Family-owned for three generations—and with a history of optical engineering that runs back to 19th-century Germany—Seiler Instrument & Manufacturing Co. produces periscopes (for armored vehicles, not submarines), telescopes, tripods and more in its military-products division. Its domestic unit distributes surveying instruments, night-vision equipment, microscopes, computer-aided drafting systems and high-end planetaria systems.

“If its got a lens,” says company President Rick Seiler, “we can deal with it.”

Seiler Instrument, which opened a 148,000-square-foot facility last year, has about 200 people on the payroll, which Rick Seiler said represents a near-historical high. It got to that level, in part, by having the vision to adapt as markets changed around it over the decades.

“Our grandfather, who started the company, had designed a line of surveying instruments,” said Rick Seiler, whose brother, Tom, is the company’s vice president. “In the ’60s, importing started to happen, with companies overseas bringing in products below our materials costs. For years, there have been no U.S. makers of small surveying instruments. So we started looking for other optical industry work. We found defense work, started bidding on it, and we were the best low bidders.”

Moving into that arena produced growth that now accounts for roughly 40 percent of the company’s annual revenues. “We still sell a lot of surveying equipment, just not stuff made by us,” Rick Seiler said.

The company’s surveying division operates in the Kansas City area from an office in Belton, as well as in Chicago, Indianapolis and Sheboygan, Wis. Its microscope division services the health-care industry with a range of optical products that includes basic binocular microscopes, fluorescence scopes, colposcopes and other office-surgery microscopes. And its CAD division, riding the crest of a technical revolution in building information management, provides software, plotters, printers and scanners for architects, surveyors, engineers, and contractors.

Perhaps the most unusual product line, though, may be with a division that markets planetaria. That unit, Rick Seiler acknowledged, is not a high-volume operation.

“In a good year, we might sell five or six, and in a bad year, just one or two, but they can be very high-end, $4–5 million for a large system,” Rick Seiler said. Those systems have gone into such high-profile locations as the Hayden Planetarium in New York, the Griffith Park Planetarium in Los Angeles, and even the hometown St. Louis Science Center.

“All big cities want the best and the German company that makes these, Carl Zeiss Jena, is the best,” Seiler said. “It’s a long sales process, and a multi-year process to design the dome, bid the work, do the training and installation. They’re huge systems.”

Working in such a niche field does produce operational challenges, he acknowledged.

“It can be difficult to find the machinists you need,” he said. “At the very top end of machining requirements, the military needs to hit a 10-meter circle from 20 miles away with its howitzers. So it’s not easy to find machinists to set machines up and set the tolerances—two ten-thousandths of an inch, to make these sights work. And the assembly work on these pieces is an art, as opposed to other assembly work. You have to be able to hold those tolerances required to make optical fire-control work properly.”

Electronic applications have altered the landscape for targeting systems somewhat, Seiler said, but for the foreseeable future—perhaps another 20 years—classical optical fire control will play a key role in military armaments. That’s because electronics, for now, can be susceptible to field conditions, electronic counter-measures and other factors that degrade their effectiveness.

“In some cases,” Seiler said, “we’re no longer the primary sight on a weapon, but you never go into battle without optical sights.”

With the U.S. planning to end military operations in Afghanistan in 2011, there will be less demand for fire-control products, but the company hopes to capture more work with a construction-sector rebound about the same time.

While they anticipate growth overall, the Seilers don’t believe much of it will be organic: “I think that if the company is to grow, that will primarily be through acquisitions and new territory,” Rick Seiler said, particularly with surveying equipment and building information management systems.