a pump stuck in a well
on the West Side and they were trying to get the pump out, and the only method
of doing that at that point in time, believe it or not, was to take a bar of
Ivory soap, on essentially a piece of string -- heavy duty string of course, and
drop that bar of soap into the well and then you'd pull it back up and there'd
be all kinds of scratches on it. And then these old hands would stand around and
look at that bar of soap and they would agree that that must mean the pump is
this way or that way and -- because the job was to figure out a tool that would
go down and grasp the pump to pull it out of the well, because you couldn't use
the well with the pump, or whatever was in it. All right. And many wells on the
West Side, then and even now, if there's an earthquake, tend to collapse so you
got to figure out what the situation is so that you -- whether the well is
usable or not. So they asked my father if he could invent a camera to go in the
well so they could see what was going on. And the first camera he made was of
course a still camera; this is a long time before the invention [laughs] of
television. And he built what he thought was a strong enough housing, but he
really didn't calculate properly the pressures and so the first couple of
cameras that he made were actually crushed by going deep in the well, so he just
kept working that out until he had developed actually a three dimensional camera
that took stereo pictures of the object in the well. And that's kind of how this
all began, then he licensed that product to First Food Machinery and then Lane
Wells and a whole succession of different people, today which is next year will
be 65 years since that occurred, we own that company again, I mean we've owned
it and sold it and owned and sold it a number of times, but we now make cameras
that sell the whole complete thing which used to cost hundreds of thousands of
dollars, now sells for 12, 13 thousand dollars and can be put in the back of a
pickup truck so times have completely changed, and of course it's television
now. One of the things that they found right away with the pictures is that not

only could they see what they were doing, and at the same time they could what
the quality of the work as far as the well drilling. Well drilling was a very
imprecise science up until the '50's and '60's and sometimes the wells weren't
quite what that were reported to be, this showed people exactly the conditions
and how far the casing really went, as opposed to what they thought it was, so
it was kind of an important breakthrough in terms of improving the quality and
the integrity of the well drilling business. But one of the things they found
out right away is that, with the three dimensional pictures you could see all
this sand that was floating around in the well and clearly that was what -there was a lot more sand than anybody expected and that was causing the pump
efficiency to deteriorate. So one of the next products he made was a separator
that you actually installed beneath the pump, so that the sand was separated
before it went into the pump and its purpose was to keep the sand out of the
pump, keep the efficiency of the pump up and to protect the pump, and that's a
product that he developed and patented and licensed and that's really the
original product that this company is based on and was a product we still make,
nobody else in the world makes a product like that. [Background talking] And
from that product then all the units that are made, the largest proportion of
what we make here now are, filtration devices that go on the discharge
[Background Sound] of the pump to protect whatever the water is going to. The
first product however was the one that protected the pump itself by going in the
well and that was an outgrowth of the camera. [Background talking] The next
product in that line of thought was now they had the way to see what the
conditions were in the well, they -- other than just putting a cap on the well
and drilling a new well, which on the West Side, [background talking] even in
the '60's and '70's could cost a half million dollars and today cost twice that.
They needed something to fix the wells, so he developed a hydraulic swaging tool
that is still used all over the world, that went down and pushed the casing back
into its original shape and then you put a sleeve back in and essentially
annealed that to the well casing so that the well was back to its original size.
Before that, if they had a cave in or something, they would put a smaller pipe
inside the larger pipe, which it at least allowed you to use the water -- some
of the water, but greatly reduced the productivity of the well. So this was
quite an innovation in terms of [background talking] making -- getting the well
back to its original condition. That was sort of the end of his involvement in
water industry, I mean he developed then a whole line of products that, as an
offshoot of the down hole unit, but the larger -- the discharge side products,
but then about that time -- and it was just about this time of year all the
raisins were [background talking] spread out all over the landscape and we had
torrential rains that went on for days and the whole raisin crop was moldy, so
his next -- he just moved right from his water projects into finding a method
for getting the mold off the raisins and it's still used. And it was -- I have
forgotten who it was licensed to now, but his whole operation was to work on
somebody's problem and then license somebody else to do the actual work and just
take a royalty.
>> Thomas Holyoke: When he made his first camera for the well, you said that was
well next year would be 65 years ago, so 64 years ago now, that puts us in the
late 1940's?
