While the board of the National Technical Laboratory was unwilling to support the secret project, whose details they could not be told, they agreed that Beckman was free to follow up on it independently. Beckman set up a second spinoff company, Arnold O. Beckman, Inc., for their manufacture. Creating the oxygen meter was a technical challenge, involving the creation of tiny, highly precise glass dumbbells. Beckman created a tiny glass-blowing machine which would generate a precisely measured puff of air to create the glass balls.