Hazeltine Corporation

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Hazeltine Corporation was a defense electronics company which is now part of BAE Systems Inc.

[edit] History

The company was founded in 1924 by investors to exploit the Neutrodyne patent of Dr. Alan Hazeltine. Headquartered in Greenlawn, Long Island, New York, since 1955, it had facilities in several other locations throughout Long Island, including its Wheeler Labs facility in Smithtown, New York, and a division in Braintree, Massachusetts. The company originally concentrated on the design of electronic circuits and the licencing of patents. Innovations in radio, monochrome and later color television allowed the company to grow. One particularly lucrative design was the AVC (Automatic Volume Control) circuit. This was such a useful feature that almost every AM radio made used this feature, under license from Hazeltine, from about 1930 until the patent ran out. Hazeltine Corporation also developed and licenced many of the basic concepts of the NTSC color television system.

The company flourished into the 1980s as a United States Federal defense contractor with particular success as a designer and manufacturer of "Identify Friend or Foe" IFF military detection and identification systems. In the 1970s, as an outgrowth of its defense work, Hazeltine Corp. developed the Hazeltine Terminal, an early monochrome computer terminal, eventually selling that line to a short-lived third party called Esprit, which was run by ex-Hazeltine employees.

Hazeltine was acquired by the Emerson Electric Company in 1986. In 1990, Emerson demerged its Government and Defense Group (including Hazeltine) to form ESCO Electronics Corporation. In 1996, Hazeltine was acquired from ESCO by GEC-Marconi Electronic Systems Corp., a US subsidiary of The General Electric Company, and renamed GEC-Marconi Hazeltine. The deal valued Hazeltine at $110 million.

With the 1999 merger of GEC-Marconi and British Aerospace to form BAE Systems, GEC-Marconi Hazeltine was renamed BAE Systems Advanced Systems. In 2002, it was renamed BAE Systems CNIR (Communication, Navigation, Identification and Reconnaissance). In a 2007 reorganization, the division was folded into BAE Systems Electronics and Integrated Solutions and is currently called BAE Systems Sensor Systems.