A few minutes after noon I placed a 5-pound guitar on my forehead. Ten minutes later I had nearly doubled the existing Guinness World Record for “Longest Duration Balancing a Guitar on the Forehead” of 5 minutes 20 seconds.

KTVB 7 News came out and Brian and I did a joint interview on STEM and how small businesses like Porter Pickups are the real drivers of economic growth in America. We hear a lot about the giant tech companies like Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Apple. But there are only a handful of these super employers. There are hundreds of thousands of small businesses like his that are also providing economic growth on a much larger scale but are more distributed so we don’t hear about any one of them nearly as much.

There is Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math all over Porter Pickups. Starting with the pickups themselves which are a transducer, which means they convert one type of energy to another (think of them as the microphone for an electric guitar). They’re made up up a magnet and wound coils. The magnet creates a magnetic field and when a guitar player plucks the string (which is metal) it disturbs the magnetic field. When a magnetic field is disturbed it induces a current in any nearby metal wire that’s in a closed loop (the coil) and that current is then amplified and broadcast through a speaker creating that electric guitar sound we all know (and most love).

Then there’s the CNC machine that needs to be programmed to cut out guitar bodies and the math behind how many coils to put around each magnet. Even if you don’t major in a STEM degree, understanding how the world of science and technology works can be extremely important to running a business.