Someone Taught Us Once. Here's How We Pay It Forward Through Community and Trustworthy Calibration Services

Why our family endowed an engineering scholarship at York College of Pennsylvania, and why every manufacturer/calibration company in this county should consider something similar

Somebody helped set the foundation for continuing education and learning. In my case it was several somebodies, and two of them share the name on the scholarship fund: Henry A. and Margery E. Zumbrun, the second generation of our family to run Morehouse. For me, how to measure force and torque came from years of questions, answers, research and experimentation, most of which was foundational as I had a quest for knowledge, I was also somewhat of a know it all at times after receiving my degree, so thankfully I must not have been too bad or the people who have helped me to where I am today, would have probably given up, or shut me out.

When I got out of college, I had foundational tools that greatly helped Morehouse. I had financial knowledge, accounting knowledge, marketing knowledge, computer knowledge, some mechanical aptitude, and a willingness to learn. Whether it was setting up Windows NT Active Directories, creating a company webpage, modifying old G-code, or setting up an accounting system and getting computers at every desk, I was able to do it. Some of those foundational pieces I learned through college; others I learned from a network of team members and others who saw something in me to help me be better.

College was an opportunity to have some fun and learn as much as possible. I ended up with 140 + credits over 5 years, though that is another story. Also, this is not an article saying college is for everyone, as some of the best and smartest people I know have no degree. What this is about is community and giving something back so others can get ahead. To that end, I am very proud of our family and company for giving back.

The ability to figure things out is something almost everyone needs to do to be successful. I do know people who have so much natural ability, though most of these people are not well-rounded and most have something off. I have often been in rooms where I am the least smartest person in it, some of the NMI level committees I am privileged to be part of, for instance, which is daunting and awesome. That’s a room full of people you can learn from.

Almost nobody arrives at Morehouse already knowing how a deadweight machine loads a load cell, why an adapter changes the answer, or what a decision rule does to a pass or a fail. What they arrive with is an education, sometimes one in the sciences such as engineering, and the habit of thinking carefully about a number or numbers; they absolutely must have attention to detail and might need to be a little quirky in some way. I’ll stop there. We supply the rest, we screen for culture fit, and we know we succeed as a team. So much so that our team all equally share a percentage of company profits. We have tuition reimbursement programs, as we value the development of our team; we want our team members to have retirement, so we have 401 (k) and cash balance; we try to do as much as we can for our team. Though what about our local community?

Which raises a question our industry does not ask often enough. If our whole business depends on education disciplines such as engineering or metrologists, who can think clearly about measurement, who is paying to produce them?

Why our family puts money into an engineering scholarship

The Henry A. and Margery E. Zumbrun Engineering Scholarship Fund and The Morehouse Instrument Company Scholarship are both funds at York College of Pennsylvania. Henry A. and Margery E. Zumbrun were the second generation of our family at Morehouse; Henry led the company from the 1950s into the 1980s. Naming the fund after them was not decoration. Harry E. Zumbrun, the first generation, was a machinist here when the company was still a machine shop; Henry I carried it into force calibration, and the fifth generation of our family works in the building today. Somebody taught each of those generations how to measure, and none of them paid for that education alone. The Zumbrun fund supports students in the Mechanical Engineering program first, then students in the Electrical and Computer Engineering program. The guidelines are deliberately narrow in one respect and deliberately generous in another. Recipients have to be full-time, hold a 3.0 minimum GPA in their engineering courses and a 2.5 minimum overall. Preference goes first to graduates of York County School of Technology, a local trade school that people attend in lieu of high school and sometimes with high school; then to graduates of a York County school district; then to graduates of any Pennsylvania school district; then to any eligible York College student.

That order is not an accident. York County School of Technology graduates show up with a wrench already in their hand. They have run a machine, cut a part, and watched a tolerance get missed. Put a four-year engineering degree on top of that, and you get the person almost every manufacturer in this county is trying to hire. All of our engineers so far are not afraid to pick up a wrench or roll up their sleeves.

