Flow's side of the story is the group of people that founded flow were originally part of a division of the Boeing Company that was part of the fluid dynamics group. When Boeing developed the use of composite materials in the early 1970s-Kevlar primarily being the main component-it had to come up with a way to machine composites efficiently and that's what Boeing did internally first. Then, when Boeing had its layoffs in the 1970s as well, that group of people, so to speak, went across the street and opened flow and ended up ironically selling a lot of those machines back to Boeing.

The application that really brought reliability to the waterjet industry was the baby diaper industry. When those machines were applied into a production type of setting, where they were running 24 hours a day, seven days a week, that's what brought the pumping technology great bounds forward and suddenly gave it a reliability factor that waterjet machines never had before.

Campbell: Did you say baby diapers?

Alkire: Baby diapers, yes.

Aalto: And they also cut carrots and food products-and still do-with water only.

Ferguson: When I was working for Pillsbury, we used to cut pepperoni with waterjet and also baby carrots.

Aalto: That's right. Also cakes and fish.

Alkire: Actually, today in our business mix at Flow, I can say that the single largest pure waterjet application remains within the automotive industry where we cut carpets and dashboards and headliners and the plastic components of the automobiles. The food industry would be the second largest.

Roundtable Conference: Waterjet Technology - Continued

Continued from

Gannon: There's a family of capabilities that comes with automation. We've already mentioned the computer aided design portion of it. Something that hasn't been mentioned so far concerning CAD is the ability to render a project before it's actually made along with the additional ability to turn around assisted design work quickly.

All of the assets of automation are present in abrasive waterjet cutting. They include the design automation benefits, cutting economies and graphic design horizons that are almost unlimited. Projects that took six months in artistic fabrication can now be executed in six weeks.

I also think the professionals in the architectural disciplines are relatively aware of automation as it applies to refrigerators, blenders and cars. It's not uncommon for someone to say to me, "well, you're just going to scan that image into the computer." so they already know that these kind of magical automated processes are possible, and they expect quite a bit from them. Although, as Richard said, they may not understand the technical details very well.

Campbell: What are the origins of the waterjet. What were some of its original uses, and its history?

Alkire: Well, I can tell you flow's side of the history.

Campbell: Go right ahead.

Alkire: We actually give credit as well to Ingersoll-Rand. They technically produced the first water jet machine. It was actually called the McCartney. It was a guy named McCartney who in 1974 developed around the same time as flow-the first pure waterjet machine.

The first one that was industrially installed was used for the cutting of pieces of wood for furniture.