>> Claude Laval III: Yes.
>> Thomas Holyoke: And that would be at a point in time when most agriculture in
the valley was dependent on well water, because I think the big surface
irrigation systems like Central Valley Project hadn't come online yet.
>> Claude Laval III: That's correct.

>> Thomas Holyoke: So was there quickly a big demand then for his project -- I
mean for his work?
>> Claude Laval III: Well two answers to that actually, [background talking] you
know, right away obviously anybody that had a well that had a problem [laughs]
in it, wanted -- it was operated as a service business by Food and Machinery in
the beginning. And they had cameras stationed around during -- because it wasn't
just -- didn't just apply here to agriculture many parts of the United States
get their municipal water as we do, primarily from wells, so they had cameras in
Texas, cameras on the East Coast -- I mean there was a whole business of -service business of going out and taking pictures [background talking] and
giving reports to people about the conditions and then recommending what could
be done with those. On the other side of it there became a big part of that
business, in those days was involved with verifying that particularly with
municipal wells that what had been delivered by the well driller was what the
customer had expected and paid for. And I can remember as a kid, my father
talking about going to the National Ground Water Association meeting which was
in California that year and, you know, its 60 years later I'm going to that same
tradeshow in Las Vegas in a month or so. But he went and made a presentation on
the camera and the results, to a bunch of well drillers and they booed, because
nobody -- it was like a doctor having somebody come around and examine the
patient after you'd finished the operation and they weren't a bit pleased about
that. So there -- it, you know, it wasn't an overnight success because if you
had a domestic well that was only -- it was very small in diameter and maybe
only 100 feet, it wasn't economically sensible to spend the money to have a
truck come all the way out and take the pictures. But it was immediate -- I mean
people stopped using impression blocks, which is what they called the soap,
right away, because now you could actually see.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So while I can understand that well drilling companies would
not be thrilled about a project that essentially checks up on the quality of
their work, but to farmers dependent on wells, this would be very important.
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, well obviously if -- and it was just sort of, you
know, well water came to the Central Valley -- a lot of this area was –- when I
was a small child, the West Side was mostly desert, and it was -- there was
plenty of water suddenly and nobody really gave much concern to productivity,
but as the agriculture as we know it now began to develop even in the late '50's
and early '60's, people suddenly began to notice if their well productivity -there was less water from the same size well. This allowed you to actually not
just look for things that were in the well that were causing a problem, but to
look at the -- to do an inspection of the whole well, to look at the
perforations to see if they were -- had become blocked, or there were some, you
know, you could actually see why there was less water and then make a
recommendation on what to do about it.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So do you, then, remain deeply involved with organizations
like the National Ground Water Association, the California Ground Water
Association?
>> Claude Laval III: Sure, yeah, we're very [laughs] involved in all of that and
I think we probably are one of the largest users of the water and energy
technology lab at Fresno State, we do all our testing there, we're -- I'm a past
president of the International Irrigation Association, it's where I'm going this
weekend, to their conference, which is in Florida. We're -- our -- the company

is all involved in the ground water business worldwide; because that's the
business we're in.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Any sense of how extensive agriculture uses ground water
today as opposed to pulling water out of, you know the San Joaquin River, Friant
Kern Canal or the Delta, what relying farmers are currently on ground water?
>> Claude Laval III: Well ground represents -- depending on the year and the
availability of surface water, ground water is the lifeline for the farming
industry, certainly the San Joaquin Valley, but pretty much all across the
country. It's the only balance you've got if nature doesn't provide and -- or
politics prevents, so, you know, you have to be a real gambler to have major -particularly permanent crop, products in the ground without the ability to
provide ground water if you need it. So what happens these days is that in years
where there's plentiful surface water, farmers use that and don't use their
wells, because the well -- mostly because of the energy cost, the well water is
far more expensive, but they have that to balance and in many cases the quality
of the surface water is deteriorated enough these days that [background beeping
sound] the only water, particularly in the Western side of the Westland's Water
District, you really have to blend your -- the surface water with the well water
to get water that's quality enough that you can actually grow product with. So
yeah without -- well water originally opened up the west side, the advent of the
Central Valley Project and all of the surface water made it what it is now, but
without the availability of the ground water, you would not be able to farm. I
actually talked to a farmer in Indiana, I think yesterday, who doesn't have
irrigation and doesn't have a well and simply this year had no crop and that
would be a very scary way to be in business, I think. I mean, when it rains you
had income and when it didn't you were in trouble and the same thing's true here
with the availability of the surface water it varies, and oftentimes you've
already planted the crop or if you've got trees, they're already growing, before
you know how much you're going to get. So you've got to be able to balance that
somehow.
