PARADISE, Cache County — "Mad scientist" is the way people usually describe Richard Rallison.
This remote corner of Cache Valley, where cow pastures, trees and mountains peacefully co-exist, is the last place you would expect to find a laboratory where impossibly precise, wildly expensive and highly sought-after optical equipment is manufactured for shipment to powerful telescopes all over the world.
Rallison is considered the father of high-end holography — used not only for novelty pendants but for powerful telescope instrument packages. But his workplace, a former cow barn located in his backyard, looks like it was thrown together from spare parts. Electrical wires run hither and thither along the ceilings. Tarps line walls, and buckets holding sophisticated equipment are suspended from the ceiling with unbent coat hangers. Insulation has been sprayed on the outer walls and left there.
It is a building inspector's nightmare. In fact, the local building inspector has been after Rallison to change his ways.
A sign on a door proclaims, "Toxic Waste Room — Beware of Mutants." A shooting gallery features a target of Osama bin Laden's head. Twelve-ton air-suspension precision exposure tables holding thousands of dollars worth of laser equipment are propped up on cinder blocks.
The 57-year-old Rallison himself usually goes to sleep at 3 a.m. and gets up when it's nearly noon.
"When I first walked into the lab my first thought was of the mad scientist in 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids,' " said Elroy Pearson, one of a handful of employees.
Rallison is the man to whom IBM turned to make its supermarket bar-code scanner possible 20 years ago. The scanner has made millions, yet Rallison sold the technology to IBM for $50,000. Numerous times, in fact, he has opted out of vast fortunes in order to be free to do what he wants.
Various companies have spun off from Rallison's innovations in laser and holographic technology — the latest, Wasatch Photonics, is now setting up shop in Logan — but the man behind it all isn't interested in participating. He prefers to fool around in his lab, fly his homemade helicopter, grow apple trees from which he makes his specialty juice and cider, and exercise in a gymnasium featuring a pool and bungee jump and connected to his house by an underground tunnel.
"He could never make that switch" to organizing a company for the purpose of making money, said Rallison's partner, Gerald Heidt. "He likes to just come out here and throw things together."
And Rallison has no regrets.
"I don't have a high profile," he said. "I could have made a lot more money, but at least I've done well enough to kind of retire early. I have a good life out here. Nobody expects me to be anything."
Rallison's profile is high enough, however, to make him a household name among people in the astronomy, telecommunications, scanner and laser industries. Utah State University awarded him an honorary doctorate in electro-optical engineering in 1995. Even neighborhood lay people know who he is, if perhaps not much about him.
"He is a very interesting fellow," said Logan Mayor Doug Thompson. "If you saw him on the street you'd never know he was a mad scientist."
And he's had his share of stereotypical mad scientist mishaps. During his career, begun in a California apartment spinning Knox gelatin onto glass plates with a record player, Rallison has burned up his labs numerous times, crashed his ultra-light aircraft into mountains and power lines, and been burned by lasers.
Once he was making adjustments to a carbon-dioxide waveguide laser — without turning off the power, of course — and a kilowatt of electricity entered his thumb and exited through his shirt to a nearby filing cabinet. He was knocked backward five feet and momentarily paralyzed, with a dime-sized burn on his stomach as a memento.
"I got married three days later and was always glad that my belly was closer to the cabinet than was my zipper," he said.
Another time he was buzzing water skiers at Hyrum Reservoir in his ultra-light plane when one of his wheels caught the water and he found himself 22 feet below water, stuck in the mud. He barely made it out alive.
"The lake ranger who had been chasing me all summer helped me haul the wreckage out of the water, but (he) would not stop laughing the whole way in to shore," Rallison said.
"How to describe Richard?" Heidt mused. "Well, first they broke the mold. Then they made him."
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