Entrepreneur Wants a Lens in Every Chicken

WELLESLEY,--Randall E. Wise had it all. A Harvard M.B.A. A profitable computer software company. But he sold his firm to follow a dream, a dream that one day he would supply contact lenses to all the egg-laying chickens of the world.

Wise, 41, may be poised to become as important an inventor and entrepreneur as Thomas Edison or Henry Ford. His red contact lenses are already on 100,000 chickens nation-wide, and his company, Animalens Inc., is growing.

Contrary to popular opinion, not all animals become angry and agitated when they see red. Bulls may stomp and snort at the sight of a toreador's cape, but chickens become positively mellow when they see the world through rose-tinted glasses. Or contact lenses.

Scientists aren't sure why, but seeing red eliminates the pecking order among chickens, which normally tend to be pretty ornery creatures. Red-eyed birds spend less time fighting and more time laying eggs. They also eat less.

According to Wise's calculations, that translates into an annual savings of at least 50 cents a chicken, or 2.5 cents per dozen eggs. With 1.2 billion chickens each laying about 20 dozen eggs per year, the savings could be as much as $600 million.

With such benefits, Wise is sure sure farmers will soon flock to buy his contact lenses. Which, by the way, go for a modest 20 cents a pair, or 15 cents if bought in bulk.

"The challenge is to go out and sell the product, especially when it's new and different," Wise says. "This certainly falls into the category of being new and different."

The idea for the lenses goes back to Wise's childhood on the chicken farm his father managed in northern California in the early 1960s.

Wise's father, Irvin, tried to produce the lenses for chickens after a sales agent told him about a farm where chickens afflicted with cataracts were better-behaved than those with normal sight, and he thought a market might exist for a lens that distorted the bird's sight.

"But the technology didn't exist at the time for the lens to work," the younger Wise explains. "The early lenses blinded the chickens."

The elder Wise's fledgling company folded. Wise went off to college, worked in the shipping industry for awhile and then founded a computer software firm in Boston eight years ago.

Although the firm prospered, the chickens and the lenses were still on Wise's mind. Three years ago he sold his company for several million dollars and set out to pursue his dream full-time.

"I got out of computers because of this," Wise says. "And I still don't miss computers. I've believed in this for a long time."

Wise says he had many problems designing lenses that would not distort the chickens' vision or irritate their eyes. He keeps a jar in his office filled with hundreds of pairs of failed test lenses that looks like a container of jelly beans.

"I look at that and I think, 'That's all behind us,'" Wise says. "we already know a lot someone else would have to figure out. That's the value of inertia."

Eventually, a working lens was developed. Wise contracted with several small plants around Massachusetts to produce the lenses, and field tests were conducted with chickens on farms around the country.

Now, Wise says, the testing stage is over, and the future for chicken contact lenses looks sunny-side-up.

"I'm very confident," Wise says from his firm's small suite of offices in this affluent suburb. "1990 is going to be the inflection point for us, when this really takes off."