Item Brochure

4
Early beginnings: 1944-1977
The SECO story began in 1944 when Ivan Ogden, a civil engineer for the State of California Division of Highways, developed polio.
Prior to his illness, he worked in the San Francisco Bay Area, including a stint as a surveyor on the Bay Bridge. After his illness, Ivan
was confined to a wheelchair and unable to return to traditional work, so he began repairing survey transits in his home.
Soon, thereafter, Ivan and his wife, Viola, opened a retail surveying business called Ogden Surveying Equipment Company
(OSECO) on Elvas Avenue in Sacramento. It offered instruments, equipment, supplies and services for land surveyors. Following
his dad into the business, Paul Ogden opened his first retail store, Surveying Equipment Company (SECO), in Redding, CA in 1965.
Over the next 12 years the company opened retail branches in Medford and Bend, Oregon as well as Boise, Idaho.
Manufacturing and Innovation: 1977-2017
In 1977, Paul Ogden established a new corporation, SECO
Manufacturing Company, Inc., to focus on manufacturing rather
than retail.
This came about through the invention of a new survey
technology: the electronic distance measuring (EDM) instrument,
which quickly replaced the traditional method of using a steel
measuring tape. A survey that once took days or weeks with
conventional equipment would now take seconds with the
electronic mechanisms. The Ogden retail business sold this new
instrument, which was housed in a box-like case that mounted on
the telescope of the survey transit (theodolite). The mount was
awkward and damaging to the instrument, but there was nothing
else available.
Paul started experimenting with adapters and a yoke that would
allow the surveyor to mount the distance meter to the standards
(sides) of the instrument, thus freeing the telescope to move
freely. The production of yoke adapters, as they were then called,
would lead the Ogdens into the manufacturing industry.
SECO Manufacturing Co., today enjoys a worldwide reputation for being on the cutting edge
of manufacturing accessories for surveying, construction, utilities and other industries using
GPS/GNSS technology. It started as a father-son retail enterprise, more than 70 years ago.
SECO Manufacturing – 40 Years of Innovation – 72 Years of Inspiration
product shipped from the US warehouse only