What the fund did during the 2025 to 2026 academic year

Eleven students received awards from the fund this past academic year, totaling $44,933.

Six were studying Mechanical Engineering, and five were studying Electrical Engineering, three of them with a mathematics minor. Individual awards ran from $995 to $11,061. They came from Mount Wolf, Dillsburg, Carlisle, Mechanicsburg, Hershey, Reading, Norristown, Washington Boro, West Chester, and one came from Vermont.

The numbers behind those awards matter because they show why the gap exists in the first place. York College distributed roughly $33 million in merit and need-based aid during the 2025 to 2026 year, and 94.17 % of students received some kind of support from the College. Even after all of that, an $8,780 gap remains between what the average student receives and what that student can actually afford. Endowed scholarships exist to close the last stretch of that distance.

The fund's market value passed $1 million in 2025, against principal contributions of $708,255. An endowment is the opposite of a one-time gift. It is a machine that produces tuition every year, forever, and it gets better at the job as it ages.

What the students said, in their own way

York College sends donors thank-you letters each year. I read all of them. Three things stood out this year.

One senior described a capstone project where a student team designed, prototyped, and built a working software-defined radio system, then won recognition for it from the Central Pennsylvania Engineers Week Council. That is not a homework assignment. That is engineering.

One sophomore named Fluid Mechanics as a favorite class and said the reason was that the class was hard. Read that again. A student volunteered that the most demanding course on the schedule was the most rewarding one, because doing well in it meant the work had paid off. If you are hiring in York County, that is the person you want on your calibration bench or team.

And one graduating senior wrote that we had never met, and that the gift made it possible for their family to say the words "I am graduating." That is the part of philanthropy that no spreadsheet captures.

Giving back is not one line item

An outside scholarship is easy to point at. It is also the smallest part of what a company owes the people it draws from.

Can you invest in the education of the people already on your payroll? Morehouse operates a Section 127 educational assistance plan, so our own Team Members can pursue coursework with the company paying a share of it. Can you give your technical knowledge away instead of hoarding it? We publish our uncertainty budgets, our methods, and our mistakes in trade journals, on our blog, and on the Metrology Today Podcast, and none of it sits behind a paywall. Can you do the unglamorous committee work that makes an entire industry better? I sit on ASTM Subcommittee E28.01 and spend real hours on ballot language that will never sell a single load cell or torsion cell.

None of that is charity. It is the same investment made in four directions.

The stakes are not abstract

Morehouse's purpose is to create a safer world by helping companies improve their force and torque measurements. That sentence sounds like marketing until you follow it to the end.

Somewhere in Pennsylvania, there is a bolt torqued to a specification that came from a torque wrench, calibrated against a transducer, calibrated against a reference standard. Somewhere there is a structural test where a load cell reported the number that told an engineer the part was safe. When those measurements are wrong, the world becomes less safe, and lives can be cut short.

Every one of those measurements is made by a person who was educated by somebody. After a century of building force calibration equipment in York — five generations of our family, and a great many team members who were never related to us at all — we know exactly where those people come from.

Things to consider

Consider who you are doing business with: is the company one with integrity? Do they support our community? Do they help people become better? Are they trustworthy? I will say the quiet part out loud: not every lab is equal. An accreditation certificate is a permit to do the work. It is not a track record, and it is not a community. It is fair to ask any lab, newer or older, what it and its owners have put back into the community they hire from, and where, and for whom. Then buy accordingly.

If you run a manufacturing or a calibration company, go endow something. It does not have to be large, and it does not have to be a scholarship. Fund a lab, sponsor a capstone team, take on a co-op student, or sit on an advisory board. Call the advancement office at a local college and ask what they need. They will tell you.

Then hire the graduates. The endowment closes the tuition gap; the job offer is what keeps them here. I will hold us to that as well. We have hosted several York College interns and have not yet hired one of their graduates outright, which is an open item on our side of the ledger, not theirs.

-Henry Zumbrun, CEO, Morehouse Instrument Company