Hughes Aircraft: From the Spruce Goose to the First Laser and DirecTV

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Hughes Aircraft Company was founded in 1934 in Glendale, California, as a division of the Hughes Tool Company so Howard Hughes could build his H-1 racer and set speed records. In World War II it grew from four full-time employees to 80,000 in Culver City, making B-25 struts and machine gun feed chutes, but Hughes's own prototypes, the D-2, the XF-11 and the H-4 Hercules mocked as the Spruce Goose, delivered nothing for mass production. A 1947 Senate investigation, one of the first televised, was harsh though he was cleared of the specific allegations. In 1948 the company pivoted to electronics, and Simon Ramo and Dean Wooldridge developed the MA-1 automated fire control system, paired with the AIM-4 Falcon missile. By 1953 Hughes had $600 million in government contracts and 17,000 employees, but that September Ramo and Wooldridge quit over Hughes's erratic management and founded what became TRW.

With the Air Force threatening to pull contracts and Hughes facing big personal taxes, he donated the company's stock in 1953 to the new Howard Hughes Medical Institute, with himself as sole trustee. The IRS challenged the arrangement and lost, and Lawrence A. Pat Hyland took over management in 1954. Hughes later employed 3,300 PhDs, Richard Feynman gave weekly seminars, and in 1960 Theodore Maiman built the first working laser at the Malibu labs. Hughes built Syncom, the first geosynchronous communications satellite, in 1963, and ATS-1 and the Surveyor 1 lunar lander in 1966. Howard Hughes died in 1976 with no valid will; after an eight-year fight led by Delaware attorneys general, new trustees sold the company to General Motors in 1985 for about $5.2 billion.

• Maiman's laser used a synthetic ruby cylinder with mirrored ends inside a coiled flash lamp.
• Conflict of interest rules barred Hughes Aircraft from developing medical technology while owned by the institute.
• By 2000 Hughes had built nearly 40 percent of the commercial satellites in service.
• Under GM, Hughes Electronics bought General Dynamics' missile business in 1992 and launched DirecTV in 1994.
• GM then broke it up, selling defense to Raytheon for $9.5 billion in 1997, satellites to Boeing in 2000 and the rest to News Corporation in 2003.