Seeking a Solution
Blair never intended to be an entrepreneur, nor did he begin his career with the primary goal of making the world a safer place.
     As a nuclear engineer, he has held key positions on the staff of the U.S. Congress (“I couldn’t stand the politics,” he says today), Westinghouse, and General Electric. He got involved with optical research and telescope design while working for the Smithsonian Institution in collaboration with the University of Arizona.
    In 1992, when the U.S. Department of Energy asked him to design a remote sensing telescope system to monitor and map nuclear poisons in Nevada, Blair learned something intriguing.
     “From that project,” he says, “it became apparent that we could remotely sense and measure a variety of chemicals out in the atmosphere. I devoted myself to finding a way to sense the chemicals in explosives ... to allow people to safely locate landmines.”
     He used that knowledge in designing ELF, which works as a remote nitrate detector, using optics technology to “see” nitrate molecules being emitted from buried landmines. ELF can detect nitrate emissions from up to 30 meters away — about a hundred feet.
     The need is great in a world littered with landmines, not only those left behind after wars and uprisings, but those placed in schoolyards and on playgrounds merely to terrorize and dishearten civilian populations.
     Yet locating and removing landmines is dangerous work; deminers must be within a few feet to detect their volatile quarry. Blair’s approach could make landmine detection and deactivation cheaper, safer, and faster than the current procedure, which uses handheld prodding devices to gently poke the ground every few centimeters. He estimates the ELF could reduce the time required to find and disarm every landmine in Croatia from some 600 years to less than a year.

Entrepreneurial Networking
Blair’s firm, Henry M. Blair Consulting, operates with a “core group” of seven employees. Using technology with widespread applications, Blair and his team developed the ELF device.
     Field tests will begin next month in Croatia, where, Blair explains, 10 percent of the surface is either known or suspected to harbor landmines. “That means 10 percent of the farmers can’t farm their land,” Blair points out. “They are prisoners in their own country.”
     The ELF project is 100-percent privately funded, although it took five years for Blair to find a sponsor. He applied to numerous government agencies, including the Federal Aviation Administration. “The device would work at airports” to detect concealed explosives, says Blair, adding that he believes the ELF could have detected the deadly bomb that destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 1995.
     Despite Blair’s reputation, federal agencies turned him down because he was working independently rather than with a major research group or university, although he received “intellectual support from scientists at some of the national labs,” which also supplied data. Private funding groups were “interested,” Blair says, but none would commit to “anything this risky.”
     After more than a hundred “no’s,” Blair’s persistence and years of entrepreneurial networking paid off. A firm called Chemical Detection Technology had heard about Blair’s work and wanted to sign on. Blair credits the humanitarian values of Rodney Boone, CEO of ChemTech and its parent company, Loch Harris, for the decision to underwrite the project.
     Five years is a long time to wait for an idea to materialize, especially when lives are at stake. Blair never grew discouraged, he says, because he knew the device would work and understood its value to humanity. “There were some bad days,” he acknowledges, “and I’ve taken a lot of work I wouldn’t normally do in order to pay the bills.”
     The financial payoff will be substantial. “We’ll make some money,” says Blair, “but I stuck with this project because I thought it was important. That’s what gave me the stick-to-it-iveness to hang in there.” constant threat.
    
     An editor since the age of 6, when she returned a love letter with corrections marked in red, Mary Campbell writes and edits for the University of Arizona College of Business and Public Administration and for dozens of entrepreneurs, publishers and authors. She is editor of the midsized-business journal The FINOVA Quarterly.