Ferranti-Packard

Ferranti-Packard Ltd. was the Canadian division of Ferranti's global manufacturing empire, formed by the 1958 merger of Ferranti Electric and Packard Electric. For several years in the post-war era, the company underwent a dramatic expansion and had several brushes with success in the computer market, but eventually shed various divisions and returned to being an electrical grid supplier once again. The company was purchased in 1998 by the Austrian company, VA TECH. On July 23, 2005 Siemens PTD purchased VA Tech's Transmission and Distribution Division (T&D) group for transformers and switchgear.

Packard Electric had first been set up in 1894 in order to supply transformers during the Niagara Falls hydroelectric developments. Ferranti Canada had first been set up in 1912, acting primarily as a sales and distribution arm for their British designed electrical products.

Prior to World War II, Canada's economy was primarily agricultural. While this allowed it to raise a fairly large army with relative ease, it also meant that it was unable to arm itself. C.D. Howe, Minister of Armaments, started an ambitious plan to heavily industrialize the country, turning it almost overnight into what is today a G8 nation.

Canada had entered World War II completely unprepared, and in the post-war era decided they would not allow this to happen again. However, as the art of war turned increasingly technical, it was clear that Canada did not have the wherewithal to support a full program of research on its own. In 1947, the Defense Research Board (DRB) was formed, and sent out a letter outlining their ideas for sharing research between the armed forces, industry and academia.

The letter made its way to the desk of Vincent Ziani de Ferranti, the then-current CEO of the family-held British company. At the time, Ferranti in the UK was involved in a similar commercial/academic development project with Manchester University to build the Manchester Mark 1 computer, so it seemed that their Canadian division would naturally be able to do the same. In October 1948, he flew to Canada to meet with the DRB. He was disappointed to learn that the DRB did not have the financial resources to fund any sort of program, but Ferranti remained interested, even though it appeared the only way to work with the DRB would be for free.

Just such a project started soon after, when word of the Ferranti meeting reached Lt Jim Belyea, a researcher in the Royal Canadian Navy's electrical labs (Electrical Engineer-in-Chief's Directorate). He had been proposing a completely automated system for ships to pass around tactical data from radar and sonar, to help organize the defence of a convoy under attack by submarines. Belyea presented his ideas to Ferranti, who agreed to start development of the technologies needed. By 1950, they had successfully developed a PCM-based radio system for passing digital data between ships, and the DRB started to become very interested. Full-scale development of the system, known as DATAR, started in February 1951 and underwent trials in late 1953. However, the cost of developing a production version was well beyond what the Royal Canadian Navy was able to afford. They attempted to sell the system to the United States Navy, but they were uninterested and the Canadians were forced to end the project. The US Navy later decided that they needed just such a system, having a rather unhappy experience with their Naval Tactical Data System in 1958.

During this period, some time in 1951, Ferranti Canada also considered commercializing the University of Toronto's experimental UTEC computer, which seemed considerably less complex than the Mark I being developed in England. This effort also ended when in 1952, the University purchased a surplus Mark I originally intended for the UK's nuclear weapons program which had suffered massive budget cuts with a change of government.

In 1956, the company received a contract from the Canadian Post Office to develop an electronic mail sorting system, which they delivered later that year. The system used a hard-wired transistorized computer that stored a table of postal codes on a magnetic drum. Operators were presented with envelopes and typed in the postal code, which their typewriter printed onto the envelope as a bar code in fluorescent ink. The sorting system would then read the bar code and automatically route it. The system was a complete success.