Sylvania Electric Products was a U.S. manufacturer of diverse electrical equipment, including at various times radio transceivers, vacuum tubes, semiconductors, and mainframe computers. They were one of the companies involved in the development of the COBOL programming language.
History
The firm was founded to repair light bulbs in 1901, and began making them as "Hygrade Incandescent Lamp Company", Hygrade merged with another firm that had been formed to make vacuum tubes in 1931 as "Hygrade Sylvania Corporation". In 1942, the company changed its name to Sylvania Electric Products, Inc. It was very successful in the early and late 1980s in India under the name Sylvania-Laxman.
The rights to the Sylvania name in many countries are held by the U.S. subsidiary of the German company Osram which, itself, is a subsidiary of Siemens AG (SI-NYSE). OSRAM acquired the Sylvania businesses in North America from GTE in 1993.
The Sylvania brand name is owned worldwide, apart for Australia, Canada, Mexico, New Zealand, Puerto Rico and the USA. by SLI headquarterd in Geneva, Switzerland. In March 2007 Havell's, an Indian manufacturer of lighting products, signed an agreement to acquire SLI Sylvania from its owners.
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