A Life Transformed by Chess: True Tales of Frank Camaratta

More than just a young chess phenom and advocate for the sport, Frank Camaratta has had two very interesting careers. First, he was an aerospace engineer and executive, working as a subcontractor to NASA. Then, after two decades, Frank decided to leave behind the stress of government contracting and its red tape to become a chess antiques dealer and chess set designer.

That decision led to everything The House of Staunton is today, and a revolution in chess equipment! I sat down with Frank for several hours to discuss some of his favorite memories from his career in aerospace and the road to becoming The Maestro of chess set collecting and design.  

Interview questions and answers have been edited for clarity and readability. In over five hours of conversation, topics ranged from baseball to space shuttles, and these are the highlights. This interview has been presented in three parts, this second covering Frank’s career in aerospace and the founding of House of Staunton. For Part I, click here.

Helicopters and Spacecraft

Frank’s first professional career was a tour in aerospace that saw him working on a variety of engineering projects, from cutting edge helicopters all the way to the space program. He was an executive in charge of a large engineering department. He was also a high-level engineering problem solver, a guy who took on mysterious failures and unexpected problems and ran them to ground. (Note: The names of the companies are intentionally omitted at Frank’s request.)

Frank: I got an offer of a job at one of the major high-tech companies. I left the Department of the Navy and joined the new company in a senior position. After several years, the Challenger happened. I was called and sequestered with the team to investigate the disaster. My job was to make sure the corporation’s hardware was not at fault. It was interesting. For some reason, NASA liked me; I don't know why. I was asked to join one of their contractors located in Huntsville next to Marshall Space Flight Center.

Frank: Prior to the Challenger incident, I prepared a document for the President of the company—they wanted to get into the space program and needed information. SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative, often nicknamed “Star Wars”) was big then. I did a study. I found out who all the players were, the size of their recent R&D staff. What contracts did they have? How much money do they have devoted to R&D? The three major initiatives at the time were: the Space Station, space transportation, and SDI. I said, “SDI is out. It's too risky for the corporation.” I was probably right in the long term. The Space Station was fine, but I recommended space transportation because every program needed to get supplies and equipment into space.

Frank: As a result, we created a division called Space Transportation. That was original. [laughter] I was sent to help set up the operation. I ended up staying in Huntsville and working with NASA as Director of Engineering. I had over 200 engineers and scientists reporting to me. We covered the whole gamut. Design, analysis, materials, and processing. Compliance, all that stuff. I could have walked to the moon, all the paperwork we generated. [laughter]

Ratcliffe: Having worked in defense contracting. I know exactly what you're talking about. The paperwork does get ridiculous. About your aerospace career--what would you say was your proudest moment? Can you boil it down to one or two?

Frank: When I showed up at my new job in Connecticut, they told me to pick a desk, so I did. I'm looking around and see a library. I made it my office. People started coming in like I was somebody important. I started getting some rather interesting jobs. I like solving problems. I don't like working with people, which is a bad, bad thing, if you're a manager.

Ratcliffe: I can see where that would be a drawback.

Frank: They would bring in problems. The life of the company depended at the time on a certain helicopter design. They were having problems meeting crash requirements with the landing gear, so the VP says, “Can you help the program manager figure out what's going on?” I said, “Sure, no problem,” never having seen landing gear in my life. I look at it, and I get my hands on a structures manual. Wait a minute—this is designed for a single stage landing gear, one cylinder. This helicopter has two. This just won't work. The engineers said, “Yeah, but that's what we have to use, because that's the manual the government approved.”

Frank: I had my first TI-59 (the first truly programmable calculator), on which I created and ran simulations. I generated numerous carpet plots. I go into the VP of Engineering's office, and he says, “What do you have?” I explained to him, “Your structures manual is wrong.” He says, “Well, have you considered this possibility?” I take a chart out and throw it down. “Have you considered this?” This kept going for a good half hour. Every time he asked me a question, I had a chart. It was my trial by fire—I showed him I was not so stupid after all.

Frank: Another one—the Army was having problems with their helicopter windshields cracking. They were walking by, and they'd hear a pop. I was asked, “Can you find out what's going on?” I said, “Certainly,” not having a clue about the chemical behavior of glass. You never tell your boss you don’t know how. I had them pull out a windshield and set it on a table to put polarized light through it. I noticed something peculiar. This air-tempered glass had indications under polarized light that looked like bullets evenly spaced around the edge. I called the supplier who made the windshield. “By the way, do you guys happen to cool these things on irons that are shaped like this?” They said, “Sure, how'd you know?”

