Marconi Research Centre is the former name of the current BAE Systems Applied Intelligence Laboratories facility at Great Baddow in Essex, United Kingdom. Under its earlier name, research at this site spanned military and civilian technology covering the full range of products offered by GEC-Marconi, including radio, radar, telecommunications, mechatronics and microelectronics.
Marconi Company chose to establish itself in Chelmsford shortly after the company was founded in 1897. It first acquired the former silk-works on Hall Street before expanding to a new factory, the New Street Works, in 1912. At the same time a formal Research Department was founded under the auspices of Charles Samuel Franklin near the original Hall Street works. [1]
The facilities were placed under the direction of the Admiralty at the outbreak of the First World War. When the Marconi Company resumed control in 1919, it was two years before the Research Department was reconstituted under H. J. Round, who had previously worked for Franklin, with a separate research team now formed under Franklin himself. Thomas Eckersley started working for Marconi at this time. [1]
By 1924 the Marconi Company had developed short wave radio technology sufficiently to be awarded a contract from the Post Office to run elements of the Imperial Wireless Chain. [1] Further research groups were developed, including one working on television. In 1936 it was decided to bring together the various radio, television and telephony research teams in a single location. A site was bought in Great Baddow because it was deemed sufficiently far from potential sources of electrical interference for all research work to be carried out without problems. Building work began in 1937 and by 1938 researchers started working at the site. [1]
The new facilities were placed under the direction J. G. Robb. Research under his direction was varied, including a telephone laboratory focusing on audio research, propagation, low noise receivers, radio direction finding and television. A specialist component group developed quartz crystals and gas discharge devices. [1]
In April 1940 the Royal Air Force took charge of the team around Eckersley dealing with Radio propagation. By August 1941, with the Admiralty Signal Establishment set up, the rest of the laboratories were taken over by the Admiralty.
When the UK electronics industry developed during the 1940s and 1950s, the campus expanded to include research into radar, general physics, high voltage, vacuum physics and semiconductors. At its peak the Centre employed more than 1,200 engineers, technicians, craftsmen and support staff. [2] It was also home to the Marconi Company's museum containing numerous original artifacts from the pioneering period of Guglielmo Marconi's work on wireless telegraphy. [3]
The site still includes a prominent local landmark, a 360-foot (110 m)-high (110 m) former Chain Home radar tower visible across the surrounding countryside. [4] The last remaining tower maintaining all of its platforms, the tower was given a Grade II listed status by Historic England in October 2019. [5]
Guglielmo Giovanni Maria Marconi, 1st Marquis of Marconi was an Italian inventor and electrical engineer, known for his creation of a practical radio wave–based wireless telegraph system. This led to Marconi's being credited as the inventor of radio, and he shared the 1909 Nobel Prize in Physics with Karl Ferdinand Braun "in recognition of their contributions to the development of wireless telegraphy".
Marconi Electronic Systems (MES), or GEC-Marconi as it was until 1998, was the defence arm of General Electric Company (GEC). It was demerged from GEC and bought by British Aerospace (BAe) on 30 November 1999 to form BAE Systems. GEC then renamed itself Marconi plc.
Chelmsford is a city in the City of Chelmsford district in the county of Essex, England. It is the county town of Essex and one of three cities in the county, along with Colchester and Southend-on-Sea. It is located 30 miles north-east of London at Charing Cross and 22 miles south-west of Colchester. The population of the urban area was 110,625 in the 2021 Census, while the wider district has 181,763.
The British Broadcasting Company Limited (BBC) was a short-lived British commercial broadcasting company formed on 18 October 1922 by British and American electrical companies doing business in the United Kingdom. Licensed by the British General Post Office, its original office was located on the second floor of Magnet House, the GEC buildings in London and consisted of a room and a small antechamber.
Great Baddow is an urban village and civil parish in the Chelmsford borough of Essex, England. It is close to the city of Chelmsford and, with a population of over 13,000, is one of the largest villages in the country.
Chain Home, or CH for short, was the codename for the ring of coastal early warning radar stations built by the Royal Air Force (RAF) before and during the Second World War to detect and track aircraft. Initially known as RDF, and given the official name Air Ministry Experimental Station Type 1 in 1940, the radar units were also known as Chain Home for most of their life. Chain Home was the first early warning radar network in the world and the first military radar system to reach operational status. Its effect on the war made it one of the most powerful systems of what became known as the "Wizard War".
