Philip Reynolds Hoffman – Inventor, Crystal Industry Business Owner

Born March 6, 1909 in Carlisle, Philip Reynolds Hoffman graduated from Carlisle High School before moving to Schnectady, New York to enter training programs conducted General Electric to become a machinist in 1932. Hoffman married Verna P. McGinnis in 1935 and lived in Schenectady for the next two years, working as a machinist for General Electric.

Back in Carlisle, the crystal industry was created in 1932 when Edward Minnich ground a quartz crystal in a Dickinson Laboratory in an independent project. The following year, Grover Hunt set up the first crystal plant in the basement of his home, where he employed his brother-in-law, P.R. Hoffman, to help build machines to manufacture crystals from 1932 to 1935.  Hoffman, who was still living in New York, would visit Hunt and created a machine that perfected operations that allow crystals to be mass produced.  This contribution allowed the crystal industry to have a very long and illustrious foothold in Cumberland County.

Hoffman moves back to Carlisle in 1938 and started a company, said to have been called Standard Radio, to build machines for Standard Piezo Crystal Company and perform machine work for others. Both Standard Piezo and P.R. Hoffman’s machine shop operated out of Edward Hoffman’s, P.R. Hoffman’s father, garage to the rear of 544 North Hanover Street in Carlisle. Standard Piezo has a fracture in ownership, with Linwood Gagne retaining the business and Grover Hunt leaving to start G.D. Hunt and Sons. During this time, Hoffman entered the crystal manufacturing business as P.R. Hoffman Co. and sold his interests in Standard Piezo to Linwood Gagne. After World War II, Hoffman opened a second company, Reeves-Hoffman Company, in 1946 that focused on cutting blank crystal to sell to companies to do the final finishing. The Reeves-Hoffman plants was located on Cherry Street in Carlisle.

During their partnership, Hunt and Hoffman’s jointly developed lap machine is still referred to as the Hunt-Hoffman planetary lap. It is uncertain who contributed what to the design, but Hoffman claims that the ideas were his and that Hunt had taken them, hired a patent attorney, and applied for the patent in 1941. It is unknown if Hoffman was paid royalties for these patents, but Hoffman quickly manufactures machines similar in design for his own business.

In 1960, Hoffman suffers a heart attack and decides to sell P.R. Hoffman in 1961 to the Ecuadorian Company. Involved from the start, Hoffman grew two successful companies and even stayed in business 20 years longer than both Grover Hunt and Linwood Gagne, two founding businessmen in the crystal industry. In 1966, Hofffman was living in Bellevue MD and by 1968, he moved near Boston MA. He returned to Carlisle to live until his death in 1984.

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