Frank: I had a feeling—because of the huge stress difference between this area, which is not tempered, and the tempered glass. Glass is curious. Glass can have what's known as static fatigue. Most metals, when you bend and bend them, eventually break. It's called fatigue. Well, turns out, glass doesn't do that, since it's a semi-amorphous solid. It doesn't have a grain structure. It will undergo static fatigue. If any kind of a flaw happens in glass, particularly at a stress point, you're going to lose a windshield—eventually.

Frank: I had a suspicion that the helicopter's sucking up sand. Some of it’s got to hit the windshield. I went to the program manager at the time, and I said, “I know what your problem is.” He says, “What?”  [Frank mimes tossing a grain of sand] He says, “You’re kidding me.”

Frank: He thought I was wasting his time. I told him to humor me. We set up a hypervelocity gun. You aim a piece of sand at a specific point on a windshield, and it fires. You heard the click when it hit, and the windshield looks perfectly fine. He says, “So nothing happened?” I said, “Let's go have lunch.”

Frank: We go eat and come back. There's a big crack running up the windshield.

Ratcliffe: Oh, that had to be satisfying.

Frank: That was fun. [laughter] By the way, the solution was simple. We got a piece of Prostripe (a thin plastic automotive striping often used by hobbyists). The striping was thick enough that if I put it around the frame, it covered those stress points. As it turned out, the solution cost us nothing. The Vice President at time said, “Look, you gotta get the holes out of the windshield.” I said, “It doesn't have holes. It's glued to the frame.” He said, “Get the holes out of the windshield.” I said, “Yes, sir.” When I came back, he asked if I got the holes out of the windshield. “Windshield has no holes in it.” [laughter]

Frank: The third one, I thought, was a biggie. We had a sleek commercial helicopter not specifically designed for offshore oil. One of these was lost returning from the North Atlantic platform in relatively calm weather. I was called to join the investigation of the cause of the accident. It wasn’t obvious what was going on. They said it had been serviced 50 hours before the accident.

Frank: The way a helicopter works, the rotor blades do this [Frank tilts his hands in front of his chest] to get the tilt or dive or climb. The tail rotor just pivots left and right, because it controls yaw. It doesn't need to do anything else. The tail rotor is controlled by a cable. Pull the levers and the blades tilt. I'm looking through the debris at the cable, and it's flat! Just like a ribbon pulled across scissors.

Frank: I said it looked like this thing was pulled over something relatively sharp. I looked at the drawings and saw a part called a sheave. It's a wheel the cable comes over. There's a little piece of metal called a keeper that holds the cable in place. I said, “I will bet that during maintenance, they pulled the cable over the keeper, rather than onto the sheave.” I had a hell of a time convincing anybody. They were doing hydrodynamic impact studies and almost anything they could think of.

Frank: I could have set up a simple test in no time, but nobody would listen. They all had their own theories. This was something that would have cost the company millions in liability, if the crash was caused by a design failure. You’d have to ground every single one of these helicopters, including commercial flights.

Frank: It was around 10:30 PM one night, and I was really frustrated. I went back to my office, and the Vice President, Bob, is jogging up the steps. He had just come back from China and headed straight for work. Okay? [laughter] He asked me how the analysis of the failure was proceeding. When I explained my theory to him, he immediately understood what I was saying. He then ordered the test, and the cable failed within the same timeframe! The problem was a maintenance issue, not the design of the helicopter. I think I felt the most satisfaction because everybody kept telling me I was wrong, something I’d dealt with my whole life.

Ratcliffe: I get the sense that you're pretty tenacious. Is it in spite of those childhood experiences, or because of those? You keep fighting until you convince people you’re right. That tenacity—where do you think it comes from?

Frank: No idea. I remember one position I held—my VP looked at me and said, “I've never, ever seen you not get what you wanted!”  I would never take no for an answer. I think that's all just part of your nature. My mother was more like that than my dad.

Ratcliffe: You took after your mom?

Frank: Probably, yeah.

