Sylvania Electric Products

Sylvania Electric Products was a U.S. manufacturer of diverse electrical equipment, including at various times radio transceivers, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, and mainframe computers. They were one of the companies involved in the development of the COBOL programming language.

The Hygrade Sylvania Corporation was formed when NILCO, Sylvania and Hygrade Lamp Company merged into one company in 1931. In 1939, Hygrade Sylvania started preliminary research on fluorescent technology, and later that year, demonstrated the first linear, or tubular, fluorescent lamp. It was featured at the 1939 New York World's Fair.

Sylvania was also a manufacturer of both vacuum tubes and transistors.

In 1942, the company changed its name to Sylvania Electric Products Inc. (note no comma)

In 1959, Sylvania Electronics merged with General Telephone to form General Telephone and Electronics (GTE)

Through merger and acquisitions, the Company became a significant, but never dominating supplier of electrical distribution equipment, including transformers and switchgear, residential and commercial load centers and breakers, pushbuttons, indicator lights and other hard-wired devices. All were manufactured and distributed under the brand name GTE Sylvania, with the name Challenger used for its light commercial and residential product lines.

GTE Sylvania contributed to the technological advancement of electrical distribution products in the late 1970s with several interesting product features. At the time, they were the leading supplier of vacuum cast coil transformers, manufactured in their Hampton, Virginia plant. Their transformers featured aluminum primary winding and were cast using relatively inexpensive molds, allowing them to produce cast coil transformers in a variety of KVA capacities, primary and secondary voltages and physical coil sizes, including low profile coils for mining and other specialty applications. They also developed the first medium voltage 3 phase panel that could survive a dead short across two phases. Their patented design used bus bar encapsulated in a thin coating of epoxy and then bolted together across all three phases, using special non-conductive fittings.

By 1981 GTE had made the decision to exit the electrical distribution equipment market and began selling off its product lines and manufacturing facilities. The Challenger line, mostly manufactured at the time in Jackson, Mississippi was sold to a former officer of GTE, who used the Challenger name as the name of his new company. Challenger flourished, and was eventually sold to Westinghouse, and later Eaton Corporation. By the mid 1980s, the GTE Sylvania electrical equipment product line and name was no more.

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