>> Thomas Holyoke: In what sense is the ground water, especially out on the west
side now, not of high enough quality to be used for irrigation?
>> Claude Laval III: It's full of -- well the ground -- it depends, like
everything. Some of the water on the West Side is very saline and there's
actually a lot of water on the West Side, probably enough water so they don't -in ground water, so they really wouldn't have to use surface water, if they
could find some economic way to take the water that's in the wells that's very
saline and convert it economically. You can do it, technically through reverse
osmosis and all kinds of other processes to get it up to a quality that it's
usable, but the problem is the cost of doing that hasn't -- is prohibititive, so
that's a problem with a lot of the ground water. The other problem is that the
surface water has a lot of bacteria and chemical content that makes it low
quality, in terms of, using it straight to agriculture and in certain parts -and this is not universally true, but in certain parts you really [background
beeping] have to blend that with ground water to get quality enough so that you
get a decent crop.
>> Thomas Holyoke: As they've had to pump more ground water and the water table
has declined, this problem of poor quality ground water, has become more severe?
>> Claude Laval III: Sure.

>> Thomas Holyoke: Jumping back to your father's early years with this, so he
was deeply involved in was sort of really expanding agriculture on the West Side
because it was so highly dependent on [background talking] well water?
>> Claude Laval III: I'm sure he never gave that a second thought. I mean it was
-- he knew the – he’d lived here all his life, the -- he knew the people at
Peerless Pump, which was owned in those days by Food and Machinery and they had
a problem and he helped them solve it. I'm sure he never really thought of this
as doing good for humanity or expanding agriculture on earth. He just was
solving a current -- I mean he moved from current problem to current problem and
so -- I mean I don't -- I'd never talked to him about that, but I'm pretty sure
he never gave that a remotest thought.
>> Thomas Holyoke: The last few left -- the last few years there is -- some have
talked about the need for, you know, much greater state regulations taking
control of ground water, currently state and stated that Federal Government
regulates surface water, but not ground water, any thoughts on that?
>> Claude Laval III: Well that's pretty much out of my area of expertise. I
mean, I think this is a pretty overregulated that -- to be a farmer in
California is already an incredibly regulated business. I think it's important
that information -- and there's a new regulation that's being enforced just now
that will give the State Water Resources board information on how much water's
actually being withdrawn, because that has been available before. And I think
that's useful for the common good, but I would be very concerned -- it would be
the kind of information that could be used for [background talking] social
purposes, other than just trying to be sure we have enough adequate water to
continue to live here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Now today your company I understand sells its products all
over the world, and you probably spend a fair amount of time traveling...
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah.
>> Thomas Holyoke: ...other parts of the world, anything that you've seen that's
really remarkable in terms of -- technology and water use in other parts of the
United States, other parts of the world?
>> Claude Laval III: Actually no, it's the other way around, I think. People who
live here don't have any appreciation for the fact, but this is the San Joaquin
Valley from about -- Stockton to Bakersfield is the epicenter of the water
technology business in the world. There's 160 companies roughly between those
two places and all of the drip irrigation manufacturers except one in the world
are -- have their American headquarters here, four or five of the major pump
companies are here, pretty much all of the water filtration companies, including
ourselves, are here. Valves, emitters, various -- even fire hydrants and things
are made here. All the testing for anywhere in the world pretty much is done at
the International Center for Water Technology on the campus, it's considered to
be the Good Housekeeping seal of approval for water technology products. I think
the average person on the street doesn't have -- in Fresno doesn't have any
appreciation of that. So people come here, actually, to see what is on the
cutting edge of water technology, whether it's irrigation or pumping [dinging
noise] or filtration, or whatever. Sometimes other places get a lot of publicity
for that, you know. Israel somehow has created the idea that they invented drip
irrigation, but it was actually invented by a farm advisor in San Diego County
and then kind of perfected by the Israelis who then exported the whole thing
here, but this is sort of the center of all of that. In fact, there's kind of an

effort to brand that as the Blue Tech Valley, and there are conferences here for
people in this business that attract people from all over the world, and it's a
very international business. If you think about the drip irrigation
manufacturers, for instance, Netafim's headquarters in the United States, which
is the largest manufacturer in drip irrigation, is about a block from where we
are today; that's an Israeli company. Jane is an Indian company; they're the
second largest there at the south end of town. A company called Eurodrip is in
Madera; that's a Greek company. There's an Italian company that's building a big
factory near Chestnut and McKinley. So, you know, look around this -- Grundfos
is a Danish company, this is a very international center for water products, and
I think most of the innovation, the water business moves very, very slowly.
Things don't happen in a revolutionary sort of way in this business, but what is
going on is pretty much focused here.
>> Thomas Holyoke: What sort of big changes have you seen in the water industry
the last 10, 20 years, great inventions?
>> Claude Laval III: People pay attention, you know. A third of the energy
that's used in California is used to pump water. And 30 years ago no one cared.
I mean, we had plenty of energy and we had plenty of water, there's a big focus
now on that water-energy nexus and being more careful with the water we've got,
and developing products that do the same job with less energy. Our focus here is
as a company is on finding ways to do finer and finer filtration with less and
less energy to do it. And that's true -- and if you kind of think about when the
camera was being developed, all the watering, all the irrigation in Central
California was done in furrows. You just dumped the water out on the ground and
60% of farming in California is still that way believe it or not. And it was
very inefficient, particularly where it gets as hot as it does. I mean,
evaporation alone was a terrible waste and putting all that water in -particularly into a desert environment created all kinds of salt problems and
other problems that man has caused. So today we've shifted from wasting water,
you can grow more stuff with less water, and put it precisely where you want it
and how much you need, and there's all kinds of technology and instrumentation
now to only water when the plant needs it, and that's kind of where we get into
agriculture because if you're going to put water in little tiny drops next to a
plant, you got to have the water clean or you plug up the little tiny holes and
the little tiny drops. But so this is all evolved where it's -- that's the same
story is true of sprinklers, when we went from dumping the water onto the ground
to having sprinklers set on posts that sprayed the water into the air, that was
better than dumping it on the ground, but most of it was blown hither-thither
and yon so that it never really landed where it was supposed to. And now even
people who use sprinklers have sprinklers that are right on the ground and put
little tiny sprays right around the surface of the plant, it helps with -- it
eliminates the need for a lot of herbicides and other chemicals that are put
onto the land, because if you only water where you need the water for the plant,
you don't grow all these weeds and other stuff. So it's a slow process, you
know, there aren't revolutionary changes from time-to-time, but it's
evolutionary if you look over the last -- I mean this business has been in -this is our 40th year, so if you look at the last 40 years of making filtration
equipment, we've moved from essentially getting rocks out of water, to getting
particles that are fine enough you can't see. So it's taken a long time, but it
-- and you have to adopt -- sometimes technically you can do things that nobody
wants to do, so you've got to kind of stage your development so that it matches
what the customers are interested in. But people look to the San Joaquin Valley,
particularly for agriculture, for the current techniques and what's -- and
that's been driven by Fresno State's Ag Program, the U.C. Program, Cal Poly. I

mean, pretty much all the research that people look at are -- is coming from
this area.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Has it been difficult to convince farmers to adopt new
technology?
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, it's expensive, it takes a big leap of faith or the
knowledge you haven't got enough water. A lot of people have moved in the last
couple of years -- the last three or four years, maybe even four or five years,
a lot of row crops have been taken out, where they've put them in every year and
have been replaced with permanent crops. You can't afford to take that gamble if
you don't have a secure water supply, and to have a secure water supply you've
got to use the least amount of water you can get and that's caused people to
essentially get the money somehow for the -- to put in drip systems and, you
know, finer -- sprinklers, and, I mean, to really think about the resources they
have and to be sure they've got enough of those to grow your crop, because if
you've got -- have a huge investment in the trees and you can't say to the tree
I've got enough water for you for the first two years, but you'll have to wait
for the third or fourth year, it just doesn't work that way.
