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English Electric Valve Company - EEV (redirected from English Electric Valves - EEV)

Page history last edited by Alan Hartley-Smith 4 years, 6 months ago

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The History of E2V in Chelmsford by Stephen Norris


The English Electric Valve Company (EEV) had its roots in Marconi research before the second war. [Editors note - there was an interest in valves dating from the first World War - see here] .Marconi had developed a vacuum laboratory for the production of valves. It used a corner of the New Street factory and was run by Doctor George M Brett. "The vacuum laboratory as I took it over was a single room, maybe 20ft by 25ft which contained a diffusion pump outfit, glass bench, spot welder, hydrogen furnace, my desk and little else. The place was gloomy, claustrophobic and I thought a poor exchange for the HH Wills Physics Lab which I had just left in the summer." Marconi's agreement with GEC and EMI prevented them from producing valves in the 1930s and it was for this reason that the company established a factory in Czechoslovakia in 1936.

 

Jim Young went from the New Street Laboratory to take charge of production in that factory. The New Street Laboratory was moved to Great Baddow but then taken over by the government when the war broke out. This produced the Stabilovolt valve. Magnetron production, a key component in radar, started in 1940, however limited space caused Marconi to establish a manufacturing base at Waterhouse Lane which was to become the centre of EEV after the war. After 1945 the demand for defence radar valves disappeared and the workforce at Waterhouse Lane declined from 450 to 150.

 

A separate company had to be formed in 1947 away from Marconi to produce valves because the latter was still bound by the agreement not to produce valves, even after the takeover by English Electric. Initially the new company was known as the Phoenix Dynamo Company Ltd, but before one financial year was completed this was changed to English Electric Valves Limited (EEV). Most of the new company's orders were from Marconi in the first year, but there was also one from a French company. Soon the occasional order came from English Electric. Jim Young, back from Czechoslovakia, became a founding member of EEV. He and Maurice Esterson, an engineer who had joined Marconi in 1940 and spent the rest of his career at EEV, turned their attention to civil radar. The company produced the first hydrogen thyratron which was used in radio receivers. EEV also started producing shutter tubes, which enabled pictures to be taken of X-ray exposures.

 

In the early 1950s the company started producing image orthicons which convert light into electronic signals in a television camera. The firm provided these for the cameras used in the TV broadcast of the Coronation. EEV also produced a new type of klystron used by Marconi in their transmitters at the new Crystal Palace station. When the company became the biggest producer of orthicons in the country, the Waterhouse Lane factory had to be expanded. In 1952 for example, image orthicons were exported to Canada, Spain and Bolivia, as well as being installed at the United Nations. They were also used in the first studio broadcasts by the BBC from the new Studio E at Lime Grove. Two hundred and fifty thousand image orthicons had been produced by the company when production of these devices stopped in 1982.

 

Jim Young became general manager of EEV in 1956, replacing Simon Aseinstein who had escaped from the Russian revolution and had risen within EEV to become general manager. In the 1950s, with enormous technological advances being made, most of the workers were women who had the manual dexterity required. Better cathode technology enabled the company to provide cathodes for televisions. The company produced magnetrons for civil radar which had a longer lifespan than their military predecessors. As with Marconi, the onset of the Cold War meant that military demand for the firm's products soon picked up. Image orthicons were adapted for use for underwater cameras and they were first used to identify a submarine. By the end of the 1950s EEV employed about 200 people and its turnover was £2.5 million.

 

The early 1960s saw a big expansion and increase in the variety of the firm's products fuelled by strong leadership by Jim Young. He achieved a balance of civil and military contracts, whilst also ensuring that exports remained healthy. The AEI Valve Company was acquired in London and a new factory was built in Maldon which opened in 1961. In a bid to further relieve pressure on the Waterhouse Lane factory, a factory was built at Benfleet but it soon closed in 1968. In 1962 offices were also opened in Toronto and New York.

 

In 1968 after the GEC takeover of English Electric, EEV was merged with the GEC Marconi Osram Valve Company. The company escaped the 'Weinstock purge' mainly because Weinstock had faith in Young. By the end of the 1960s EEV was producing over 200 different types of magnetron. Five hundred of the company's klystrons were in use in TV transmitting stations around the world. They were also used as oscillators in radar receivers and the Doppler radar used in navigation and speed measuring equipment. The 1960s saw the rapid expansion of the company's workforce to over 2,000. Two hundred of them were engineers and physicists, most of them graduates. Pressure of space saw the company bid for the old Crompton Parkinson site. Most of this site was taken over by Marconi but EEV was given a small part of the rebuilt factory. In 1968 the firm won a Queen's Award for Industry for the high degree of accuracy of its image orthicons.

