22 Facts About Plessey

Plessey Company plc was a British electronics, defence and telecommunications company.

Plessey company was founded in 1917 in Marylebone, central London.

Heyne later became the managing director and chairman of Plessey and was one of the key figures in the development of Plessey during the 1920s and 1930s.

An early customer of Plessey was a galvanising company called British Electro Chemists.

Byron's son Allen George Clark joined the company in 1921, and went on to become a driving force behind the development of Plessey, followed later by his sons John Allen Clark, and Michael William Clark, both of whom rose to prominent positions in the company.

Related searches

Plessey produced the first British-made portable radio in the same year.

Plessey became one of the largest manufacturers in this field as the radio and television industries grew.

In 1936, Plessey obtained a number of important manufacturing licences from American companies such as Breeze Corporation for aircraft multi-pin electrical connectors, Federal Laboratories for Coffman starters, and Pump Engineering Services Corporation for the manufacture of Pesco fuel pumps.

Plessey went on to produce large numbers of these fuel pumps for Rolls-Royce Merlin engines, and in 1940 the fuel pump for Britain's first jet engine was supplied by Plessey.

Plessey built a new factory at Swindon in Wiltshire, and opened several other shadow factories around the country to produce munitions.

Plessey produced an early integrated circuit model in 1957, before the patents of Jack St Clair Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild.

In 1961 Plessey merged with Ericsson Telephones and Automatic Telephone Manufacturing Company of Liverpool, to become Britain's largest manufacturer of telecommunications equipment, including the majority of the country's crossbar switches.

Plessey were partners in the development of the Atlas Computer in 1962 and in the development of digital telephone systems, including System X, from the late 1970s.

Plessey pioneered the gathering and consolidation of accounting information from around the world using in-house software.

Plessey was the lead contractor for the Ptarmigan communications system supplied to the British Army, which adopted the System 250 architecture.

Plessey had a manufacturing plant in Sydney, Australia that made defense equipment and TVs.

Again, Plessey rejected the offer and again it was referred to the MMC.

GEC Plessey Semiconductors was purchased by Mitel Semiconductors of Canada in 1998.

Plessey continues to operate in the Roborough site with leading-edge 150mm and 200mm wafer processing facilities to undertake design, test and assembly of products, and a comprehensive suite of photonic characterisation and applications laboratories.

In March 2019, Plessey used their GaN on Silicon technology, which natively emits Blue, to innovatively engineer the early layers within the process to emit native Green, opening more opportunities for markets such as military.

Tellumat continues to develop and manufacture Plessey-branded products as before and operates in the defence, telecommunications and contract manufacturing markets.

Name is used to refer to a barcode symbology developed by Plessey, which is still used in some libraries and for shelf tags in retail stores, in part as a solution to their internal requirement for stock control.