General Radio

1540 Strobolume, a professional grade stroboscope produced by General Radio

Close-up view of the 1540 Strobolume control box

General Radio Company (later, GenRad) was a broad-line manufacturer of electronic test equipment. Started in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1915 by Melville Eastham, the company moved to West Concord in the 1950s. There, it became a major player in the automatic test equipment (ATE) business, manufacturing a line of testers for assembled printed circuit boards. It also produced extensive lines of electrical component measuring equipment, sound and vibration measurement and RLC standards.

Primarily because of its line of ATE equipment, the company was eventually acquired by Teradyne in 2001 and has now been relocated to Teradyne's corporate campus in North Reading, Massachusetts. In 1991, QuadTech, Inc. was founded as spinoff of GenRad's Instrumentation Division. IET Labs, Inc. purchased the GenRad product lines from QuadTech.

The classic GenRad instrument line including RLC standards and decades, Digibridges, LCR meters, megohmmeters, stroboscopes, and sound level meters continues to be manufactured and supported by IET Labs, Inc. in West Roxbury, MA.

Among General Radio's accomplishments over the years have been:

• The introduction of one of the world's first portable oscilloscopes
• The production of many high-precision standards for resistance and capacitance
• The commercial production of the stroboscope as the Strobotac
• The commercial production of the sound level meter
• Commercial invention of the binding post.
• Invention of the GR connector
• The Variac variable autotransformer

Additional General Radio Firsts Can be found Here http://www.ietlabs.com/company_info/dev_history/

See also

• James Kilton Clapp

External links

• General Radio Experimenters http://www.ietlabs.com/genrad/experimenters/
• General Radio Historic Catalogs http://www.ietlabs.com/genrad_history/historic_catalogs/
• General Radio Manuals http://www.ietlabs.com/genrad_history/historic_manuals/
• http://www.teradyne.com -- Teradyne, the current owner of the GenRad ATE business
• http://www.ietlabs.com/genrad/index.html -- IET Labs, the current owner of the traditional GenRad instrument business
• http://www.quadtech.com -- QuadTech Instruments, purchased by Chroma System Solutions in 2012
• http://www.teradyne.com/corp/grhs/ -- General Radio Historical Society