Beckman Coulter

Beckman Coulter, Inc. is an American company that develops, manufactures, and markets products relevant to biomedical testing. It has been a subsidiary of Danaher Corporation since 2011. It operates in the industries of diagnostics under the brand name Beckman Coulter and life sciences under the brand name Beckman Coulter Life Sciences. The company was established in 1935 as National Technical Laboratories, and has become an international company through growth and acquisitions of other life sciences organizations.

The company employs over 12,000 people, with $5.8 billion in annual sales by 2017. It is currently headquartered in Brea, California. Beckman Coulter was acquired by Danaher Corporation in 2011.

The company was founded by Caltech professor Arnold O. Beckman in 1935 as National Technical Laboratories to commercialize a pH meter that he had invented.

In the 1940s, the name was changed the name to Arnold O. Beckman, Inc. to sell oxygen analyzers, the Helipot precision potentiometer, and spectrophotometers.^{[citation needed]} The company name changed to Beckman Instruments, Inc. before going public in 1952.

In the 1950s, Beckman Instruments developed the EASE series of analog computers, two of which were used by NASA in the 1960s for real-time simulation during the development of the Apollo Guidance Computer.

In 1954, Beckman Instruments acquired ultracentrifuge maker Spinco (Specialized Instruments Corp.). The Spinco division went on to design and manufacture a broad range of laboratory centrifuges.

In 1961, Beckman acquired Offner Electronics, a company founded by inventor Franklin F. Offner.

In 1982, the company merged into SmithKline to form SmithKline Beckman, with Arnold Beckman as vice chairman, but regained its independence in 1989 after SmithKline merged with Beecham Group to form SmithKline Beecham (now part of GlaxoSmithKline).