The Marconi Company was a British telecommunications and engineering company that did business under that name from 1963 to 1987. Its roots were in the Wireless Telegraph & Signal Company founded by Italian inventor Guglielmo Marconi in 1897, which underwent several changes in name after mergers and acquisitions. The company was a pioneer of wireless long distance communication and mass media broadcasting, eventually becoming one of the UK's most successful manufacturing companies. In 1999, its defence equipment manufacturing division, Marconi Electronic Systems, merged with British Aerospace (BAe) to form BAE Systems. In 2006, financial difficulties led to the collapse of the remaining company, with the bulk of the business acquired by the Swedish telecommunications company, Ericsson.
The history of radar started with experiments by Heinrich Hertz in the late 19th century that showed that radio waves were reflected by metallic objects. This possibility was suggested in James Clerk Maxwell's seminal work on electromagnetism. However, it was not until the early 20th century that systems able to use these principles were becoming widely available, and it was German inventor Christian Hülsmeyer who first used them to build a simple ship detection device intended to help avoid collisions in fog. True radar, such as the British Chain Home early warning system provided directional information to objects over short ranges, were developed over the next two decades.
The Telecommunications Research Establishment (TRE) was the main United Kingdom research and development organisation for radio navigation, radar, infra-red detection for heat seeking missiles, and related work for the Royal Air Force (RAF) during World War II and the years that followed. It was regarded as "the most brilliant and successful of the English wartime research establishments" under "Rowe, who saw more of the English scientific choices between 1935 and 1945 than any single man."
2MT was the first British radio station to make regular entertainment broadcasts, and the "world's first regular wireless broadcast" for entertainment. Transmissions began on 14 February 1922 from an ex-Army hut next to the Marconi laboratories at Writtle, near Chelmsford in Essex. Initially the station only had 200 watts and transmitted on 700m (428 kHz) on Tuesdays from 20:00 to 20:30.
Camp Evans Historic District is an area of the Camp Evans Formerly Used Defense Site in Wall Township, New Jersey. The site of the military installation is noted for a 1914 transatlantic radio receiver and various World War II/Cold War laboratories of the United States Army. It was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 2012, in recognition of the site's long role in the development of modern civilian and military electronic communications.
South Woodham Ferrers is a town and civil parish in the City of Chelmsford in Essex, England. It is approximately 35 miles (56 km) east of London and 8 miles (13 km) south-east of Chelmsford, and had a population of 16,453 at the 2011 Census, a decrease from 16,629 at the 2001 Census.
Little Baddow is a village to the east of Chelmsford, Essex.
AMES, short Air Ministry Experimental Station, was the name given to the British Air Ministry's radar development team at Bawdsey Manor in the immediate pre-World War II era. The team was forced to move on three occasions, changing names as part of these moves, so the AMES name applies only to the period between 1936 and 1939.
Thomas Lydwell Eckersley FRS was an English theoretical physicist and engineer.
Wacław Struszyński was a Polish electronics engineer who made a vital contribution to the defeat of U-boats in the Battle of the Atlantic. He designed an exceptional radio antenna which enabled effective high frequency (HF) radio direction finding systems to be installed on Royal Navy convoy escort ships. Such direction finding systems were referred to as HF/DF or Huff-Duff, and enabled the bearings of U-boats to be determined when the U-boats made high frequency radio transmissions.
Sir John Turton Randall, was an English physicist and biophysicist, credited with radical improvement of the cavity magnetron, an essential component of centimetric wavelength radar, which was one of the keys to the Allied victory in the Second World War. It is also the key component of microwave ovens.
Captain Henry Joseph Round was an English engineer and one of the early pioneers of radio. He was the first to report the observation of electroluminescence from a solid state diode, leading to the discovery of the light-emitting diode. He was a personal assistant to Guglielmo Marconi.
Sir Eric Eastwood CBE FRS, was a British scientist and engineer who helped develop radar technology during World War II.
The New Street Works was a manufacturing plant built for the Marconi Company in Chelmsford, England in 1912. It is credited as being the first purpose-built radio factory in the world.
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