With his wonderful descriptions of his early life in Vienna, the history of the city, its culture, its politics and the family that would shape who he would become, David creates a vivid picture of the events that lead to Mr. Gerber’s escape from Austria. Providing details of his first escape with his father into Switzerland only to return and later be captured and sent to a nearby work camp gives the reader a true sense of the desperation of the times. The descriptions of how his and other Jewish families were persecuted, terrorized, brutalized and murdered by the millions cannot be fathomed by most people today. David captures these situations multiple times and conveys the terrible actions with his well researched descriptions.

The true genius of Mr. Gerber is reflected throughout the book from the radios and hand warmer he built for his father in his youth, to his numerous ground-breaking technological advancements he contributed during his career. David does an excellent job of walking the reader through the history of advancement from the early days of the variable scale to GerberCutters and his revolutionary vision of the garment industry then on to the sign and optical industries.

Throughout the book the key players are included with the chapter on Dave Logan and his team at Gerber Scientific Products (GSP) being especially interesting to anyone who has been involved with the sign and graphics industry. The entrepreneurial spirit that was created at GSP under Dave Logan and the comment that Gerber was trying to ‘clone himself’ tells a story of how innovation again was at the core of the business. The terrific story of the search for new products and research by Dan Sullivan (a GSP engineer at the time) of the Yellow Pages lead him to find the ‘signmaker’ category as a potential market for automation is fantastic.

The chapter continues with the details of how Logan’s team which had been working on a project in the morning and abandoned that to start on the Signmaker project the same afternoon and how later Logan himself realized that making the Signmaker (GSP’s first commercial vinyl cutter) affordable and then benefiting from the annual sale of vinyl substrates and additional fonts to those customers would greatly enhance Gerber’s bottom line.

Another highlight is the story of the development of the Gerber Edge Thermal printer which was created by an accidental discovery by another Gerber engineer and Ron Webster’s (then running GSP) belief that the process of inventiveness was ‘Dreams and Accidents’. 

The additional inclusions of how Gerber developed the first billboard printer with a contract from Metromedia and how this group lead Gerber to the optical industry is also fascinating. David Gerber’s book truly captures who is father was—a great man, a true genius with a global legacy that continues to this day.
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