Lebanon
Geokon’s instruments are made for the latter.
The 125-employee Lebanon company designs and manufactures measuring instruments that detect the subtle shifts — the nearly imperceptible rocking and rolling of pressure and movements — that occur in large infrastructure projects and the surrounding land mass.
Where a bridge pylon sinking even a few inches can affect the safety of the span it supports or shifts in the earth weaken a pipeline for natural gas, the miniscule movements from a structure settling in the earth or from shifts in the ground itself can threaten a structure’s integrity or put people in danger. That makes tracking those movements critical.
Little-known outside the esoteric field of geotechnical instrumentation and overshadowed by more prominent Lebanon manufacturers such as Hypertherm, FujiFilm Dimatex and Timken Aerospace, Geokon has been steadily growing since it was founded in the basement of the Whitman Communications building, a 122-year-old former woolen mill, in 1979. The company is on track to report $31 million in sales this year, its third-highest total after its peak of $34 million a couple years ago.
“Slow and steady,” is how Barrie Sellers, Geokon’s founder, describes the company’s growth.
“We’ve revolutionized the geotechnical instrumentation business,” said the 81-year-old Sellers, who retired in 2016 and now carries the title of president emeritus but still regularly comes into his cramped office. “Before us, it was all very fragmented.”
Geokon’s bread and butter is instruments designed around what is known as vibrating wire technology.
In its simplest form, the sensor is a steel tubing, inside of which is a stretched wire fixed at both ends. Whenever an external force is applied to the device, the wire vibrates, like a guitar string. When the wire’s tension changes — like when the ground shifts and smushes the ends of the tubing together, making the taut wire slightly less taut — the frequency of the vibration changes.
A signal sent from the device relays that frequency change, indicating how much force is being exerted on the structure.
From its workbenches in a warren of rooms — each sensor is made by hand — at the company’s building on a side street a couple minutes’ drive from downtown Lebanon’s Colburn Park, Geokon makes a catalog of geotechnical instruments with Seussian names like extensometers. piezometers, inclinometers, stressmeters and tiltmeters. They are used to measure key parameters such as strain, displacement, force, temperature, inclination, alignment and settlement that occur among bridges, dams, embankments, landfills, groundwater, tunnels, mines, pipelines and excavations.
Last week, needing room to expand, Geokon held a ceremonial groundbreaking for a new $1.3 million, 23,000-square-foot building across the street from its headquarters that will include 35 offices, a training facility for customers and facilities for the marketing department studio for photography and video production.
The front of Geokon’s main office building will be converted from a parking lot to green space. All the company’s parking will be consolidated in an expanded lot on the east side of the building on two recently purchased parcels. The new building, which will be powered by solar panels on the roof, is designed by Lebanon’s Banwell Architects, who designed the new Lebanon Middle School, Lyme’s elementary school and a host of other public and private projects in the Upper Valley.
The construction of a new office building is the fifth time Geokon has expanded since relocating to Spencer Street in 1985 from its second location on Central Avenue in West Lebanon.
“We were busting at the seams,” Sellers said of Geokon’s current office space, the former site of Jenks Machine and Tool Co. and, earlier, a soda bottler. “We’ve grown to the point where we are running out of space. There’s no room left here.”
Indeed, the hallways of Geokon’s offices are lined with metal filing cabinets, and workshops have been added in higgledy-piggledy over the years, giving the premises a haphazard feel. Large National Geographic wall maps of the U.S. and world adorn nearly every office, emphasizing the global scope of Geokon’s business.
The private company also is open with employees about its revenue, posting a chart in locations in the hallways that show the company’s annual sales numbers each year since its founding in 1979 (it took five years to reach its first $1 million in sales). Roughly 60 percent of Geokon’s revenue is from sales overseas and 40 percent come from sales in the U.S.
Sellers, who grew up in Sheffield, England, and has a Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield, was working as a mining engineer in Colorado when he received a call from a friend to come work at Irad Gage Inc. in Lebanon, a former maker of geotechnical instrument sensors. But that “didn’t last long,” Seller said, and soon he had left to start his own company to design and make vibrating wire sensors.
In the beginning, Geokon was just a handful of people. The company’s first contract was a $30,000 order for geotechnical sensors to monitor an underground subway project in Chicago.
“That got me going,” he said.
Sellers credits a lot of Geokon’s early success and continued growth to John McRae, who initially worked with Sellers at Irad Gage and joined him when he formed Geokon. McRae, who was vice president, retired a couple years ago.
“I wouldn’t have gotten anywhere without John McRae,” Sellers said. “He was the inventor and designer and the one in the machine shop.”
Although Geokon has offices in Canada and recently opened an office in Singapore — China accounts for 10 percent of the company’s sales and Sellers said they have not yet felt any impact from the Trump administration’s tariffs — the majority of the company’s sales are handled through a network of 50 independent agents around the world. The agents are responsible for reaching out to project engineers to interest them in Geokon’s products.
Since Sellers stepped down two years ago, Geokon has functioned with a four-person executive director team and does not even have a CEO. Jack Taylor runs finance and operations, Colin Judd oversees engineering, Tony Simmonds is the international projects manager and Chuck Chamley heads up sales.
Given the pace of infrastructure projects around the world, Sellers sees only growth for Geokon in the future, even as the market for geotechnical instruments becomes more competitive.
“We’ll get a slice of a bigger pie,” he said.
John Lippman can be reached at jlippman@vnews.com.
