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Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation was a company founded by Sherman Fairchild. It was based on the East Coast of the United States, and provided research and development for flash photography equipment. The technology was primarily used for DOD spy satellites. The firm was later known for its manufacture of semiconductors. [1]
Fairchild Camera and Instrument was incorporated in Delaware in 1927 as the Fairchild Aviation Corporation (also see Fairchild Aircraft), which comprised seven aircraft businesses that were the outgrowth of Fairchild Aerial Camera Corporation, which had been incorporated in 1920. The merger made Fairchild Aviation the second-largest manufacturer of commercial airplanes and the fourth-largest aviation organization in the United States.
Fairchild Aerial Camera manufactured aerial cameras for military and commercial aerial mapping that were used in Russia, Poland, and throughout South America. They were the official cameras of the United States Army and Navy Air Services.
In 1944, Fairchild changed the company name from Fairchild Aviation to Fairchild Camera and Instrument Corporation. Its product portfolio expanded during World War II from aerial photography equipment to include machine gun cameras, x-ray cameras, radar cameras, gun synchronizers, and radio compasses.
After the war, military sales still represented a large portion of Fairchild's revenue. The company won a U.S. Air Force contract for the C-82 Packet cargo and troop-carrying airplanes and spare parts. The company then began to develop products for the commercial sector such as manufacturing x-ray equipment. In 1948, the company introduced the Fairchild Lithotype for the newspaper and publishing industry. It was described as "a revolutionary machine that types standard printers' type in a great variety of faces and sizes."
During the 1950s, Fairchild invested heavily in research and development, and introduced new products that ranged from devices combining radar and photography for training pilots to automatic corrected color engraving machines. In 1958 it developed high-speed processing equipment for motion pictures that could develop 500 feet of film almost instantly.
The Fairchild Company in America introduced in the early 1960s a range of Cinephonic cameras. They used pre-striped Standard 8 film. The amplifier was transistorised and the sound separation was 56 frames. The entire system was run by a rechargeable 12-volt nickel-cadmium battery that was reputed to shoot and record 800 ft of film without being recharged. The camera took 8mm film in 100 ft reels which gave five and a half minutes shooting at a speed of 24 fps. [2]
In 1957, the company was approached by members of the "traitorous eight" to rescue the group from the authoritarian regime of William Shockley. With help from Arthur Rock Sherman Fairchild agreed to provide the venture capital to launch a division of Fairchild called Fairchild Semiconductor, from which would spawn dozens of semiconductors and Silicon Valley. [3] [4]
In 1960, two years after Emerson Radio had acquired DuMont's TV manufacturing division (in 1958), Fairchild acquired the remnants of Allen B. DuMont Laboratories (oscillograph & cathode-ray tube manufacturing), as well as large interest in Società Generale Semiconduttori, an Italian semiconductor producer. Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, it acquired several companies in various industries: printing, sensors and magnetic heads, precision optical and photographic equipment, water quality monitoring equipment, and precision molding equipment.
Its corporate headquarters were in Syosset, New York, which were later moved to Mountain View, California when Lester Hogan assumed control of Fairchild Semiconductor.
In 1979, Fairchild Camera and Instrument (including Fairchild Semiconductor) became a subsidiary of Schlumberger. Schlumberger sold Fairchild Semiconductor to National Semiconductor in 1987; National Semiconductor was then acquired by Texas Instruments in 2011. The rest of Fairchild was renamed Fairchild Weston Systems in 1982, which was bought by Loral Corporation in 1989. The company was then renamed as the Loral Fairchild Systems division of Loral Corp.
In 1996, Lockheed Martin completed the acquisition of Loral Corporation's defense electronics and system integration businesses, which included Fairchild, for $9.1 billion. The company became Lockheed Fairchild Systems.
In 2000, Lockheed Martin grouped Fairchild with Sanders Associates and Lockheed Martin Space Electronics & Communications under the Lockheed Martin Aerospace Electronic Systems division. BAE Systems agreed to acquire the division in July 2000 and completed its acquisition on in November. [5]
In 2001, the Carlyle Group reached an agreement with BAE to spin out Fairchild's imaging sensors division as an independent private company called Fairchild Imaging. [5] In 2011, BAE Systems purchased Fairchild Imaging from the Carlyle Group. [6] It is based in Milpitas, California, about twelve miles away from the site where Fairchild Semiconductor was founded.
The Lockheed Martin Corporation is an American aerospace, arms, defense, information security, and technology corporation with worldwide interests. It was formed by the merger of Lockheed Corporation with Martin Marietta in March 1995. It is headquartered in North Bethesda, Maryland, in the Washington, D.C. area. Lockheed Martin employs approximately 115,000 employees worldwide, including about 60,000 engineers and scientists as of January 2022.
