The Chrysalis had had its public debut at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts “Dangerous Curves” guitar exhibit in the Spring of 2000. As the “inflatable guitar” it got a lot of play in the news media. I even got to see myself and the guitar on the in-flight entertainment video on a United Airline flight I took to California. People were in general pretty shocked by it, and I found perverse pleasure in showing to un-believers that this outrageous impossible guitar was real.

Over the next three years I built and sold about 15 Chrysalis inflatable guitars with their pretty red-flocked foam-filled attaché cases.  I didn’t have any trouble selling them – there are a lot of guitar collectors out there - but they were miserable things to make, small-shop dirty and oh so time-consuming. By the time I got each one done I was pretty angry at it, which was hard because it was so beautiful, but I couldn’t wait to get rid of it. There were the usual design flaws that come with Rev 1 of anything, and vendor issues, as I sub-contracted some of the parts. I had this dream of having the Chrysalis guitar manufactured, by someone else of course, but I found myself pretty much lost at sea when it came to manufacturing.  I had been intensively trained as a custom guitarmaker, with every part measured by eye and whittled from stock. I think somewhere along the line a bolt had simply fallen out through one ear and I lost the ability to even comprehend manufacturing. So I went back to work as optical engineer. Light beams are endlessly interesting and fun to play with, and some people pay a LOT to have them shaped and delivered just so.

In 2012 I finished with several years of commuting weekly to Chicago where I managed R&D for a machine vision company there. It was amazing technology, and I never ceased to be astonished that I could get up before dawn on Monday mornings in New Hampshire, and be at my desk in Chicago before 9 AM. But it got old, so I came back to look for work closer to home.

I started going down to technical and entrepreneur meetups around Boston, looking for optics consulting work, but didn’t have much luck. I was the old guy in a young people’s world, and I felt fairly invisible. But I picked up hints that there was always CAD work needing to be done by young entrepreneurs, so I decided to try to re-brand myself as a freelance CAD designer. I had a little portfolio of renderings of some of the gizmos I had made, but showing tech baby pictures in a roaring entrepreneur/investor meetup is difficult. Driving back to New Hampshire one night, I decided that the next time I went down I should bring something real I had designed, as I could see that techie entrepreneurs love show and tell as much as they love talking about their own ideas. But what should I bring? The Chrysalis guitar under my bed at home, where it had slept for the last eight years, picked up the signal, and stirred.

When I pulled out the Chrysalis guitar at my next entrepreneur meetup, life was different.  People stopped talking, stared, and when I snapped it together, jaws sagged, and I felt like I was coming home. All I heard, over and over, was, “What the hell are you doing optics for, when you should be working on this?”. Within a couple of minutes, it was up on the Internet. I started getting invitations to show the guitar at various meetups, culminating a couple of months later in a two-hour presentation-demonstration I gave at MIT, with Harvey Reid riding shotgun as my music expert, and he was great.

A student at the MIT Sloan Business School, Arjun Mendhi, approached me after the talk and said that what I was doing was beautiful, and I should not stop. I was stunned. A couple of weeks later he asked if he and some classmates could create a business plan for the Chrysalis guitar as a class project. Hell, Yes.

Word was getting around by this time, and the local TV station here in Manchester, NH, WMUR, approached me about doing a TV show segment on the Chrysalis guitar for “New Hampshire Chronicle”. It was time to go out and kick the dust off the shop, put forgotten things in order, and step up.

The above picture is from lead-in to the TV segment that was subsequently filmed.  It is a little blurry because it is, well, TV. But what you see lined up in one place are the entire experiment / prototype series leading from the first conception of the Chrysalis guitar up to the actual guitar itself. On the left end is the original experiment – a 12-string guitar with the busted face that I fitted with a carbon-fiber grill and Mylar balloon that sounded so beautiful, and on the right end is the Chrysalis guitar that eventually emerged from the various prototypes in the middle. That is thirty-two years sitting there on that bench.