M. E. L. Equipment Co
of Crawley, manufacturer of telecommunications equipment and electronic instruments, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Philips Industries.
1961 Previously called Mullard Equipment.
Mullard Equipment Ltd moved to Crawley in 1961. Later became The MEL Equipment Co Ltd, when it was still a Philips owned company, however, once the name was changed, the letters MEL was no longer an abbreviation for Mullard Equipment Ltd. Towards the end of its Philips ownership, this Crawley business became known as the MEL Division of Philips Electronic and Associated Industries Ltd.[1]
1964 M. E. L. Equipment and a French company agreed to develop components for the Concord (sic) aircraft[2]
By 1966 Philips' telecommunications subsidiary was known as Mullard Electronics Ltd[3]
1967 Philips Scientific Equipment was a division of MEL[4]
1968 Supplied automatic message routeing equipment to the Post Office [5]
1968 The Philips Scientific Equipment Division of M. E. L. Equipment Co. became part of Pye Unicam[6]
1969 Was one of the principal subsidiaries of N. V. Philips[7]:
1971 Acquired avionics plants at Southend and Glasgow from Pye with 750 redundancies[8]
Near the end, there was also an MEL Defence Systems Ltd on Ottawa, Canada as a result of having a major defence contract for the Canadian Navy which required that a system designed in Crawley needed to be manufactured in Canada as condition of winning the Contract.
1990 Thorn EMI acquired Mullard Electronics. The communications business was sold to Thomson-CSF.
After the MEL Division was sold the Thorn EMI at the end of 1989, Thorn EMI eventually sold the communications business of MEL to Thomson-CSF and they were allowed to call this business MEL Communications Ltd. Before long, Thompson amalgamated that business with the Redifon Radio and it became know as Redifon-MEL Ltd. [9]
Once Thomson-CSF "badge engineered" themselves as Thales, Redifon-MEL it became Thales Communications Ltd.[10]