Raymon Randolph Staton

Raymon Randolph Staton is an avid sailor and electronic engineer. Born in Dallas, Texas on Sept. 24th, 1937 to Clementine Spivey and Raymond Staton, he attended Texas Tech University and Southern Methodist University where he graduated with a degree in Electronic Engineering. While an undergraduate at SMU he began a career with Teledyne Geotech (of Garland, Texas) where he was instrumental in designing, marketing and manufacturing many seismic products including the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package.
At SMU he met Virginia Wassall, whom he married in 1961. Together they had four children (Steven, Susan, John and Leigh Anne) between 1962 and 1970. In 1971, Virginia attempted suicide and was permanently hospitalized with severe brain trauma. Ray married his North Dallas HS sweetheart Jo Anne Thurmon in 1972; they divorced in 1981. Ray subsequently married again two more times. He currently lives in Weatherby Lake, MO with his fourth wife, Ana Royal Staton. He and Ana are active in the Weatherby Lake Yacht Club and in their community. He has eight grandchildren by his four children.
Engineering Achievements
Ray's career has three main periods in which he made substantial contributions to seismic and public utility mapping technologies.
Teledyne Geotech
Ray spent most of his career, in two periods, at Teledyne Geotech of Garland, Texas. Geotech developed seismic equipment primarily for the petroleum and gas industry (competing with the likes of the early Texas Instruments). During the Cold War, Geotech won contracts to develop and deploy seismic instruments around the world (with an emphasis on the Pacific) to detect nuclear weapons testing by the Soviet Union and China. Ray personally traveled to many military posts in the Pacific, where he developed a keen interest in the history of the War in the Pacific that raged during his childhood years. Partially as a result of the system he helped design and deploy, the Plate tectonics theory was devised. The seismic instruments he designed provided the bulk of the data that showed the location of most of the (until then) undetected earthquakes that were caused by the interaction of continental plates.
In 1967 Ray found himself assigned to a project that lead to the creation of the seismic package that was deployed on the Moon by the Apollo astronauts as part of the ALSEP. The initial instrument was passive and wasn't expected to function for more than a month after deployment. Subsequent packages were combined with active seismic testing (provided by both the crashing of the LM and explosives deployed by the astronauts). The scientific consensus of the ALSEP and it's brethren is that the Moon is seismically inactive, with a very light core unlike the Earth. These measurements helped back the Giant impact hypothesis of the Moon's origin.
For a three year period he was "on loan" to the TRW Corp. of Torrance, California. When he returned to Dallas in 1971, he worked on non-petroleum seismic systems (including the BLID detector, an early seismic sensor that detected human activity such as vehicles and footfalls), but he finally returned to pipeline instrumentation in the late '70s. He was a pioneer at Geotech for championing the use of 8-bit microprocessors in the pipeline instruments being designed. He purchased an Osborne/1 computer to use as a prototype system in 1981 and became an avid user of the early "portable" computer.
Laser Data Images
With financial backing from Petroconsultants, S.A., he started a small business dedicated to creating a sustainable service for converting physical drawings into digital documents using optical scanning and AutoCAD (drafting software from AutoDesk Corp.). Pushing the Intel 286 computers of the time (1986-8) to their limits, he demonstrated a working model for the business that was profitable. Petroconsultants decided to divest itself of the business and subsequently sold it to Ray's first employee who raised the capital from his family. Laser Data Images showed that trained draftsmen could quickly sample and re-create paper drawings in AutoCAD by using a bitmap layer template more quickly than simply re-drawing the document from a blank AutoCAD slate.
Missouri Gas Engineering
After a thirty-five year career at Geotech, Ray moved to Kansas City, MO where he was instrumental in creating a hybrid GIS system to efficiently manage utility pipeline upgrades. Kansas City used brittle piping to transport natural gas to neighborhoods and gas line breaks were a common, and often fatal as well as costly, accident. Ray devised a system to detect when older pipes were compromised by the newly devised horizontal boring system, for which he applied and received a patent (#5,457,995).
He made great strides in integrating low-cost CAD with existing mainframe GIS information databases, based partially on concepts pioneered at LDI. he was able to dramatically lower the cost of integrating central GIS data with field-workers, and in conjunction with his patented system for detecting pipeline incursions, was able to lower the gas leak rate and cost of mapping existing infrastructure dramatically.
Hobbies
Sailing
Ray learned to sail with the Corinth Yacht Club at White Rock Lake, in Dallas, Texas in the early 1960's. He maintained a love of sailing throughout his life, even designing and building several different prototypes of fixed and rigid sailboats. He has been a member of the Weatherby Lake Yacht Club since 1995, where he has served as Commodore for several terms. He remains active in the club, sailing in Regattas and contributing to the club's physical maintenance and generally friendly (yet competitive) atmosphere of the club.
Model Airplanes
Ray has held a lifelong interest in airplanes, staring with his childhood growing up along the western edge of Dallas Love Field. He constructed numerous model planes, and was an early user of radio control. Recently he has been able to experience the real thing in flights on a few of the WWII planes he read about as a young aviation fan, including a B-19.
Sports Cars
During his college years, Ray repaired and raced Austin-Healey Sprite coupes. In 1971, he refurbished a 1963 Alpha Romeo Spider Special, which regrettably he had to sell to his divorce lawyer. His love of cars and engines lead him to a career in engineering, but in keeping with the times, he chose electronics over mechanics, while never fully giving up his fascination with machinery.

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