Telephones, radios and the Minox

VEF started in April 1919 as the main workshop of the Latvian post and telegraph department, with five mechanics. By the 1930s, renamed Valsts elektrotehniskā fabrika in 1932, it made almost anything with a market: telephones, exchanges, radios that won Grand Prix awards in Brussels and Paris, light bulbs, irons and, from 1936, Walter Zapp’s Minox, then the world’s smallest camera. In 1930 it bought the Latvijas Bērzs plywood factory for radio cabinets, and from 1935 that plywood went into aircraft.

Irbītis and the aeroplanes

The aircraft were the work of Kārlis Irbītis, who designed a line from the I-11 sports racer to the I-16 fighter. The two-seat I-12 trainer, first flown on 26 June 1937, toured Britain that summer, came second in the Cinque Ports Wakefield Cup at Lympne, and was flown non-stop from London to Riga in nine hours, a record for the route. Twelve were built, and Rollasons was named British distributor.

Taken away to Moscow

Soviet occupation in June 1940 ended it. All VEF aircraft were ordered off Spilve airport and other designs were shipped to Moscow in March 1941; the single I-16 fighter prototype, left behind in Riga, was captured by the Germans and used as a trainer at Toruń until 1942. After the war VEF made two of every three Soviet telephones and employed 20,000 people by 1991, but it was broken up in the 1990s.

Factories

• VEF works · Brīvības iela, Riga — 1899 assembly hall; buildings by Peter Behrens 1912–1914
• Spilve airport · Riga — Flight testing until 1940

People

• Kārlis Irbītis · aircraft designer — 1904–1997; later in Canada, worked on the Canadair CL-84
• Walter Zapp · camera designer — Designed the Minox

Records and firsts

• VEF I-12 flown non-stop London to Riga in nine hours, a record for the route, 1937