Melville Eastham isn’t well known today, yet his breakthrough technical, business, and social achievements in the first half of the 20th century were highly influential and helped create the modern electronics industry.
Born in Oregon City, Ore., on June 26, 1885, Eastham entered a world that little resembles today’s continuously connected planet. In 1885, the year AT&T was incorporated, the telephone and telegraph were the only high-speed communications options, primarily used by governments, businesses, and only the wealthiest individuals. Yet by 1964, the year Eastham died, telephones could be found in nearly 83% of U.S. homes. Radio images were being transmitted from the moon. And, AT&T was demonstrating its Touch Tone dialing and Picture Phone technologies at the New York World’s Fair.
For most of his professional life, Eastham led General Radio, which initially offered a wide range of radio and electrical products, but eventually focused on test instruments, such as vacuum tube voltmeters (VTVMs) and oscilloscopes. But it wasn’t the equipment that set Eastham apart from his competition.
Eastham’s greatest long-term contribution to the electronics industry was the care and attention he lavished on his company, employees, and products. In all of these areas, Eastham set benchmarks that can still be used to measure the success of an electronics company, even in an era of smart phones, flat-panel televisions, and unmanned aerial drones.
Early Career
In 1905, after leaving school and working for a time as an electrician for a streetcar company in Portland, Ore., Eastham moved to New York. Upon arriving in what was then the nexus of a rapidly growing U.S. electrical industry, Eastham joined the Ovington X-Ray Company.
The next year he partnered with a pair of Ovington employees, J. Emory Clapp and W.O. Eddy. Together they founded the Boston-based Clapp, Eddy and Eastham Company, which also marketed x-ray components, such as spark coils.
The business, which was renamed Clapp-Eastham following Eddy’s departure, continued to offer x-ray parts. But the company eventually found a lucrative new niche by selling its spark coils to wireless experimenters who were eager to use the components in their primitive spark-gap transmitters.
Eastham left Clapp Eastham in 1915 to organize General Radio, based in Cambridge, Mass. The new company would serve the rapidly growing ham radio market, as well as a steadily increasing number of commercial and government customers, with a variety of radio-related products, including test instruments. With amateur radio experimentation silenced upon the nation’s entry into World War I, the company turned its attention to military sales, offering transmitters, receivers, test devices, and various radio components.
After experiencing a business downturn at the end of the war, General Radio’s sales slowly revived as the company began cashing in on the 1920s radio boom. The firm sold radio transmitters, receivers, and related equipment to hams as well as commercial and government customers. By the late 1920s, as the radio boom subsided, General Radio backed out of the transmitter/receiver market to focus on what Eastham felt was his company’s core competency: precision test instruments.
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