About Cordin

Cordin is a family owned high technology design and manufacturing firm located in Salt Lake City, Utah specialized in ultra high speed cameras for scientific research.

During the Manhattan project, a tricky technical problem emerged regarding energy levels of the conventional explosive stage of the first nuclear weapon. There was acute disagreement between the explosives experts and the physicists as to what exactly the problem was. A gifted technician on the project named Berlin Brixner had the idea to take a high speed picture. He was familiar with the work of Cearcy D. Miller, who had demonstrated the principle of relaying an image at high speeds through a rotating mirror in the 1930's.

They built the first ultra-high speed rotating mirror camera, capable of 1 million frames per second. They photographed their experiments, and the pictures revealed timing errors in detonation which neither the ballistics experts nor the physicists had anticipated. This was the last major technical hurdle of this history changing project, solved by the ultra high speed camera.

The technology remained classified for around ten years. It was declassified and presented at a conference in 1953, attended by Earl Pound, who was a professor at the University of Utah. He and Bill Partridge formed Cordin Company in 1956 and built a camera for a local explosives manufacturing company. The name Cordin was taken from 'coordination', symbolic of the coordination between government, academia and private enterprise which created the company.

As such, Cordin was one of the first examples of successful technology transfer. In 1959, Sid Nebeker joined the company, and took it from an offshoot of an academic department within the University to a fully realized high technology manufacturing company. In our first ten years, we developed and maintained a natural monopoly in the field, buying out our main competitor, Beckman and Whitley, in 1969.

Since its inception, we have always pursued the highest quality and sophistication of high speed imaging devices. In 1982, we began offering image converter cameras. And in 1994, we began offering high speed imaging using CCD technology. In 2004, we began the migration away from film to CCDs for the rotating mirror camera systems. Cordin products from these three major product lines have been purchased by leading research centers worldwide.

Our customer base has expanded from military and explosives research facilities to include a very broad array, including many of the research leaders in material science, aerodynamics and hydrodynamics, internal combustion engines, laser studies, and medical research.

Cordin continues to look toward the future by staying at the forefront of imaging technology. Throughout our history, our basic commitment has not changed. That commitment is to provide intelligent, competent solutions to fill our customer's needs in high speed and high technology imaging devices. It is through this commitment that Cordin has developed and maintained an undisputed leadership in our field.