PDC was founded in 1956 by Dr. Walter W. Mosher, a 22-year-old engineering student at UCLA, along with three investors. The company developed what was then a revolutionary innovation—a single-piece patient wristband: no parts and no tools necessary.
Excited and motivated by the quick success of the wristband, the partners scraped together $2,000 and called the venture Precision Dynamics Corp. While the name initially signified nothing in particular, “it worked nicely to get people to extend credit,” said Dr. Mosher.
In the early days, a series of low-rent storefronts in Burbank, CA represented the company’s operations. By the 1970s, PDC needed cash to grow so the founding shareholders sold the business to a division of W.R. Grace & Co.
By July 1981, Dr. Mosher and his childhood friend, Robert Kramer, bought PDC back from W.R. Grace in a leveraged buyout and soon moved to a 57,000-square-foot facility in San Fernando, CA. Thus began the company incarnation as a private firm, innovating identification solutions for multiple markets including healthcare, patron management, and law enforcement in over 100 countries worldwide.