 

Despite this overall success the late 1960s saw the first signs of industrial unrest at the Chelmsford factory. A walk out by AEU workers in September 1968 was followed by a work to rule by the draughtsmen at Waterhouse Lane a few months later. Just over a year later there was a full blown strike by 1,150 workers over pay - though they came back for a day to qualify for holiday pay! The workers were able to use their industrial muscle to get large pay increases several times in the 1970s. By the early 1970s the Waterhouse Lane factory was ten times larger than it had been in 1947. Two further units were built on the site. By 1980 its space at the old Crompton works was open, as well as a previously empty factory which it took over at Witham. Twenty years previously its main customers had been the UK government, Marconi and Decca, but by the early 1970s it was selling a wide variety of power valves, microwave tubes and light conversion techniques to hundreds of customers from all over the world. The biggest export market was North America.

 

In the 1970s the company helped produce the thermal imaging camera and it was also involved with the development of the first full colour TV screens for outside events, which were known as Starvision. These, using Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD), were the earliest version of the large screen TV screens that are today such a part of outdoor events. The company also provided LCDs for TV game shows such as Family Fortunes, The Price Is Right, 15 to 1 and Bob's Full House. Later, LEDs caught up with the Starvision technology and within a decade EEV stopped producing its large screens. In October 1981 the company announced a takeover of the LCD division from a subsidiary of Westlands Aircraft Limited. Its manufacture of liquid crystal displays was transferred to the EEV part of the Crompton site.

 

During the 1970s, big developments in the company's image intensifiers for night vision occurred. Initially they had weighed several pounds and were not easy to move. The second generation of this equipment was much more compact. War in the Falklands resulted in a camera that could see through smoke and a camera for use specifically by fire fighters.

 

The 1980s saw strong progress in the company. There was a sense of community that perhaps hadn’t been there in the 1970s. On one occasion there was a terrible August thunderstorm at the weekend. The company put out a message on the local radio asking for the employees to go in to work. Lydia Bridges recalled “going in just as we were, in shorts, with our wellies on”. Everybody helped including management. “We worked non-stop to save all the electronic equipment.” “We all felt that we were part of the E.E.V. family”.

 

The company won a £40 million order for its third generation intensifiers in 1986, securing work for 130 people. Four hundred new jobs were created during the following year, 375 of them at Chelmsford. In 1990 however, a recession resulted in 250 job losses overall. The company’s policy of long term development of new products did see returns in the long run but the end of the Cold War caused problems because 70% of its business was still defence related. This was something that Jim Young had worked hard to avoid.

 

New products allowed a slimmed down E.E.V. to gradually get back to acceptable levels of profitability. In 1990 it launched Nite-Watch, a pocket sized night vision viewer which was immediately popular with police forces in the U.K. and abroad. They also produced the first dental CCDs, which produced instant X rays of dental work. This removed the need to develop film and reduced X ray doses by 80%. The company supplied image sensors for several space missions and in 1984 it launched the light compact Stellar satellite communication amplifier, used to send live news across the globe. It was soon popular for use at outside events such as the Tour De France and was used for the BBC live broadcast of an ascent of Everest. This was followed by the next generation of the fire and rescue camera. The company’s revival was helped by increasing demand for established products such as magnetrons and klystrons.

 

This growth resulted in another expansion at the Waterhouse Lane complex. The company invested £1.2 million to double the floor space in 1993. Further investment was also put into a new training centre.

 

EEV briefly became Marconi Applied Technologies (M.A.T.) in 1999 when G.E.C. sold off its defence interests to BAE to focus on telecommunications. The collapse of the dot com boom had a dramatic effect on Marconi shares and an initially equally severe effect on the renamed company. M.A.T. did not really fit in the new Marconi telecom group because of its defence and fire fighting interests. An attempt at selling the company came to nothing and attention turned to a possible management buyout. This started in 2001 and was completed by 2002. The buyout was backed by the venture company 3i. It was made easier by the fact that the business was profitable and had a high level of orders The new company was immediately named e2v technologies after a deal was worth £42 million. “The company is a worldwide leader in thermal imaging and components for space cameras” the Essex Chronicle commented. Only two years afterwards e2v was floated on the Stock Exchange and became a public limited company.

 

It was felt that the company needed to expand quickly and in 2005 the £5 million pound Gresham Scientific Instruments was taken over. This was renamed as e2v Scientific Instruments. The following year e2v bought Atmel Corporations facility in Grenoble for £76 million. Atmel’s semi-conductor activities meshed well with e2v’s and reflected the fact the company had a large market in France. e2v garnered prestige in 2001 by supplying CCDs for the Hubble space telescope upgrade. In 2005 the company opened the e2v Centre for Electronic Imaging at Brunel University.

 

By 2006 the company had doubled its sales figures in three years, with orders from Germany now outstripping those from France. In 2007 e2v was helping to improve cancer treatment with its compact solid state modulator for radiotherapy equipment. “About 90% of the world’s radiotherapy machines are reliant on components coming out of Chelmsford.” e2v CCD sensors were used on the Gaia satellite sent in 2011 to provide a 3D map of the galaxy. Defence technology represented a smaller percentage of total production by the new millennium but both the Chelmsford and Grenoble factories were involved in the Eurofighter programme. The company received yet another Queen’s Award for Industry in 2007 for its L3 Vision, low level imaging technology, the Argus 4 a thermal imaging camera for fire fighters and for its involvement in the Gaia project. By 2011, e2v had contributed 106 CCDs for the enterprise which was involved in making a 3D map of our Milky Way galaxy. In 2013 the firm made four image sensors costing one million pounds each for NASA’s IRIS project. They were built to withstand extreme conditions and used to take pictures of the sun. In May 2012 Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg visited e2v after its ‘Pro wave’ project was given a £6 million grant from the Regional Growth Fund.

 

Despite this progress, the firm was not unaffected by the economic downturn following the banking crisis. In 2009 employees agreed to work three days a week “in a drastic attempt to save jobs”. This was after losses of £28 million. Workers blamed the company’s poor position on the over expensive purchase of the French company Atmel in 2001 which had cost £70 million. The weakness of the pound had also contributed to the company’s previous profits of £13 million being wiped out. 2010 saw a revival in its order books however.

 

In 2013 the company supplied the imaging array for the Europen Space Agency Gaia project to map the Milky Way. At one million pixels this was the largest focal plane flown into space. In 2018 E2V is one of the suppliers of imaging CCDs to the large Synoptic Survey Telescope. This will photo the entire available sky every few nights.

 

The company’s current clients include Boeing, Airbus, Siemens, Nottingham University and NASA. Its annual sales are approximately £250 million. Besides its design, development and manufacturing facilities in Chelmsford and Lincoln and the one in Grenoble, France, it has one in Seville, Spain, and one in Milpitas, U.S. It has an operational base in Beijing, China. Chelmsford remains however the HQ for e2v.

 

In March 2017 the company was acquired by Teledyne Technologies and is now known as Teledyne e2v.

 

Input from Alan Pamphilon

Each building on the EEV or now e2v Teledyne site has a letter and they have already reached “Z”. The site was once known as Little Waterhouse Farm and dates back to at least 1591. In 1934 it was purchased by the Marconi Company. One of the building known as “B building” started life as storage garage for a fleet of Marconi vans. During WWII it became the production unit for the new cavity magnetron, the heart of a secret high-power precision radar set that could “see” over a distance of many miles. The magnetron device was developed first at Birmingham University in1940, then later at the Marconi laboratory in New Street and the finally at Great Baddow where the first production devices were made.  

 

Mass production of the cavity magnetron was then transferred here, in May 1942.  Although the farm land had been sold off most of the original farm buildings remained and these were considered as useful camouflage against attacks from the air.

The road to the farm, Waterhouse Lane, was a farm track with a number of potholes. Being close to the river the track would frequently flood in wet weather, especially near the old army bridge. With very few people owning cars and petrol being rationed. Most of the work force at that time travelled to the site by bicycle, so the journey to work could prove somewhat difficult in the winter months.

 

Two men Dr Serge Aisenstein and Jim Young were responsible for production and before long several hundred cavity magnetrons were being manufactured each month. These devices were then carefully transported to the Marconi radar factories to be incorporated into the new H2S radar sets which being made for airborne use.

 

These are entries from a book called "Memories of Chelmsford" published byTRUE NORTH BOOKS 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 

 

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