The Federal Telegraph Company was a

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country Continental United States, primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 U.S. state, states, a Washington, D.C., ...

manufacturing and communications company that played a pivotal role in the 20th century in the development of

radio Radio is the technology of signaling and communicating using radio waves. Radio waves are electromagnetic waves of frequency between 30 hertz (Hz) and 300 gigahertz (GHz). They are generated by an electronic device called a tr ...

communications. Founded in

Palo Alto, California Palo Alto (; Spanish for "tall stick") is a charter city in the northwestern corner of Santa Clara County, California, United States, in the San Francisco Bay Area, named after a coastal redwood tree known as El Palo Alto. The city was es ...

in 1909 by

Cyril Frank Elwell Cyril Frank Elwell (August 20, 1884 – 1963) was an Australian-bornHugh G.J. Aitken, ''The Continuous Wave: Technology and American Radio, 1900-1932'' Princeton University Press, 2014, Chapter 3 ''Elwell, Fuller and the Arc'' American inventor ...

, the company would eventually merge in August 1927 with the Mackay Companies. In 1911-13,

Lee De Forest Lee de Forest (August 26, 1873 – June 30, 1961) was an American inventor and a fundamentally important early pioneer in electronics. He invented the first electronic device for controlling current flow; the three-element " Audion" triode v ...

and two assistants worked at FTC on the first

vacuum tube amplifier A valve amplifier or tube amplifier is a type of electronic amplifier that uses vacuum tubes to increase the amplitude or power of a signal. Low to medium power valve amplifiers for frequencies below the microwaves were largely replaced by so ...

and

oscillator Oscillation is the repetitive or periodic variation, typically in time, of some measure about a central value (often a point of equilibrium) or between two or more different states. Familiar examples of oscillation include a swinging pendulum ...

, which De Forest called the "Oscillaton" after his earlier Audion. Electronics Research Laboratory plaque

The company remained a separate entity within the Mackay Companies, however, and when International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) purchased the Mackay Companies in 1928 Federal remained a component of the Mackay structure as a manufacturing entity. In 1931, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the

cyclotron A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Jan ...

, convinced Federal Telegraph to donate an 80-ton magnet they had developed for a canceled project in China to his first cyclotron project on the campus of the University of California Berkeley. Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron was the basis of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1939. In 1940, Sosthenes Behn moved Federal Telegraph under ITT directly so that its manufacturing capabilities could help ITT replace those in Europe that had been shut down because of the war and the Fall of France. In 1954, FTR changed its name from ''Federal Telegraph and Radio Corporation - an IT&T associate'' to ''Federal Telegraph and Radio Company - division of IT&T'',Compare copyright notices o
F-5658
(1953) an
F-5604
(1954) "Federal Power Triode" datasheets and its research division became the ''Federal Telecommunications Laboratories'', both continuing as subsidiaries of ITT after World War II through at least the 1950s.

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Further reading