"The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes,
but in having new eyes."
— Marcel Proust
We learned to see what others couldn't.
Every complex system—a dam, an organization, a person, an aircraft—can exhibit emergence: capabilities that no individual component possesses alone. When systems integrate effectively, they flourish. When integration fails, they collapse.
The problem? Current monitoring approaches measure components while missing integration. They photograph parts while ignoring the machine. They assume stability while missing trajectories. They react to failure rather than predicting it.
Talbot Systems practices Emergence Engineering—the discipline of creating, monitoring, and protecting integration. We don't just ask whether a system is working. We ask whether it's becoming more integrated or less. We track trajectories, not snapshots.
The information that predicts failure has always been there. We learned to see it.
Traditional monitoring asks: "Has this number crossed a limit?" We ask: "Where is this system going?" Thresholds react to failure. Trajectories predict it.
Every failed system passed its component checks. The failure was in the relationships—the load transfers, the communication patterns, the coherence that makes a system more than parts. We measure what matters.
Systems that appear stable can collapse catastrophically—not because change happens suddenly, but because gradual degradation goes unnoticed until it's too late. We see the approach, not just the arrival.
Three generations of infrastructure engineering. Decades of systems architecture at scale.
When specialists said problems couldn't be solved, we looked elsewhere for answers—and found them. Cross-domain innovation isn't our method. It's who we are.
Our founders' journeys converged from seemingly distant territories—broadcast technology innovation, dam safety engineering at the Bureau of Reclamation, large-scale systems deployment that put technology on thirty million wrists.
Different paths, common insight: when you stop looking for new landscapes and start seeing with new eyes, impossible problems become tractable.
In 2017, nearly 190,000 people were evacuated when a major dam's spillway failed. In 2019, a tailings dam collapse killed 270 people in Brazil. Both facilities had passed inspections. Both had monitoring systems.
Both failed catastrophically because monitoring measured the wrong things.
The geotechnical industry relies on methods developed when capturing detailed waveforms wasn't possible—counting hammer blows instead of analyzing energy transfer, sampling parameters instead of tracking trajectories. It's like diagnosing heart disease by counting heartbeats without ever seeing the ECG.
Our technology captures complete information from existing testing methods, extracting dramatically more insight from every measurement. The result: advance warning measured in weeks, not hours.
Monitoring what matters before it fails
Continuous monitoring that detects internal erosion pathways, foundation instability, and structural degradation—the integration failures that precede catastrophic events.
Site characterization that reveals subsurface conditions in three dimensions. Layer boundaries detected at resolution impossible with traditional methods.
Pavement and roadbed assessment that catches problem zones before they become failures. Quality control at the scales infrastructure actually varies.
A dam fails when internal pathways erode its structural integration. An organization fails when communication breakdowns erode its operational integration. An aircraft fails when component interactions erode its flight envelope. Different systems. Same mathematics.
Aircraft are complex systems where integration is life-critical. We monitor integration trajectories to predict degradation before it threatens safety—and to optimize maintenance by understanding actual system state rather than assumed timelines.
Power grids, mining operations, manufacturing systems—any complex industrial process where integration failure causes cascading consequences. We track the coherence that makes systems function.
Mission-critical systems operate under stress. Integration health determines readiness. We provide trajectory awareness that enables proactive maintenance and confident capability assessment.
The human body is an integration machine—systems within systems, each maintaining coherence. We're developing approaches that track physiological trajectories to enable intervention before crisis.
Talbot Systems is an emergence engineering company headquartered in Highland, Utah. We create, monitor, and protect integration—the quality that makes complex systems more than the sum of their parts.
Founded on the principle that the hardest problems in one field often have solutions already proven in another, we bring cross-domain innovation to challenges that specialists have declared unsolvable. When conventional approaches reach their limits, we look elsewhere—and find answers.
Our work spans infrastructure monitoring, aviation systems, energy networks, and beyond. Different domains, unified mathematics. The patterns that govern integration don't care about industry boundaries.
Three generations of infrastructure engineering. The Central Utah Project. The Jordanelle Dam. Bureau of Reclamation dam safety operations spanning decades. This is where we learned that complex systems demand respect—and that understanding them requires more than measuring their parts.
Parallel to this engineering heritage ran a different thread: broadcast technology innovation, large-scale systems deployment that coordinated thirty million devices, signal processing that pushed the boundaries of what information could be extracted from data.
These paths converged at Talbot Systems. Infrastructure expertise meets systems architecture. Domain depth meets cross-domain vision. The result is capability that neither tradition could achieve alone.
Thirty-five years of cross-domain systems integration. Broadcast technology innovation in video compression. Led one of the largest consumer IoT deployments in history. Richard brings the rare ability to see patterns that connect disparate fields—and the engineering discipline to turn those patterns into working systems.
Retired Bureau of Reclamation Dam Safety Engineer. North America's leading expert in penetration testing methodology. PhD research that validated international techniques for U.S. practice, supervised by advisors who represent the pinnacle of geotechnical engineering achievement. Michael combines deep domain expertise with the regulatory credibility and academic rigor that critical infrastructure demands.
When systems work—when a dam holds, when an organization thrives, when an aircraft flies—it's because integration creates capabilities no component alone possesses. This is emergence, and it's fragile.
Every catastrophic failure was preceded by gradual degradation. The tragedy is that degradation was visible—if anyone had known how to look. We learned to look.
The boundaries between engineering disciplines, between physical and organizational systems, between natural and artificial—these are human categories, not natural ones. The mathematics that governs integration doesn't respect our filing systems.
From dams to highways, our technology monitors the integration health of critical infrastructure around the world.
New Release
Our Smart DPT platform now features interactive 3D subsurface visualization with real-time liquefaction zone detection, water table mapping, and waveform analysis. See how trajectory-based monitoring reveals what traditional methods miss.
Explore the technologyTalbot Systems is building technology that changes how the world understands complex systems. That work requires people who see connections others miss, who aren't satisfied with "good enough," and who believe that the hardest problems are often the most worth solving.
We value depth and breadth. Deep expertise in a domain matters—but so does the ability to recognize when a solution from somewhere else might be exactly what's needed. The best ideas often come from the edges, where fields overlap and categories blur.
If you've ever looked at a problem everyone said couldn't be solved and thought "but what if..."—you might be our kind of thinker.
No positions are currently available. We're a growing company, and that will change. If our work resonates with you, we'd like to hear from you anyway.
Even without open positions, we're always interested in connecting with exceptional people. If you'd like to be considered for future opportunities, send us a note introducing yourself. Tell us what you're working on, what problems interest you, and why Talbot Systems caught your attention.
We read everything. When the right role opens, we'll remember the people who reached out before they had to.
We're building the future of how complex systems are understood, monitored, and protected. Let's talk.
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