Company History
When the company at which Span's current president, William Baker, was chief engineer sold the company to a large Japanese firm, Bill became VP for the firm.
After a productive stint there, Bill accomplished a short project (an oxygen-on-demand system) on his own time for a local medical company. Liking the result, the then informal customer offered to support Bill if he should decide to create a new company that would develop another product, this time a major medical instrument. The task was to design an oximeter, a device now used extensively to measure oxygen content of blood, optically.
Thus Span began, and a viable product resulted for the now formal customer.
From this modest start about 25 years ago, through the ups and downs of the nation's economy and with only self-financing, Span has become a stable and respected private business with a record of solving technical problems and creating opportunities for some very well-known clients.
Span, Motorola, & the First Cell Phone Charger
Soon after start-up, Span was asked to solve a battery servicing problem for a local retail enterprise. Span did so by employing a microprocessor, which, at a time, was still a young discipline. Span's effort came to the attention of Motorola as Span went to work busily creating the industry's first cellular telephone product.
The success of Span's own project persuaded Motorola to choose Span for the same battery servicing task for the Motorola product. Thus, it is fair to say the first really sophisticated charger was designed and first produced in the small offices of Span, Inc. Motorola went on to build millions of chargers in China of exactly this design. Span just got more interested in servicing batteries.
Smart Batteries
In the first weeks of creating battery servicing solutions it was suggested among Span's engineers that a concept of monitoring and displaying the charge status of batteries might some day become important. In a short while, a technical approach evolved, and with no customer in sight, a prototype was created just to prove the idea.
The solution again involved a microprocessor. It turns out that the manufacturer of that microprocessor liked the resulting technology well enough to offer to purchase from Span a right to produce a version of his processor, incorporating it as a dedicated product.
While Span was enjoying 15 years of royalties from that process, NASA also chose to use an enhancement of the same technology to determine battery charge status for electronics built into space suits and astronaut backpacks. They too paid to use the technology that, to our knowledge, is still in use today.
Thus, the concept of "smart batteries" did catch on. Today, nearly all laptop computers and many other instruments use "smart batteries." Duracell and Intel together created the industry standards for this concept but decided Span was too small to be involved in realizing the new “smart battery” industry. Spending significant investment and burning much calendar time, their version was introduced with a number of initial problems that the Span design had avoided. Eventually, most were remedied. Span did enjoy about two years of being the only supplier of chargers that could properly service “smart batteries” and remains today a respected player in the field.
It turned out to be very nice day for Span and for an important set of customers. A person responsible for selling his company's laptop computers to the education market called Span and with some emotion, claimed he could not meet the needs of schools because the batteries in his computers lasted less than two hours in classroom use. Could Span help? Span soon devised a robust product that would rapidly service 16 typical batteries in a manner suited to being operated by school children or other non-IT skilled persons. Recognizing that battery designs would often change with introductions of new computer models, the charger was designed to easily adapt to new batteries with only an inexpensive tool change.
The result was a very happy customer and satisfied school users. To this day, Span is the most significant supplier of chargers to the K-12 market. This experience also led to Span designing a computer cart having the most complete range of electronic features available anywhere delivering first to schools, then to medical, military and other applications.
Contact Span to Learn More
Become one of our happy customers! Contact Span today, and let us help you realize the battery charging solution you need. We look forward to working with you!
