Pye

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This article is about the electronics company Pye Ltd.. For other uses of Pye see Pye (disambiguation).

Pye Ltd. was an electronics company founded in Cambridge, England and is currently wholly owned by Philips.

W.G.Pye & Co. Ltd. was founded in 1896 in Cambridge by William George Pye, an employee of the Cavendish Laboratory, as a part time business making scientific instruments. By the outbreak of World War I in 1914 the company employed forty people manufacturing instruments that were used for teaching and research. The war increased demand for such instruments and the War Office needed experimental thermionic valves. The manufacture of these components afforded the company the technical knowledge that it needed to develop the first "wireless" (as early radios were called) when the first UK broadcasts were made by the BBC in 1922.

The company started a wireless components factory at Church Path, Chesterton and the series of receivers that it made were given positive reviews by Popular Wireless magazine. In 1924 Harold Pye, the son of the founder, and Edward Appleton, his former tutor at St. John's College designed a new series of receivers which proved even more saleable. In 1928 William Pye sold the company, now renamed Pye Radio Ltd., to C. O. Stanley, who established a chain of small component-manufacturing factories across East Anglia.

When the BBC started to explore television broadcasting, Pye found that the closest of their East Anglian offices was some 25 miles outside the estimated effective 25 mile radius of the Alexandra Palace transmitter. Stanley was fascinated by the new technology and on his instructions the company built a high gain receiver that could pick up these transmissions. In 1937 a 5-inch Pye television receiver was priced at 21 guineas (£22.05) and within two years the company had sold 2,000 sets at an average price of £34.

The new EF50 valve from Philips, enabled Pye to build this high gain receiver, which was a Tuned Radio Frequency (TRF) type, and not a superhet type. With the outbreak of World War 2 the Pye receiver using EF50 valves became a key component of many radar receivers, forming the 45MHz Intermediated Amplifier (IF) section of the equipment. Pye went on to design and manufacture many famous army radio equipments such as Wireless Sets No. 18, 19, 22, 62.

In February 1944 Pye formed a specialist division called Pye Telecommunications Ltd which it intended would design and produce radio communications equipment when the war ended. This company developed, prospered and grew to become the leading UK producer of mobile radio equipment for commercial, business, industrial, police and Government purposes. See http://www.pyetelecomhistory.org

Demo of television in Mons (Belgium) on 16th sept. 1947

After the war Pye's B16T 9" table television was designed around the twelve-year-old EF50 valve. It was soon superseded by the B18T, which used an extra high tension transformer (EHT) developed by German companies before the war to produce high cathode ray tube voltages.

In 1955 the company diversified into music production with Pye Records. The Independent Television Authority (ITA) started public transmissions in the same year so Pye had to produce new television designs that could receive ITV and the availability of a second channel introduced the need for tuners. Pye's V4 tunable television was launched in March 1954 and was followed by the V14. The V14 proved to be technically unreliable and so tarnished the Pye name that many dealers transferred their allegiance to other manufacturers. This failure so damaged corporate confidence that Pye avoided being first to market thereafter, although they developed the first British transistor in 1956.

Not wishing to risk further damage to their fragile brand, Pye first used transistors in a product sold as a subsidiary brand: the Pam 710 radio, with the transistors themselves labelled Newmarket Transistors (another subsidiary). When this proved acceptable the company launched the Pye 123 radio a Pye 123 (still with the Newmarket label on the novel internal components). Products such as these reversed the decline but the arrival of Japanese competition reduced demand to a level that threatened the viability of the manufacturing plants. The company, like most of its domestic competitors, attempted to restore demand with price competition and, where viable production exceeded demand, sold excess stock at loss-making clearance prices. This tactic has no strategic value and by 1966 Pye was in such difficulties that they started to reduce their manufacturing capacity with closure of the Ekco factory in Southend.

Philips attempted to buy out the ailing Pye in 1966. The Trade Secretary Anthony Wedgwood Benn determined that a complete sale would create a de facto monopoly so he permitted the transfer of just a 60% shareholding with an undertaking that the Lowestoft factory would continue to manufacture televisions.

The arrival of colour television in the mid sixties was not the rescue that domestic manufacturers had hoped. Test signals began in 1966 and scheduled transmissions commenced on December 2, 1967. The colour transmissions introduced 625-line transmissions alongside the 405-line broadcasts so the receivers had to handle both systems, with a consequent cost overhead. The resulting high price of the new technology delayed consumer adoption.

In the early 1970s Sony and Hitachi launched UK colour televisions at under £200 and most domestic manufacturers decided to compete with them in that market. This decision handicapped the domestic manufacturers when the Japanese moved upmarket using just in time (JIT) manufacturing. When the UK consumers chose quality over price, domestic manufacturers found themselves with high stocks and low cash flow at a time when industrial relations were poor and there was little flexibility in cost reduction. Pye was unable to recover and the entire Pye group of companies was bought by Philips in 1976. The Lowestoft factory was subsequently sold to Sanyo for the manufacture of television sets after Philips moved the manufacture of Pye televisions to Singapore.