Ratcliffe: You had an interesting career—how did you decide to leave it?

Frank: The money was good. I mean, you got a corporate car. You got stock options. But it just didn't feel right. I remember coming home one day and telling my wife, “I just quit my job. I'm going to design chess sets.” An interesting conversation ensued. [laughter]

A Life-Changing Discovery: The Staunton Chessmen

Frank remained active in the chess community during his aerospace career as detailed in Part One of our interview. A pivotal moment in his life was a trip to London in 1986, where he discovered that authentic, historic Staunton chess sets were readily available and affordable. His fascination with the Staunton design would lead to a renaissance of quality, playable chess equipment.

Frank: When I was a tournament player, I noticed there were not any decent chess sets to play on. They were either cheap plastic or wood sets you could get splinters playing with. I thought that was a bad idea. I went to a world championship with a good friend of mine in London in ‘86, and I happened to see an ad for an antique chess set sitting there. “Look at this, it’s really nice.” I remember going to the antique dealer. He showed me the set, and I was really impressed with it, so I got it. I found out it was made by a company called Jaques of London. I did some research, and they've been in business as likely the world's oldest sporting goods manufacturer since 1795.

Frank delved into the history of the Staunton design and the original manufacturer, Jaques of London. Recognizing the beauty and practical playability of the pieces, he bought and sold antique sets, becoming the world’s foremost expert on antique chess sets and a broker for chess collections large and small. His appreciation for the quality of the Staunton pieces led him to a conversation with Christopher Jaques, then the head of Jaques of London. Frank recreated the quality pieces Jaques had once been famous for, and as they say, the rest is history (particularly apt in this case).

House of Staunton, a Revolution in Chess Equipment

Founded in 1990, The House of Staunton is the premier chess retailer in the United States. While the business may have started out as a source of quality chess antiques, innovations in manufacturing and technology quickly drove demand for its durable and enjoyable chess sets, clocks, and accessories. Everything at House of Staunton is player-focused—how does it feel to play with? How long will it last? How does it enhance the game? Frank Camaratta created a new standard in chess gear that has been driving the market ever since.

Ratcliffe: When I was growing up in the 1980s, my dad had a really nice European set, which was unusual for the time. It was magnetic and folded closed, with foam inserts inside for all the pieces. Sometimes we were allowed to touch it. [laughter] What we had most of the time were really cheap, hollow plastic chess pieces. The first set you designed seemed like a reaction to those cheap sets that made playing chess frustrating.

Frank: When I began playing chess, yes, we used hollow chess sets and Milton Bradley mass-produced sets. Soon after my mom recognized my passion for the game, she bought me my first real Staunton set, which was unusual. It was made in Germany, and I can remember it was a white wood, probably boxwood, with lacquered black pieces. The black rook had a huge crack running right down it, and it was lacquered right over.

Frank: When I started playing serious tournament chess, the tournament provided inexpensive plastic sets or cheap wood sets that were available. They were abysmal. They were really awful. That's not even a good word. They were horrible. I couldn't understand. Why can’t someone make a decent chess set?

Frank: I decided to do something. In my opinion, the cost of making a plastic set is in the molds. You have to create the masters. Once that’s done, you just pump them out by the bazillions. Well, why are they pumping this crap out? It takes no more effort to carve a good master than it does to carve a crappy master. So, I designed my Collector set in plastic, and it became an immediate hit. It was a beautiful set.

Frank: That was an innovation. That's how I approach things. I see something, and I say, “Wait a minute. That can be done better.” People a hundred years ago did better than this, I can do better. I usually do—not always, sometimes I end up with a pile of “stuff” and think, “That wasn’t a good idea.”

Ratcliffe: I have a pile of short stories in a drawer that will never see the light of day, so I understand how some experiments don’t work out. You have three patents for chess equipment, though, so some of them worked out?

Frank: The problem with high end wooden chess sets is they use expensive woods—ebony being one of them, rosewood, padauk. They crack. People kept saying the reason they cracked was that the wood wasn’t dried properly. I said, “That’s bull, here’s what happens.”

Frank: They would manufacture a piece, then bore a hole for the lead weight and felt over it. They were pouring molten lead in and facing it off. For one thing, you're changing the properties of the wood, but let's forget that for the minute.