National Semiconductor was an American semiconductor manufacturer which specialized in analog devices and subsystems, formerly with headquarters in Santa Clara, California. The company produced power management integrated circuits, display drivers, audio and operational amplifiers, communication interface products and data conversion solutions. National's key markets included wireless handsets, displays and a variety of broad electronics markets, including medical, automotive, industrial and test and measurement applications.
Sperry Corporation was a major American equipment and electronics company whose existence spanned more than seven decades of the 20th century. Sperry ceased to exist in 1986 following a prolonged hostile takeover bid engineered by Burroughs Corporation, which merged the combined operation under the new name Unisys. Some of Sperry's former divisions became part of Honeywell, Lockheed Martin, Raytheon Technologies, and Northrop Grumman.
Fairchild was an American aircraft and aerospace manufacturing company based at various times in Farmingdale, New York; Hagerstown, Maryland; and San Antonio, Texas.
Fairchild Semiconductor International, Inc. was an American semiconductor company based in San Jose, California. Founded in 1957 as a division of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, it became a pioneer in the manufacturing of transistors and of integrated circuits. Schlumberger bought the firm in 1979 and sold it to National Semiconductor in 1987; Fairchild was spun off as an independent company again in 1997. In September 2016, Fairchild was acquired by ON Semiconductor.
Canon Inc. is a Japanese multinational corporation headquartered in Ōta, Tokyo, specializing in optical, imaging, and industrial products, such as lenses, cameras, medical equipment, scanners, printers, and semiconductor manufacturing equipment.
Schlumberger Limited, doing business as SLB, is an oilfield services company. As of 2022, it is both the world's largest offshore drilling company and the world's largest offshore drilling contractor by revenue.
Loral Corporation was a defense contractor founded in 1948 in New York by William Lorenz and Leon Alpert as Loral Electronics Corporation. The company's name was taken from the first letters of each founder's surname.
Fairchild may refer to:
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Sanders Associates was a defense contractor in Nashua, New Hampshire, United States, from 1951 until it was sold in 1986. It is now part of BAE Systems Electronics & Integrated Solutions, a subsidiary of BAE Systems. It concentrated on developing and manufacturing electronic systems, notably aircraft self-protection systems, and tactical surveillance and intelligence systems. Other business areas included microwave, missile and space electronics; infrared imaging; and automated mission planning systems, with both military and commercial applications.
Sherman Mills Fairchild was an American businessman and investor who founded over 70 companies, including Fairchild Aviation, Fairchild Industries, and Fairchild Camera and Instrument. Fairchild made significant contributions to the aviation industry and was inducted into the National Aviation Hall of Fame in 1979. His Semiconductor Division of Fairchild Camera played a defining role in Silicon Valley. He held over 30 patents for products ranging from the silicon semiconductor to the 8-mm home sound motion-picture camera. Fairchild was responsible for inventing the first synchronized camera shutter and flash as well as developing technologies for aerial cameras that were later used on the Apollo Missions.
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EMR Telemetry was a division of Weston Instruments, Inc. based in Sarasota, Florida. EMR started in 1957 and was sold to several different companies throughout its existence. EMR has been owned or operated by companies such as Fairchild Camera and Instrument, Schlumberger LTD, Loral, Lockheed Martin. Currently, the Aviation Recorder Division of L-3 Communications operates the Sarasota facility. EMR products included telemetry processing equipment and space-rated data transmission system, cockpit voice recorders (CVR) and flight data recorders (FDR).
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Fairchild Systems was a United States defense contractor which is now part of BAE Systems Electronics, Intelligence & Support. A descendant of Fairchild Camera and Instrument, the San Francisco Chronicle described Fairchild Systems as "one of the legendary names of Silicon Valley" and that in "the late 1960s, [its] Bay Area operations were the training ground for the engineers who went on to found Intel and other top semiconductor companies."
Eagle Test Systems is a supplier of automatic test equipment (ATE) and operates as a business unit within the Teradyne Semiconductor Test Division. Eagle's test equipment was designed to address volume production. Customers, including semiconductor manufacturers and assembly and test subcontractors, use the products to test analog, a combination of digital and analog, known as mixed-signal, and radio frequency (RF) semiconductors.
Hanwha Aerospace Co., Ltd., formerly Hanwha Techwin Co Ltd is a subsidiary of Hanwha Group, is an aerospace industrial company headquartered in Changwon, South Korea. It was established in 1977 as Samsung Precision. The company is Korea's only gas turbine engine manufacturer, and specializes in the development, production and maintenance of aircraft engines. In 1979, it started the aircraft engine business with gas turbine engine depot maintenance business, providing various gas turbine solutions to Korea and all over the world and by 2016 the company had produced more than 8,000 pieces of equipment.
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