Cold War electronics abroad: Magnavox and the licensed radio

1951 — 1995

Fort Wayne's defense electronics went out under foreign flags: From the 1940s, Fort Wayne's Magnavox division built military systems for the Department of Defense and for NATO countries, as the company's own published history puts it, and by the time the Magnavox Government and Industrial Electronics Company closed its forty-year Fort Wayne account it reported annual sales above $650 million. The outward mechanism was the Foreign Military Sales program and its technology-transfer agreements, and one Fort Wayne engineer's career memoir documents it from the inside: work in the FMS area with customers in Greece and Korea; a technology-transfer program under which Magnavox supplied manufacturing kits for its airborne radio sets and Aselsan in Turkey assembled the sets for its own country's use and for other NATO countries; and contracts work "on transfer of technology of Magnavox products direct to NATO Countries starting with Turkey." On the consumer side, the same corporation's most famous Fort Wayne product went abroad as a novelty: the Odyssey, the first home video game, demonstrated at Magnavox headquarters in Fort Wayne in 1969 and sold in the United States from 1972, was released that year in a dozen other countries as histories of the console record, and Magnavox built a distinct Export Odyssey variant by 1974 — modified American units going to England and the export model turning up from France to Venezuela. The defense group's long Fort Wayne run ended in the consolidations the Business section records — Philips, the Carlyle Group, Hughes in 1995, Raytheon after — but for four decades the city's radios, sonobuoys and electronic-warfare sets were standard equipment far beyond the United States.

Sources:

1. Daniel Aldred and David Peterson, Magnavox Government and Industrial Electronics Company, 1951–1991: A Legacy of Pride and Excellence (2017), as reviewed in The Journal Gazette, 30 June 2018 — military systems "for both the department and NATO countries," annual sales above $650 million, more than 7,000 employed.
2. John D. Hannigan, "Magnavox – Fort Wayne – 1992" (career memoir, 2019) — FMS customers in Greece and Korea, the Aselsan technology-transfer program in Turkey, and technology transfer "direct to NATO Countries starting with Turkey."
3. Histories of the Magnavox Odyssey (console histories and the Export Odyssey record) — the 1969 Fort Wayne demonstration, release in twelve other countries in the first year, and the 1974 export variant.
4. Businesses — the Magnavox divisions, sales and successions in full, cross-referenced and not retold here.