by Gretchen Wing

Dale Davidson is not a professor. In fact, he has no degrees beyond high school. But this self-taught inventor of everything from radar-absorbent metal to remote-controlled crab boats has something to say to those with advanced degrees: “Shove the books aside and do your own testing. Use your eyes, and if you see something that really turns you on, follow it, because it’s going to go somewhere.”

Raised in the Snoqualmie Valley, Dale was the third of eight kids. In high school he joined the Army Reserves, and like his brothers before him, earned his electrician’s license. In fact, all five Davidson brothers won both the state and national electrification awards while still in high school, something no other family had achieved.

After graduating in 1957, Dale married Arlene, the sweetheart he’d known since elementary school. Their marriage produced four kids and lasted 26 years, and though Dale and Arlene divorced in 1984, they are still friends—as are Arlene and Dale’s current wife. Debra Olson was waitressing at the Brown Bag, and Dale used to ride his horse into town. “She liked my horse,” he says. Debbie’s two daughters became Dale’s as well, and the couple celebrated their 29th anniversary in February.

Dale became a lineman for Cascade Telephone and held that job for twenty years, but he never limited himself to it. He and his brothers built a sawmill in Carnation, where he worked nights and weekends, becoming increasingly involved in the technical aspects of machinery. In 1971, he says a man asked him to build him an electric arc furnace. Dale proceeds to provide an explanation involving carbon, amps, and volts which a lay reporter has trouble following—“but it could smoke a rock,” Dale adds, to clarify. The man was scared of this monster furnace he’d commissioned, so Dale ran it, and fell in love with atomically “rearranging” metals using heat.

In 1979, Dale followed his leanings and founded Davbro (for Davidson Brothers), with himself as chief researcher. Lacking a university platform, Dale paid for his own research at facilities around the country: MIT, Oak Ridge, Los Alamos. He found himself welcome, but over time he  learned to distrust the academics’ orthodoxy.

“They would always tell me, ‘Oh no, you can’t transmute metals,’ but they’re wrong,” he says. “I have more knowledge in experimental arc furnaces than anybody, because the ones before me blew themselves up.” Dale then admits that he nearly did the same, losing a lung in an accident in 1975 when he opened his furnace too soon. That taught him to work safely, and in time Dale’s experimentation produced a new alloy he named “Metal X.”

During the next year, Dale discovered how to make a powdered version of Metal X,  adding to its profitability. Mixing the powder with other metals, Dale made bearings which could withstand 2,000 degrees without lubrication. What else could he use it for? Some Boeing engineers suggested he make bullets; a self-lubricating metal could create an even deadlier machine gun and be very lucrative.

“But I said, ‘I’m not making any damn bullets,’” says Dale. “I know my stubbornness has cost me money.”

Such hounding from people in the metals industry, eager to milk Dale’s discoveries, eventually sent him into “hiding” on Lopez. Dale had earlier been offered a lineman’s job on Lopez, but Arlene never wanted to move here. But in 1987, Debra had no objections, so Dale moved where he could work in peace.

Eventually Dale found a profitable, nonviolent use for his alloy, a welding wire involving tungsten shrouded with inert gas.

“We have the absolute best wire in the world, and we’re selling it all over the world, right from here,” Dale says.

Although proud of his achievements, Dale says he doesn’t want his kids following in his inventor footsteps.  Besides the dangers of experimentation, there’s the stress, which he blames in part for a struggle with alcoholism in the 1970s. Even worse was the refusal of academic scientists to believe his results. Dale says that when he took his metal to MIT, a researcher actually  accused him of pawning off a meteorite as his own invention, and called Dale a liar. Probably the most frustrating, however, has been his experience of people in large companies—including some very well-known Washington ones—stealing his inventions before he could even think to patent them. The resulting bitterness causes Dale to sum up, “I don’t want my kids to go through what I did.”

Despite admitting that the disappointments of inventing have “far outweighed the rewards,” Dale cannot stop. His latest venture, a remote-controlled crab boat, is now being sold. It proves useful not only to shrimpers in Louisiana and lobstermen in Maine, but also to ecologists controlling invasive water weeds. Dale says he’d need “ten lifetimes” to bring to life all the ideas in his head. But one very full lifetime is what you get when you shove the books aside and invent yourself.