Ricardo plc

Ricardo plc

Type	Public (: )
Industry	Automotive, Clean energy, Defence, Rail, Marine
Founded	1915 (as Engine Patents Ltd.)
Headquarters	Shoreham-by-Sea, England
Key people	Dave Shemmans (CEO)
Revenue	£257.5 million (2014/2015)
Number of employees	2700 (2015)
Website	http://www.ricardo.com

Ricardo plc is a British publicly listed company named after its founder, Sir Harry Ricardo, originally incorporated and registered as Engine Patents Ltd in 1915. Since 1919 the headquarters have been at Shoreham-by-Sea, West Sussex. Ricardo develops engines, transmissions, vehicle systems, intelligent transportation systems (ITS) and hybrid & electric systems. The industries served are in transportation, defence and clean energy.

Ricardo activities cover a range of market sectors including passenger car, commercial vehicle, rail, defence, motorsport, motorcycle, off-highway, marine, clean energy and power generation and government. Its client list includes transportation original equipment manufacturers, supply chain organisations, energy companies, financial institutions and government agencies.

As well as the Shoreham UK headquarters, there are technical centres in Royal Leamington Spa, Cambridge, Chicago, Detroit, Aachen, Schwäbisch Gmünd (Germany), Prague, and regional offices in Shanghai, Yokohama, Seoul, New Delhi, and Moscow.

Harry (later Sir Harry) Ricardo was born in London in 1885 and was educated at Rugby and Cambridge where he studied at Trinity College. The first internal combustion engined cars were made by Daimler and Benz in the year of his birth and in his childhood days he was clearly highly influenced by these new forms of transport. He was renowned for his research into the problem of knock in engines; the results of his work on fuel and reducing fuel consumption assisted Alcock and Brown to cross the Atlantic for the first time by aircraft. Over the years, he was responsible for significant developments in the design of piston engines for a number of applications and derivatives of his original designs are still in production.

He was elected Fellow of the Royal Society in 1929 and in 1948 was knighted in recognition of his services to the internal combustion engine industry. He died in 1974 at the age of 89.

From his earliest days, Harry Ricardo had a fascination for engines. He had designed and built many small engines in his youth including, at the age of 17, an engine to pump water at the family home in Sussex. In 1906 he filed his first engine design patent while still a student at Cambridge. In 1908 ‘The Two-Stroke Engine Company’ started to manufacture and sell a car - the Dolphin - fitted with the same novel engine he had designed and patented earlier as a student at Cambridge. This also found its way into many of the Shoreham-built fishing boats until almost every fisherman had a Dolphin engine in his boat; they were suited to prolonged low speed operation and proved extremely reliable.