Light from the gods

In 1922 three Massachusetts men, the MIT engineering professor Vannevar Bush, the engineer Laurence Marshall and the scientist Charles Smith, founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge to work on refrigeration. They quickly drifted into electronics. Their first hit was a helium-filled voltage-regulator tube, based on Smith’s research into the star Zeta Puppis, that let radios run off household mains instead of expensive batteries. They called the tube Raytheon, a coinage meaning light from the gods, and in 1925 renamed the company after it. By the 1930s Raytheon was one of the world’s largest makers of vacuum tubes.

Magnetrons and a melted sweet

The Second World War made it. British scientists had invented the cavity magnetron, the heart of microwave radar, and the US government needed someone to mass-produce it. With help from MIT’s Radiation Laboratory Raytheon was turning out magnetrons within months, then complete radar sets, and by 1945 it had built about 80 per cent of all magnetrons. That same year a Raytheon engineer, Percy Spencer, noticed that a magnetron could heat food rapidly; the company demonstrated its Radarange microwave oven in 1947, and after buying Amana in 1965 it sold the first countertop household microwave in 1967.

Missiles before aircraft

Raytheon’s aviation story is mostly about things that fly without pilots. It began building guided missiles in 1948, and in 1950 its Lark became the first such missile to destroy a target aircraft in flight. The air-to-air Sparrow and the surface-to-air Hawk followed, then the Phoenix and the Patriot, whose exposure in the 1991 Gulf War drove a surge in export sales. Raytheon also built the Apollo Guidance Computer that flew on every Apollo mission. A burst of acquisitions in the 1990s, including Texas Instruments’ defence arm and Hughes Aircraft’s defence business in 1997, made it the world’s largest maker of guided missiles.

Buying Beech, then Hawker

For 27 years Raytheon also built aeroplanes. It bought Beech Aircraft of Wichita on 8 February 1980, and in August 1993 added British Aerospace’s Corporate Jets, makers of the BAe 125 line. In 1994 the two were merged as Raytheon Aircraft Company, and the old Hawker name was revived to signal the jets’ Hawker Siddeley ancestry. Under Raytheon the firm won the US joint primary trainer competition with the T-6A Texan II, a licensed development of the Swiss Pilatus PC-9, and launched the Premier I, first flown on 22 December 1998 with a carbon-composite fuselage. NetJets’ 2005 order for 50 Hawker 4000s was the largest single order in Raytheon Aircraft’s history.

Selling the planes, keeping the name

In March 2007 Raytheon sold its aircraft business to Goldman Sachs and Onex for US$3.3 billion; it became Hawker Beechcraft and, after bankruptcy, part of Textron Aviation. Raytheon itself stayed in the air through systems: it was prime contractor for the RAF’s Sentinel R1 battlefield-radar jet, five of which were integrated largely at Broughton in Wales and served until March 2021. In April 2020 Raytheon merged with United Technologies to form Raytheon Technologies, renamed RTX Corporation in July 2023, where Raytheon lives on as the missiles and defence segment. In 2024 RTX agreed penalties of about US$1 billion over bribery and overcharging allegations.

Továrny

• Wichita works · Wichita, Kansas — Beech and Raytheon Aircraft headquarters and production, 1980–2007
• Broughton · Broughton, Flintshire, Wales — Integrated four of the five Sentinel R1s

Lidé

• Vannevar Bush · co-founder — MIT professor who co-founded American Appliance in 1922
• Percy Spencer · engineer — Discovered magnetron cooking in 1945, leading to the microwave oven
• Charles Francis Adams IV · president, 1948–1960 — Led the move into guided missiles

Rekordy a prvenství

• Lark: first guided missile to destroy a target aircraft in flight, 1950
• Built about 80 per cent of all magnetrons produced by the end of the Second World War
• Beechcraft Starship: described as the first composite aircraft produced