NEWTON — The printing presses have been replaced by work benches. The walls now shine white, giving the impression of a NASA "clean" room. On the loading dock are wooden crates holding multi-million dollar equipment, rather than bundles of 50-cent each newspapers.

Where once editors talked about "column inches" of copy, Siegfried Mueller, the new owner of 2 Spring St., talks about "parts per billion," and quality control for the U.S. Air Force and Space Force, and building machines which can "see" just what is emanating from the process of changing a landfill in Puerto Rico into new "green power" generation, and knowing just what is inside a bottle of Coca-Cola.

Founded 21 years ago, Mueller's company, Analytical Science & Technologies, has outgrown its non-descript building on Route 94 across the street from the Frelinghuysen Township School. His search ended when the New Jersey Herald went through ownership changes and a pandemic emptied its office, putting the 1960s-era building adjacent to the 1860s-era Sussex County Courthouse, on the market.

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The building was sold by Gatehouse Media when the company bought the Herald. Gatehouse merged with Gannett in 2019.

A Newton developer bought the property from Gatehouse with an eye toward converting the building into offices and a medical facility. The pandemic caused those plans to fall through and the Herald's office staff began working from home.

The developer put the building back on the market and Mueller found the structure;s two-story-tall pressroom and two levels of office space perfect for the new corporate headquarters for his company, with clients world-wide. There is a second laboratory which serves as West Coast office is in Vancouver, Washington.

According to Sussex County tax records, the purchase price last fall was $1.8 million.

So what is Analytical Science & Technologies? "We consult and build equipment for the food and beverage industry, semi-conductors manufacturers who need ultra-high purity; medical and pharmaceutical companies and the military," he explained.

As examples, the company's equipment constantly tests for any impurities in the oxygen which high-altitude aircraft crews breathe; clean and purify pipes which carry high pressure rocket fuel to launch sites; monitor how many molecules of "other" gas are in the neon, argon and nitrogen used by a variety of companies.

And, yes, there is testing apparatus made in northwestern New Jersey which peers through every bottle of Coke to be sure it contains the right ingredients in the right ratios so the consumer can "Taste the Feeling" and get "Real Magic."

Mueller, who prefers to walk barefoot even when he's in the office, is a native of Fredon where, he laughs, "My mother couldn't make me wear shoes. I went barefoot all the time."

It was also his mother who took him and his sister on trips to places around the world, giving the young Mueller a multi-cultural view of the world. He graduated from Bradley University in Peoria, Ill., then obtained masters and doctorate degrees from the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

"I guess I grew up with the dream to clean-up toxic waste sites," the 52-year-old Mueller said. But that was as a heavy-equipment operator. His company, with a staff of 20, had outgrown the building in Warren County and now is expanding to 30 employees and, he said, "We will likely be at 50 in the next five years."

The move into the Newton building is far enough along that the company recently took down the New Jersey Herald sign which spread across the parapet of the building. Also gone are the New Jersey Herald plaques on the small brick signs on Spring Street and Mill Street entrances.

He said, however, he will be memorializing the Herald with a bronze plaque on the building which might be unveiled when there is a formal ribbon-cutting ceremony as the move nears completion.

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Mueller said the company now "operates in every geography in the world," has major projects in China and Malaysia.

"Newton is a great spot," he said, "Everything that happens in the world, is happening in New Jersey.

"And this building is nearly perfect." Sitting in what was the reception area of the second-floor former newsroom he said, "And that view. Yeah."

The company's view, however, is focused down to the molecular, and even electron, level.

The company's equipment can detect particles on "PPB, PPT, and even PPQ level," he said, that means "parts per billion, trillion and quadrillion. As an example, he said the detectors can pick up 20 ppb of benzine in a sample of carbon dioxide.

As an example of just how exact that is, Mueller said it's like picking out 20 individual grains of sand from a five-gallon pail of "pure" white beach sand, "when what you are looking for is beige."

Mueller is a believer in technology education, noting he has a working relationship with Sussex County Technical High School, and is looking to create similar relationships with both the county community college and Thorlabs, working on the need for higher education and training in the workforce.

"We all have the same goal. We are going to need these young people to come into what we are doing here. We can all move forward," he said

As an example of using modern technology, the company's detection equipment uses the unique properties of various gasses and, along with cloud computing and cataloguing, has created a "fingerprinting" system, able to identify where a particular sample of gas was created.

"Some of what (impurities) we are looking for are regulatory," he said of food and drink samples. "Some are sensory. You don't want a bad-tasting Coke."

Some impurities can even shut-down multi-million dollar research projects, or stop space launches.

Mueller talked about going into high-security areas where even the company (maybe government) name is nowhere to be found, but there are plenty of security guards. He said his detection equipment was able to find what and how much of a chemical had contaminated a rocket fuel line. The satellite was launched with just a couple of hours to spare.

In another place, what was being done in nearby farm fields, was causing anomalies in a high-security research project. He wasn't sure whether the guards were government or private company.

For a new project in Puerto Rico, the company's equipment is in a landfill to make CO2 in a carbon net neutral manner. "That business model alone will save the planet," he said.

Other equipment monitors gas lasers used in eye surgery or etching lines in silicone only seven electrons wide to be used in semi-conductors. "That is 1,000 times smaller than the width of a human hair," he said.

Among equipment manufactured now in the "white room," are laser gas mixing panels. The gas has to be pure so there are no imperfections on the inside of the stainless steel pipettes. The mixing panels are only as good as the equipment in Newton which does interior welds on those pipettes.

He said the technology is also challenging what is known as "Moore's Law," which stated, in 1965, that the number of transistors in a semi-conductor would double - and the cost would half - every two years."

He said that from roughly 1947-1980 there were Univac computers "the size of a room. Look at what we have now." Pulling his cell phone out of a pocket he gestured: "This has the computing power of many rooms of Univacs."

Not all the conversation was rosy, however. He noted that helium, which is essential to many electronic equipment as a cooling agent, "is disappearing. Being lighter than air, helium keeps rising into space.

Other gasses, such as neon, are no longer being extracted. The only two plants which had done the work were in Ukraine, and were razed by the Russian army.

Now, the only supply is what's already extracted, sitting in tank trucks or storage facilities around the world.

Mueller got up from his seat, disappeared into his office and came out holding a sealed glass laboratory vessel.

"This is filled with argon," he said. "It was collected from the air before any atomic tests. We'll never see as pure a sample ever again."