Bob Switzer

Robert C. Switzer (19 May 1914 – 20 August 1997) was an American inventor, businessman and environmentalist. Switzer was co-inventor of the first black light fluorescent paint along with his brother Joseph Switzer and the inventor of the Magnaglo process for nondestructive flaw-detection in machined parts. The brothers founded the Day-Glo Color Corp. in 1946 to develop and manufacture fluorescent paints, pigments and other products. Biography Early life Switzer was born in Fromberg, Montana, to parents Maud (Slocum) and Emmet Switzer and was raised in Berkeley California. In 1932, he received a scholarship from the Scaife Scholarship Foundation of Oakland, California, so he attended the College of Chemistry at the University of California, Berkeley, in hopes of becoming a physician. During the summer of 1933, while working to unload tomatoes from a freight car at a H. J. Heinz Company laboratory in Berkeley, California, Switzer fell and suffered several serious injuries, including a skull fracture and severed optic nerve. Medical doctors told him to stay in a dark room until he recovered his eyesight, a period which lasted several months.