>> Thomas Holyoke: So what do you foresee the water industry going in the next
10, 20, 50 years?
>> Claude Laval III: Gee, I wish I knew [Laughter]. I have no idea. I mean, it's
-- there's -- it's all a matter of money, I think. Water as a commodity is
underpriced worldwide, it's undervalued, it's probably more important. More
fighting is going on at the moment over water than -- it's probably worldwide,
than it’s -- than oil. And I mean particularly the developing world, it's an
incredible problem, so I think eventually water will be priced more so that -at a higher lever so people actually have to think about it when they're using
it and wasting it, and to buy equipment and use -- do practices that prevent it
from being wasted. But I -- it's -- and the pricing of the water, I mean, the
same thing's true of you know, forget agriculture, the same things true of
municipal water, people take municipal water for granted, they just turn on the
tap and assume it's going to be great water and it's going to come out of the
tap and it's going to cost hardly anything. I don't know what the number is but
probably half the world doesn't have that luxury, and we should be careful we
don't waste it. So I think technology -- we have the capability of doing a lot
of things, but we can't do them as long as water is very inexpensive and
eventually I'm sure the cost of the technology will come down and the cost of
the pricing of the water will come up so that there's -- it meets someplace and
when that happens there'll be quite a spurt of new innovation. I mean, there is
a lot of ways to get things you don't want out of water; people just aren't
necessarily willing to pay the cost. And in many cases we don't have the energy
to do that. So, you know, I mean, you're in the political science business, you
probably understand this better than I do, we -- you need the whole national
priorities about energy got to be figured out somehow, because that has a big
impact when you get it down to the lowest level to being sure that the water
that comes out of your tap or the water you irrigate your plants or trees with,
is economically feasible, because it's mostly driven off the cost of the energy.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Actually have you seen the last 10, 20 years expansion of
your business into third world countries?
>> Claude Laval III: Yeah, our business from the beginning has been -- third
world countries in some -- 40% of the stuff we make in this building are shipped
to outside the United States. Most of it to -- I mean, I just came back from

India, the -- I mean, we do a big business in India, the Middle East is a big
market for us. The worse the quality of the water, the worse the quality of the
drilling of the wells, whatever the making of the canals, whatever it is, the
better it is for us from a business standpoint, so much of our business is in
the worst parts of earth. And people -- it kind of goes to what we we're talking
about a minute ago, I mean, those people understand the value of the water and
understand the value of spending money -- it's just a question of what you want
to spend your money on and in parts of the world, money is being spent on
improving the quality of the water so that -- because it's the lifeblood of the
country. That hasn't quite dawned on the average American yet.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Have you enjoyed working in this field, water technology?
>> Claude Laval III: Well, I really didn't start out do this, so I did -- it
just sort of happened -- yeah, this is a very interesting -- I mean we're not
only -- it's been a successful business, it's nice to be in a business where you
do innovative -- not “me too” type products so it's made the business
interesting, it's particularly interesting to you know, this business has grown
from just the product itself to where it is now, so that in itself is
interesting. But I think it's been rewarding, because we're actually doing -when you particularly in developing parts of the world and some of them not so
nice, there's a picture on the wall behind you -- I'm standing next to an
airplane in the Libyan desert with the Minister of Agriculture and Water and -I mean that's in the beginning of the Gaddafi regime. There was no water in that
country at all when the Gaddafi came to power and overthrew the king, the water
was all out in the desert, the cities were all along the coast, there they've
drilled all these wells and built a great manmade river that brings the water
1500 miles across the desert to -- using separators at every pumping station to
clean the sand out of the water, so not only was it a good piece of business,
but we were actually doing something that was important for the people that
lived in that part of the world. Now Gaddafi himself turned out to be kind of a
madman, but at the beginning when I first started going there, he did remarkable
things in -- to bring that country into a current state, because it was back in
the middle ages, there were no roads, no telephone system, no water, poor
electricity. So yeah it's not only been good business, but it's been very
rewarding in that sense.
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, I'm at the end of my questions, but is there anything
you'd like to add?
>> Claude Laval III: Nothing that I can think of. I don't know that -- what
you've got out of this, but...
>> Thomas Holyoke: Well, a lot out of it, actually.
>> Claude Laval III: Really? Okay. Well, that's good.

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