Frank: Ebony is a very strong wood, but it's brittle, and has a very low crack tolerance. It's very strong but has no stretch, unlike a rubber band. If you tried to stretch it, it would just break, meaning it has a low strain-to-failure. Say it loses humidity and shrinks. The lead inside doesn't give a damn. It just sits there. If you were to take the lead out, it would be smaller [from compression].

Ratcliffe: Right.

Frank: Now, if I try to push the lead back in again, it's going to cause some problems. It tries to stretch the ebony so far it breaks because the strain levels get too high. Rosewood has a much higher strain-to-failure, more elastic, but ebony and padauk have that problem.

Frank: When you use molten lead, you don't give the wood any chance to contract. Any piece of wood has flaws, internal flaws, and anywhere there are flaws has a higher chance of cracking. The bigger the piece, the greater the chance of getting a flaw. It's just statistics.

Frank: I decided I could design something that will prevent ebony from ever cracking. I came up with an idea like a beanbag, but the interstitial spaces were so big that I couldn’t get the same density. If I use lead granules as opposed to a solid block, it's going to weigh half as much. I don’t get the weight I need.

Frank: I found tungsten! Tungsten is about two and a half times the density of lead. I worked the numbers out. Putting tungsten granules in there, it can't exert any pressure on the wood, but it resulted in a chess piece that weighs the same as a lead-weighted piece. It works like a charm. It’s expensive, but ebony is not cheap. Two other materials work great, one is platinum and one is gold. [laughter] That process is now patented.

Ratcliffe: I don’t have gold-weighted chess set money floating around.

Frank: [laughs] So I went with tungsten.

Did you ever have a handheld computer chess game? Odds are it boasted a “rating” equivalent to a human chess player. The most reliable ratings were certified by the Computer Rating Agency of the US Chess Federation. Frank built the tests to run on the handheld units that assigned a consistent and meaningful rating number, endorsed by USCF. For example, an advertisement for the Fidelity Sensory Chess Challenger 9 stated “The United States Chess Federation has officially rated the Fidelity Sensory Chess Challenger 9 at 1771.” Customers were able to buy computer chess devices with confidence that the play would be as expected.

Other innovations in chess can be traced back to Frank Camaratta. Players today take the time-delay standard for digital chess clocks as a given. Time-delay provides a few seconds after your opponent hits their button before your clock starts counting down. This helps prevent games, especially short games like Rapid or Blitz, from being arbitrarily decided by time. This wasn’t always the international standard! Frank advocated for the adoption of time-delay and invented the first digital clock to incorporate it, gifting the patent to the US Chess Federation.

Frank: The other patent was a similar idea. Rex Sinquefield created the Saint Louis Chess Center, and in 2013, he decided to hold the first Sinquefield Cup. He wanted to create the grand chess tour, and the Sinquefield Cup would be his signature tournament. He said, “Can you design me a chess set specifically for the Sinquefield Cup?” I said I could do that. And then I said, I’ll make it one step better.

Frank: All chess sets used at the time in international competition were not weighted due to their embedded sensors. These sensors tell the computer which piece is moved and allow moves of the game to be displayed on a screen in the playing hall. DGT engineers claim you can’t add weight to the pieces because it interferes with the sensor.

Frank: I’m thinking, what's the problem? In a block of ferrous material, when you excite the coil inside the chess piece, it's going to generate eddy currents. However, if there are just metal granules, you're going to create small eddy currents, but there'll be a bazillion of them running in different directions. They're going to cancel each other out, and they won't interfere with the sensors in the chess board. Sure enough, it worked like a charm.

Frank: That’s the other patent. That all seems so obvious.

Ratcliffe: It’s obvious now that you’ve thought of it, but nobody else thought of it before you did.

Frank: For whatever reason.

Next Time, in Part Three of True Tales of Frank Camaratta

Frank Camaratta has spent his life taking on problems and innovating his way through them, from the up-close feel of a chess piece to the safety of our space program. His reinvigoration of the Staunton chess set design in the 1990s has grown House of Staunton into one of the most widely known chess retailers today, with “Chess sets designed for chess players by chess players.”

In Part III of our series, we’ll talk to Frank about almost rubbing shoulders with one of chess’s greats, his personal philosophy, and how he’s continuing his pursuits in retirement. You won’t want to miss his once-in-a-lifetime sea story!