Raytheon

Raytheon is a business unit of RTX Corporation and is a major U.S. defense contractor and industrial corporation with manufacturing concentrations in weapons and military and commercial electronics. Founded in 1922, it merged in 2020 with United Technologies Corporation to form Raytheon Technologies, which changed its name to RTX Corporation in July 2023.

Raytheon was established in 1922, reincorporated in 1928, and adopted the Raytheon Company name in 1959. More than 90% of Raytheon's revenues were obtained from military contracts and, as of 2012, it was the fifth-largest military contractor in the world. As of 2015^[update], it was the third-largest defense contractor in the United States by defense revenue. It was the world's largest producer of guided missiles, and was involved in corporate and special-mission aircraft until early 2007. In 2018, the company had around 67,000 employees worldwide and annual revenues of about US$25.35 billion.

Raytheon has moved its headquarters among various Massachusetts locations: Cambridge from 1922 to 1928; Newton until 1941; Waltham until 1961; and Lexington until 2003.

In 1922, Vannevar Bush, scientist and professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), along with engineer and physicist Laurence K. Marshall, and scientist Charles G. Smith, founded the American Appliance Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Its focus, which was originally on new refrigeration technology, soon shifted to electronics. The company's first product was a gaseous (helium) voltage-regulator tube that was based on Charles Smith's earlier astronomical research of the star Zeta Puppis. The electron tube was named Raytheon (a compound of Old French and Greek meaning 'light from the gods') and was used in a battery eliminator, a type of radio-receiver power supply that plugged into the power grid in place of large batteries. This made it possible to convert household alternating current to a regulated, high voltage direct current for radios and thus eliminate the need for expensive, short-lived batteries.

In 1925, the company changed its name to Raytheon Manufacturing Company and began marketing its rectifier, under the Raytheon brand name, with commercial success. In 1928 Raytheon merged with Q.R.S. Company, an American manufacturer of electron tubes and switches, to form the successor of the same name, Raytheon Manufacturing Company. By the 1930s, it had already grown to become one of the world's largest vacuum tube manufacturing companies.^{[citation needed]} In 1933 it diversified by acquiring Acme-Delta Company, a producer of transformers, power equipment, and electronic auto parts.^{[citation needed]}

Early in World War II, physicists in the United Kingdom invented the magnetron, a specialized microwave-generating electron tube that markedly improved the capability of radar to detect enemy aircraft. American companies were then sought by the US government to perfect and mass-produce the magnetron for ground-based, airborne, and shipborne radar systems, and, with support from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Radiation Laboratory (recently formed to investigate microwave radar), Raytheon received a contract to build the devices. Within a few months, Raytheon began to manufacture magnetron tubes for use in radar sets, and then complete radar systems. During the war, Raytheon also pioneered the production of shipboard radar systems, particularly for submarine detection. Raytheon was also a contractor for the mass-production of miniature shock-resistant vacuum tubes used in proximity fuses. These tubes were difficult to manufacture and required rigorous attention to detail. At war's end in 1945, the company had built about 80 percent of all magnetrons. Raytheon ranked 71st among U.S. corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.

In 1945, Raytheon's Percy Spencer invented the microwave oven by discovering that the magnetron could rapidly heat food. In 1947, the company demonstrated the Radarange microwave oven for commercial use.

During the post-war years, Raytheon also made generally low- to medium-powered radio and television transmitters and related equipment for the commercial market, but the high-powered market was solidly in the hands of larger, better-financed competitors such as Continental Electronics, General Electric and Radio Corporation of America.