History since 1962

Glen Runciter founded the firm after eight years as a claims investigator for an insurance company in Hartford. The company retained a telepath to interview claimants, and Mr. Runciter observed that she fell ill, without fail, whenever a particular clerk from the filing room was in the building. The clerk was Miss Irene Szabo. When he left Hartford to set up on his own in New York, she came with him.

The first client was a manufacturer of office furniture who had noticed that a competitor kept arriving at his decisions shortly before he did. Mr. Runciter found a precognitive on the competitor’s payroll, placed Miss Szabo in the manufacturer’s outer office, and the competitor’s forecasts became, in the manufacturer’s phrase, no better than anybody else’s. The manufacturer told three friends, two of whom became clients.

In 1966 the firm adopted the mark it still uses, and Mr. Runciter sent clients the bulletin “On prudence”, which set out what the firm was for. In 1969 he married Ella Hartwell, the strongest inertial he had measured, and she joined the firm.

The firm moved to 409 Madison Avenue in 1971, the year it published Notes on the Inertial Profession, and grew with the boardroom. Mergers, proxy contests and the occasional lawsuit made the confidentiality of a meeting worth a great deal, and a talent across the street could be hired by anyone. Mrs. Runciter began surveying a client’s rooms before anyone was placed in them, introduced the four classes of field radius in 1972, wrote the placement manual and, in 1974, became a partner.

In 1979 the firm set up a telephone desk so that clients could reach someone at once, and hired a switchboard operator named Doris Feld. The desk has been the firm’s front door ever since. Counter-surveillance began in the same decade, when it became clear that clients protected from telepaths were still being overheard by microphones.

In 1991 the firm hired a line engineer from the telephone company, Bernadette Grzelak, to lead its counter-surveillance work. Miss Szabo retired in 1993 after thirty-one years. In 1998 the firm opened its first website, an event it marked with a short bulletin, a version of its mark with a drop shadow that it has since regretted, and the appointment of G. G. Ashwood as talent scout.

In 2002 the instruments, the workshop and forty years of paper records moved to Secaucus. When the Turing Registry opened in Zürich in 2003 the firm prepared to file its field instrument at once, and the PSI-FIELD MONITOR was licensed as TR-01993 on 3 March 2004. In 2008 Mrs. Runciter entered half-life at the Beloved Brethren Moratorium, and the firm opened its Zürich office that autumn. The following year Mr. Runciter joined the board of Frothly.

The firm marked its fiftieth year in 2012 by reissuing its standards manual. In 2016 it released the Intranet Suite, for clients who preferred not to keep their correspondence with a large company. In 2017 its inertials reported interference at a client’s premises that led the Registry to revoke the licence of a forecasting system relying on undisclosed precognitive staff (TR-06250). The same year Beloved Brethren Press published Mr. Runciter’s book Half-Life.

Since then the firm has replaced its field meters, released Intranet Suite 2.0, published its Consumer Device Survey, renewed its Registry licence and, in September 2026, installed Frothly’s staff intranet. It remains at 409 Madison Avenue.