Raytheon Company

Raytheon Company was founded in Cambridge, Mass., as the American Appliance Company in 1922, a pivotal time in American history. The first decade of modernism, the 1920s saw the advent of automobiles, radios and refrigerators. The electrical industry was extending power lines across the United States, and telephones were linking every hamlet and home. In the aftermath of World War I, the roaring '20s was a time of flappers and flasks, and the nation was in flux, disillusioned by the end of a bitter war that brought no real peace or economic security and energized by the prospects of modern technological advances. Emerging from the depths of a severe post-war depression that wiped out jobs and forged a widening chasm between the privileged and the poor was a breed of entrepreneurs with a driving ambition to succeed and willingness to gamble on it.