Paul Linden’s story starts, fittingly, with an experiment.
As a high-school student he built an ambitious science-fair project titled “Underwater Cities: Homes of the Future” — a working tabletop apparatus of pumps, timers, and hand-wired control panels that imagined how people might one day live beneath the sea. The photograph of a young Paul standing beside it, in a Lincoln High School blazer, already shows the pattern that would define his career: an idea about how people might experience the world, and a machine built to make it real.
The underwater idea stuck with him. As a 1997 Kansas Alumni profile recounts, Paul first set out to study oceanography at Tulane — where he hoped to build a sustainable underwater city — before changing course and enrolling at the University of Kansas (class of ’75), where he moved through engineering and industrial design and, after reading an article in Rolling Stone, fell for holography.
Laser light as an art medium
By the mid-1970s Paul had found his way to lasers. A 1974 story in the Sioux City Journal, “Holography Explored as Art Medium,” documents Paul and fellow University of Kansas senior Barney Wages adjusting a reflector system as they prepared to make a hologram — “laser-beam photography,” as the paper called it, “its possible uses in art.” It is the earliest known press record of Paul working with the coherent light that would become his life’s material.
Armour Amusement
While at college, Paul went to work with Armour Amusement, servicing and operating commercial entertainment equipment — arcade games, pinball machines, early video games, and coin-operated attractions out on location.
It was an unglamorous but formative education. Armour taught Paul how entertainment technology performs in the real world — not on a workbench, but in a noisy room full of paying guests, where a machine has to be reliable, serviceable, and genuinely fun. That instinct, for engineering measured by the experience it creates, carried straight into everything that followed.
This chapter is being actively researched. If you have Armour Amusement photographs, business records, or stories, the family would love to hear from you.