Dendritics History

Dendritics Incorporated is located at 223 Crescent St. in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA, 15 Kilometers West of Boston, near the famous route 128 "America's Technology Highway". Our facilities are housed in an historic renovated watch factory (where "Waltham Watches" were made in the early part of this century) now known as the Waltham Engineering Center. These facilities are dedicated to a laboratory established for the research of a new capacitance weighing technology and the development of pocket-sized carat scales using this technology.

This project was begun in 1982 by John Borchard, the founder and president of Dendritics, arising from his business and personal relationships in the jewelry industry. Gemscale 50 was developed from the requests of stone dealers and jewelers for a pocket-sized digital carat scale. Mr. Borchard remained on this project continuously, and enlisted the assistance of specialists such as mold design experts who were also consultants for the Polaroid Corporation of USA. This development was completed 9 years later, with the introduction of the Gemscale 50 at Tucson in February of 1991, and continued developments in sensors and circuits leading to the Gemscale 100 in 1994. Subsequent development into a Millicarat scale led to the Millicarat-50 in 1998 and the offshoot scales Dendritics 55 and 125 in 2000. Somewhere along the line, out came the larger and sexier Dendritics 500.

After all these scale projects, we decided we had had our fill of scales, and besides the Gemscales were all over the world, so we quit.

The future? Who knows what the future will hold! But these links can give you some idea of what the past held: