EMI, The Start Of Something Big…

Below is an EMI 203 Image Orthicon camera from 1960, but broadcast was just one area EMI was involved in. Here’s a short course on their history. Electric and Musical Industries Ltd was formed in March 1931 by the merger of the Columbia Graphophone Company and the Gramophone Company, with its “His Master’s Voice” record label, firms that have a history extending back to the origins of recorded sound. The new company produced sound recordings as well as recording and playback equipment.

The company’s gramophone manufacturing led to forty years of success with larger-scale electronics and electrical engineering. During and after the Second World War, the EMI Laboratories in Hayes, Hillingdon developed radar equipment and guided missiles, employing analogue computers. The company later became involved in broadcasting equipment, notably providing the first television transmitter to the BBC. It also manufactured broadcast television cameras for British television production companies, and for the BBC. The commercial television ITV companies used them as well alongside cameras made by Pye and Marconi. Their best remembered piece of broadcast television equipment was the EMI 2001 colour television camera, which became the mainstay of much of the British television industry from the end of the 1960s until the early 1980s. Exports of this piece of equipment were low, however, and EMI left this area of product manufacture.

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