Joseph R. Coulter Jr.

Joseph Richard Coulter Jr. (August 18, 1924 to November 27, 1995) was an American electrical engineer who, with his brother Wallace H. Coulter, built the Coulter counter, the first commercial instrument to count and size blood cells by the Coulter principle. He was the first president of the company that sold it, Coulter Electronics, Inc., and he is named with Wallace on five of the 85 United States patents that Wallace held.^[1][2]

He shared his father's name. Joseph R. Coulter Sr. kept the books of the family business until he semi-retired at 81. The cellophane into which Wallace burned the first aperture came from a pack of the younger Joseph's cigarettes.^[3][4] The firm the brothers built was sold to Beckman Instruments two years after his death and became part of Beckman Coulter.

Joseph was the younger of two sons and Wallace's only sibling. Graham's history of the invention makes him about eleven years younger than Wallace, and its front matter dates his birth to August 18, 1924.^[5] He joined the United States Army in October 1942. The Army put him through sixteen months of its Specialized Training Program at Ohio State University, studying electrical engineering, and then made him a radio operator in the Signal Corps at Camp Crowder, Missouri. He was discharged on February 19, 1946.^[6]

In August 1945, while Joseph was still in uniform, Wallace was building a blood-cell counter in Chicago and drafting his brother into the work by mail. He sent a list of thirty references to read and summarize, and asked Joseph to go to the Alien Property Office for a United States patent that had been granted to the Norwegian Jan Kielland for a blood-cell counter. Joseph, writing to Wallace in January 1946, a few weeks before his discharge, proposed that they live together in Chicago while he finished his degree, since "it would be cheaper and I could absorb some of your experience." He added: "I've really got my heart set on us being in business someday and the sooner the better."^[6]

Wallace registered him at the Illinois Institute of Technology to finish his degree. Joseph received it in 1947, took a job as a project engineer in the Communications Division of Motorola, and kept the partnership going as Coulter Electronics.^[6] In April 1947 the brothers bought the house at 3023 West Fulton Boulevard in Chicago, which had an unfinished basement.^[6] A proposal that Wallace sent to the Office of Naval Research on April 30, 1951 describes Coulter Electronics as "a full partnership wholly owned by Wallace H. Coulter and J. R. Coulter, Jr.", established in 1947.^[7]

Joseph's best-documented contribution is the manometer. The counter needed a way to draw a measured volume of cell suspension through the aperture, and the brothers adapted a nineteenth-century method of timing a column of mercury between two electrodes. Joseph found the source in a library, as the Coulter counter article describes. "It was the manometer that made the counter work," he said later. "It was simple, it was easy to control, and it kept working."^[8] Summing up the decade of work that preceded the first sales, he said: "We knew there were problems, but we also knew we had something useful."^[8] He married in January 1956.^[8]

On April 14, 1958 the brothers dissolved their partnership and incorporated Coulter Electronics, Inc. Joseph became its president and Wallace its vice president. Their father became the second full-time employee.^[2] Graham records Joseph expanding the company's commercial operations from then on. In late 1958 he set up a subsidiary, Coulter Electronics, Ltd., in a basement on Edith Road in London, and in 1961 he organized Coultronics France S.A. at Margency, near Paris.^[9]

When the company moved from Chicago to Hialeah, Florida, in December 1961, the brothers arrived with the first employees at an empty warehouse at 590 West 20th Street and put a door across two sawhorses to make a shared desk. Joseph reorganized production there and found the location an advantage, since the educated Cuban exiles then arriving in the area supplied a labor pool.^[9] The company grew until its Hialeah operations occupied about thirty-five buildings. In 1991 the brothers merged Coulter Electronics into Coulter Corporation, and from 1992 to 1995 the corporation moved to a former bank campus in Kendall, Florida, which the brothers bought with cash.^[9]

Graham counts Joseph as a co-inventor on five of Wallace's 85 patents.^[1] The earliest is US 2,622,150, an "interference eliminating device for measuring instruments", filed January 13, 1949 and granted December 16, 1952.^[10] US 2,869,078, a "fluid metering apparatus" filed May 9, 1956 and granted January 13, 1959, covers the mercury manometer, and names both brothers.^[11] Two later patents on flow-through sample apparatus for electrical particle study devices, US 3,340,470 and US 3,340,471, list Joseph alone and were granted on September 5, 1967.^[12]

Joseph died on November 27, 1995, when the corporation's relocation to Kendall was largely complete. Wallace's declining health then led to the sale of the company, and Beckman Instruments took control in 1997. The sellers named in Beckman's agreement included the Joseph R. Coulter, Jr. Trust.^[9][13] The Miami Herald ran an obituary on November 29, 1995 under the headline "Joseph Coulter, Jr., built worldwide enterprise".^[14] Graham's study of the invention is dedicated to both brothers, and the line it sets beside Joseph's name is "Some things are more important than money."^[5]

Molecular Reality Corporation names Joseph where it names Wallace. A post on the member site of EQBio-OS, written in the voice of the persona Thucydides, begins "They should have won a Nobel prize" and credits "Wallace and Joseph Coulter" with the technology behind the complete blood count.^[15] The founder's essay introducing Epic Quest Bio retells the 1948 experiment as happening to "Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph in a makeshift lab in the basement of your home in Chicago", in a section titled The Hole Enchilada, and ends the section by asking readers to "let Wallace Coulter and his brother Joseph rest in glory".^[16]

• Wallace H. Coulter
• Coulter counter
• Beckman Coulter
• Resistive pulse sensing