PYE

Pye Radio was started by C.O. Stanley, the unconventional Irishman.Though he started with little experience and even less money, he was to make Pye a major player in the British electronics industry - only to crash it spectacularly forty years later.
From the romance of early radio to the birth of the mobile, Stanley and Pye were players in some of the key moments of 20th century Britain.

Pye of Cambridge are known as a radio and television manufacturer but in 1896 William George Pye started a part time business making scientific intruments while he was employed at the Cavendish Laboratory. By 1914 W.G.Pye & Co employed 40 people manufacturing instruments used for teaching and research. The war helped his business grow and he ventured into valves for experimental purposes. When broadcasting started in 1922 he was ready with his first Wireless. The demand was there and with his scientific background he established a Pye factory at Church Path, Chesterton making his own components for a series of wireless receivers. They got acclaim from Popular Wireless and were scientifically good, his son Harold was put into the job of salesman, having just graduated from St John's College in science. It seems impossible now to imagine no radio and television shops but the trade had to start somewhere and he visited the cycle shops and garages trying to sell the wireless receivers but he did not sell one in five weeks. Harold helped design a new series in 1924 with the help of his old tutor Sir Edward Appleton and the business took off.

By 1966 Pye were in trouble and Philips put in a bid, they were allowed a 60% shareholding with an understanding to Anthony Wedgwood Benn (then Trade Secretary), that the Lowestoft factory would carry on making Television's. Pye had closed their Ekco factory in Southend earlier that year.  Slowly the British industry ground to a halt and with the industrial trouble at the time between the unions and management it unfortunately never recovered. Only the strongest European manufactures have survived, Philips being one of these. Philips a Dutch firm bought Pye out completely in 1976, the Lowestoft factory is now owned by a Japanese firm Sanyo making Japanese television's sets.       

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