Raytheon

From its early days as a maker of radio tubes, its adaptation of World War II radar technology to invent microwave cooking, and its development of the first guided missiles, Raytheon has successfully built upon its pioneering tradition to become a global technology leader. Today, Raytheon is focused on its core businesses: defense and commercial electronics and business aviation and special mission aircraft. Each provides the company with the capabilities it needs to build on its strength as an innovator and to prosper in a highly competitive global economy. Key Dates: Company changes its name to Raytheon Manufacturing Company and begins making tubes for radios. Raytheon is chosen to develop magnetrons, a tube used in microwave radar systems, marking the company's entrance into defense technology. U.S. Navy contracts with Raytheon on the delivery of 100 ship radar systems. Raytheon's Lark missile comes to the fore when it successfully intercepts and destroys a test drone. Raytheon acquires the defense businesses of Texas Instruments Inc. and Hughes Electronics Corporation; its home appliances unit is divested. Raytheon Company is the third largest defense contractor in the United States, trailing only the Boeing Company and Lockheed Martin Corporation. Among the company's key defense products are missile defense systems, including the Patriot and Hawk ground-based missile systems; offensive missiles, including the Tomahawk, TOW, and Stinger; and radar, infrared, and other electronic systems for surveillance, reconnaissance, targeting, navigation, and other purposes. Raytheon has pioneered in the conversion of defense technologies into commercial products handled by Raytheon Commercial Electronics, such as marine electronic equipment, broadband wireless communications products, and infrared night vision systems for automobiles. Raytheon Aircraft Company is the number one maker of business and special mission aircraft in the world; this subsidiary, however, had been placed up for sale in 2000. The sale of the company's aircraft unit would complete a divestiture program launched in the late 1990s that transformed Raytheon from an industrial conglomerate to a company focused solely on defense and commercial electronics. Raytheon was founded in 1922 when a civil engineer named Laurence Marshall was introduced to an inventor and Harvard physicist named Charles G. Smith by Dr. Vannevar Bush. Marshall proposed a business partnership with Smith and Bush after hearing that Smith had developed a new method for noiseless home refrigeration using compressed gases and no moving parts. Marshall raised $25,000 in venture capital from investors and a former World War I comrade and incorporated the partnership in Cambridge, Massachusetts (near Bush's employer, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), as American Appliance Company. Virtually all the tubes produced by Raytheon were used in radio sets whose design patents were held by RCA. In 1927 RCA altered its licensing agreements with radio manufacturers to stipulate that the radios could be built only with new rectifier tubes (called Radiotrons) manufactured by RCA. Raytheon was, in effect, denied access to its markets. The company was forced to switch to the production of radio-receiving tubes, a field in which more than 100 companies were engaged in fierce competition. With world war looming in 1940, U.S. President Franklin Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill authorized the joint development of new radar technologies by American and British institutions. Through the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Raytheon was chosen to develop the top-secret British magnetron, a microwave radar power tube. The technology would provide the range and clearer images required for successful detection and destruction of enemy planes, submarines (when they surfaced), and German warships. The new device had more than 100 times the power of previous