Mr. Clean.

• Position: Dick Matthews of Filtration Technology Inc.

Although Dick Matthews ultimately launched his Filtration Technology Inc. in Greensboro, he started out thinking Federal, N.C., might be a better site.

"I looked all over the map until somebody told me it was Fayetteville they were talking about," the Rhode Island native recalls.

Nowadays, as head of an international group developing standards for the multibillion-dollar clean-room industry, Matthews, 61, struggles more with the accents of Swedes and Orientals than with Tar Heel drawls.

A philosophy graduate who can't speak a foreign language and flunked freshman chemistry at Wesleyan College in Connecticut, Matthews says he's "the classic case of a little fish making a big splash. And thank God, the international business language is English."

The splash started in 1978 after Matthews and his company dived into the design and construction of clean rooms -- work areas where most contaminants and particles are filtered out. NASA developed them in the 1960s, and they were soon adopted by electronics and pharmaceutical manufacturers. The size of the...