business profile
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Polished to
Warren clark charts the intriguing and long history of Gooch and Housego, which dates back more than 60 years
he story of Gooch and Housego dates back to wartime Britain, when the paths of Archie Gooch and
Gareth Jones
Les Housego crossed for the first time. Gooch was a skilled optical craftsman, Housego an engineer, and both were seconded to work for STC in the field of quartz crystals. Crystal-controlled oscillators were used in wartime aircraft to change the communications frequencies after each mission, so their expertise in quartz crystals was an essential part of the war effort. During the war, the STC operation was moved from Greenwich, London, down to Ilminster in Somerset – where the company Gooch and Housego is located today. During the time STC was located in Ilminster, both Gooch and Housego married and settled down in the area. When STC moved away after the war, both were reluctant to follow, and instead decided to stay put. Thus, in 1948, the company Gooch and Housego was born, with a focus on scientific optics. The company’s differentiator, from a very early stage, was the ability to work with both crystalline materials and precision optics. Throughout the 1960s and 70s, the company grew steadily and unspectacularly, maintaining a reputation as a highly-skilled optical jobbing shop, but without any in-house design capabilities. Gareth Jones, now chief executive officer, joined Gooch and Housego as a graduate physicist in 1978, to be followed shortly after by other physics graduates. It signalled the beginning of a
8 electro optics l MAY 2011 Gooch and Housego’s headquarters in ilminster
shift in the company’s ethos, as it began to exploit the properties of crystalline materials more fully. ‘We began to make waveplates, acousto-optics, piezo-electric transducers, electro-optic devices and beyond,’ says Jones. ‘It was a great place for a physicist to be, as we had all these skills in house, and fantastic opportunities to create new products. In the early 80s, when lasers began to move from the laboratory into the industrial arena, there was a requirement for products such as Q-switches and modulators. ‘We had the skills and capabilities to manufacture these products, but at the time, not the design abilities. I was part of a group of people that set up an R&D department, which meant that from around 1982, we were a company that designed its own products too. One of our early successes was the Q-switch, which remains one of our best-selling products to this day.’
Jones believes that Gooch and Housego stole a march on its competitors at the time, because
of the skill set it had. ‘Others were either crystal growth companies or electronics companies; this meant that they often had design skills, but couldn’t match our optical manufacturing skills – a field in which we’d been involved for more than 30 years already.’ One aspect of the optical manufacturing process where the company lacked in-house expertise was in thin-film coatings. ‘We used a number of third-party companies
We had the skills to
manufacture these products, but not the design abilities
to do the coatings, but they just weren’t good enough,’ says Jones. ‘So, we took the bold decision in the mid-1980s to start our own thin-film coatings facility. This was a huge challenge, because we were attempting to achieve standards that specialist coating companies could not reach. It took time but, once we set it up, it had massive benefits in terms of cost-savings and reduced turnaround times. The ability to excel in both optical
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