Hazeltine Corporation

Hazeltine Corporation was a defense electronics company which is now part of BAE Systems Inc.

The company was founded in 1924 by investors to exploit the Neutrodyne patent of Dr. Louis Alan Hazeltine. Headquartered in Greenlawn, Long Island, New York, since 1955, it had facilities in several other locations in Long Island, including its Wheeler Laboratories facility in Smithtown, New York, manufacturing plants in Riverhead and Little Neck, NY, and a division in Braintree, Massachusetts.

The company concentrated originally on the design of electronic circuits and the licensing of patents. Innovations in radio, monochrome and later color television components allowed the company to grow. One particularly lucrative design was the AGC (Automatic Gain Control) circuit. This was such a useful feature that almost every AM radio made used this feature, by license from Hazeltine, from about 1930 until the patent expired. Hazeltine Corporation also developed and licensed many of the basic concepts of the NTSC color television system.

From 1955 to 1959 the president of the Hazeltine Company was Philip La Follette, former three-term governor of Wisconsin and son of "Fighting Bob" La Follette, who campaigned for president in 1924 as the Progressive Party candidate.

The company flourished into the 1980s as a United States Federal defense contractor with particular success as a designer and manufacturer of "Identification Friend or Foe" (IFF) military detection and identification systems.

During the 1970s, as an outgrowth of its defense work, Hazeltine Corp. developed the Hazeltine Terminal, an early monochrome computer terminal, eventually selling that line to a short-lived third party called Esprit, which was managed by ex-Hazeltine employees.

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