PORT ANGELES — After spending 14 years tucked away at Airport Industrial Park, a homegrown manufacturing company with a worldwide reach has planted its corporate offices smack in the middle of downtown.
Magna Force Inc., founded by inventor, company president and owner Karl “Jerry” Lamb in 1993, opened an office late last year in part of the former Bank of America building at 102 E. Front St., Port Angeles, in a structure owned by Jerry and Alana Levesque of Sequim.
The headquarters is distinguished by the large LEVX sign on the east side.
That’s the name of the magnetic levitation — mag-lev — technology invented by Lamb and tested at the Port of Port Angeles’ Airport Industrial Park.
Magna Force also focuses on energy-saving, magnetic coupling devices that eliminate friction between pumps and motors.
Its LEVX technology uses a cushion of magnets to move large, heavy objects — such as trains and 40-foot containers — seemingly without effort.
“We have to have a place we can bring the world to,” Lamb said last week.
“That’s what we got the place for.
“We’ll bring people from all over the world here.”
This from a man who, in 1993, spent $1,200 in savings to found LEVX in the garage of his Port Angeles home. Born in Forks, he worked at Rayonier for 14 years before blossoming as an inventor.
The new offices are locked to the public, and Magna Force is not taking applications, a company representative said.
Nearly $100,000 was spent on interior improvements and decor for the headquarters, the majority of which was bought from local businesses, Global Communications Director Ingrid Swanson said in an e-mail.
In a 2003 Peninsula Daily News interview, Lamb, then 43, called LEVX “transportation for the 21st century.”
These days, Magna Force is selling LEVX technology worldwide, Singapore being the company’s main customer, said Lamb, who declined to be photographed.
The primary marketing focus: transportation of 40-foot containers at the world’s ports, Lamb said.
“We’re targeting container movement systems,” he said.
Lamb rents 3.78 acres at the industrial park from the Port of Port Angeles for $513 a month on a month-to-month basis, said Pat Deja, port marketing and properties manager.
Lamb also owns a couple of modular buildings and a warehouse on the site, Deja said.
“He continues to do his research and stuff up there,” Deja said.
In her e-mail, Swanson said, “Visitors will meet with LEVX technology sales and marketing teams, and tour the nearby demonstration site.”
Swanson would not comment on whether a planned 2,440-foot test track was built at the company’s research complex.
“We’re trying to stay low-key,” Lamb said in the interview.
In 1999, six years after he founded the company in his garage, Magna Force was awarded a $2.1 million market contract from the Northwest Energy Efficiency Alliance, whose goal is to promote energy-efficient technologies.
But the company’s true coming-out party occurred on the state’s largest political stage: the Capitol campus.
That’s where, in 2002, Lamb demonstrated his LEVX technology to then-Gov. Gary Locke by levitating a Chevy Corvette a few millimeters above 40 feet of guide rails on the Capitol grounds.
A year later, in his PDN interview, he said his company had 18 U.S. patents and 114 foreign patents.
Updating the Port Angeles Rotary Club in a May 2004 luncheon, he said he had built 80 feet of indoor test track and 40 feet of outdoor test track.
In October 2004, then-gubernatorial candidate Chris Gregoire rode the mag-lev system at the industrial park as part of a campaign stop.
In November 2004, Bellevue-based MagnaDrive Corp., which by then had exclusive rights to Lamb’s magnetic technology, was recognized by the accounting firm DeLoitte & Touch USA LLP as one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies, having grown 2,485 percent since 1999.
By then, Lamb’s Magna Force systems had been installed by the city of Port Angeles’ wastewater Pump Station No. 4, Nippon Paper Industries USA and what was then Portac Inc.’s lumber mill in Forks.
In a 2002 Magna Force website entry introduced with “Inventor thrilled over U.S. Navy’s implementation of Fixed Gap Coupling Technology,” Naval Sea Systems Command Public Affairs said the following about magnetic couplings aboard the guided missile cruiser USS Anzio:
“The magnetic coupling installed on Anzio’s No. 1 seawater service pump, the ship’s workhorse pump, also performed superbly.
“. . . Since the pump and motor never come in contact with each other . . . the pumps and bearing have shown little, if any, decline in performance.
“If possible, [Commanding Officer Capt. Mark] Nesselrode says he would have magnetic couplings installed on all SWS pumps, as well as any other water system pump.”
For more information about LEVX, visit www.levx.com; for Magna Force, visit www.magna-force.com.
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Staff writer Paul Gottlieb can be reached at 360-417-3536 or at paul.gottlieb@peninsuladailynews.com.
