Dreams move us. They spark and take hold, carrying us places we could never have reached on our own. Edmund O. Schweitzer III's boyhood dream was "to invent something and manufacture something that people would want to have and somehow make the world a better place." That dream ultimately transcended the suburban, tree-lined streets of Northbrook, Ill., where he grew up, and drove him to spread his inventions across the globe.

Now nearly 60 years old, the affable collegeprofessor- turned-entrepreneur is CEO of Schweitzer Engineering Laboratories Inc. (SEL), which employs more than 1,300 people. "I started the company [in 1982] with $2,000 in the basement of my home in Pullman, in a room that was 12 feet by 24 feet," explains Schweitzer. "The objective was to see if I could bring to market what I had been researching for several years at the university."

A DRIVE FOR INVENTION

Schweitzer comes from a family of inventors, the knack for growing a company coursing through his blood. His father and grandfather had both been successful inventors and manufacturers as well, and his father's company, Edmund O. Schweitzer Manufacturing (or EOS), made switching boxes for the electrical power grid.

After college Schweitzer went to work for the National Security Agency in Maryland. "It was at the NSA that I learned about digital processing. I left and went to a small company for a year, but was unhappy, and my dad suggested, 'Why don't you go back to school?'"

Instead, he really wanted to get closer to the power industry. So he made the trek westward to Washington State University's doctoral program, swapping the shores of Lake Michigan for the dry heat and rolling hills of the Palouse.

Academia proved no match for the draw of entrepreneurship. As part of his doctoral dissertation, Schweitzer developed the initial algorithms that led to his invention of microprocessor- based power protection, a system for detecting faults in electric transmission lines across the power grid. At the time, in the mid-1970s, few fathomed the demands now placed on the electrical power grid, especially from computers and related embedded systems and other technical developments driving our digital-dependent information economy. But Schweitzer saw a way to use these digital technologies to protect the power system that was making technology ubiquitous in our daily lives.

"Before computerized equipment for protecting power systems, you needed endto- end electromechanical whiz-bangs on a high-voltage transmission line, each about the size of a shoe box, and you might have six to a dozen or more," says Schweitzer. "When a fault was detected, one of the insulators would flash over and trip the power circuit breaker to de-energize the line." SEL's digital relay was first sold in 1984 and promised significant advantages over older mechanical equipment.

"My dad started EOS in 1949," Schweitzer says. "He held 100 patents before he died at the age of 86." The business that could have been his by birthright, the younger Schweitzer dwarfed instead. Indeed, Schweitzer's company, whose annual revenue is $245 million, purchased his father's company in 2004. That subsidiary now employs over 100 people in the design and fabrication of new fault indicators and remediation methods for lower-voltage systems. By comparison, SEL's products work across the entire grid.

Deregulation of the North American power grid in the mid-1990s, along with the accompanying excessive demands and resulting blackouts, changed the stakes of energy transmission. When parts of the grid are forced to carry electricity at near capacity, any small shift of power flows can trip circuit breakers, which sends larger flows onto neighboring lines, starting a chain-reaction failure. But the younger Schweitzer's microprocessor- related inventions, of which there are over 150, operate in hundreds of differing configurations to calculate and correct voltages and currents.