While LushProjects Blog was helping their dad clear our some old books, they found this pamphlet from 1986 – “The Story of Pye Wireless” by Gordon Bussey. Pye was a very early British electronics company.
They couldn’t find any other references to it on the web, and it seems well researched with some nice photos. So, to make it more widely available, they scanned it and made a copy available on their blog. Some excerpts:
The first public demonstration of wireless equipment made by W. G. Pye & Co., was at the Royal Show of 1922, held in Cambridge. A ship’s operator was writing into words dots and dashes from a loud speaker, and there was great excitement when a voice was heard from one of the earliest Croydon-Le Bourget passenger flights in a Handley Page bomber biplane, the pilot finally giving his opinion of the weather conditions in ‘blue’ R.A.F. language.
The book goes into great detail about early radio and then into the world wars:
Pye set up their first Radiolocation (Radar) receiving equipment at Walton-on-the-Naze, to detect the approach of enemy aircraft, in 1939. This was followed by the development of a very wide range of air-to-air, air-to-ground and ground-to-air Radar devices, culminating in a degree of accuracy that enabled a fighter-pilot to shoot down his enemy without even seeing him, and bomber-pilots to release their bombs, so that they landed within yards of the selected targets.
Pye later made televisions, then merged in the 1960s with other companies.
See the LushProjects Blog for more info and the PDF of the book.
