History
The company was founded in 1998 by MeasureNet System inventors Robert Voorhees, Professor Estel Sprague, and Paul McKenzie as a spin-off of their research performed at the University of Cincinnati’s Department of Chemistry. MeasureNet’s first offices were at the Hamilton County Business Center; an incubator adjacent to Xavier University in Cincinnati’s Norwood neighborhood. It has since grown to occupy a building in 2008 shared with a regional administrative center of the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration at 4240 Airport Road. This facility contains rooms for assembly, storage, and administration, as well as a wet laboratory for product development.
MeasureNet’s development evolved from the need in the early 1990s to better prepare university chemistry students for the modern workplace or upper-level laboratory that contained a plethora of various electronic data acquisition instruments. Further impetus behind the network-based design evolved from the need to reduce computer maintenance and recurring computer replacement costs associated with personal computer-based interfaces of the time.
Voorhees, Sprague, and McKenzie assembled a small proof-of-concept network in early 1993 in the Chemistry Electronics Shop with the assistance of an internal University of Cincinnati grant. In 1996 the United States National Science Foundation and Procter & Gamble Company funded 10 prototype networks with $190,000 in combined grants for use in the University's freshman chemistry laboratories. Voorhees, McKenzie, and Sprague filed an application for a U.S. patent in August 1996. The first 10 networks of the newly designed system became fully operational for student use in the autumn of 1997. The United States Patent Office then awarded the network a patent (number 5,946,471) in 1999.
Read more about this topic: Measure Net Technology Ltd.
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