Raytheon

Raytheon is a major American defense contractor and industrial corporation, now a business unit of RTX Corporation, with manufacturing concentrated in weapons, military electronics and commercial electronics. It was founded in 1922 in Cambridge, Massachusetts by Vannevar Bush, Laurence Marshall and Charles Smith as the American Appliance Company, and its name came from an early voltage-regulator tube built on Smith earlier astronomical research on the star Zeta Puppis. It took the name Raytheon Company in 1959. More than ninety percent of its revenue came from military contracts, it was the fifth-largest military contractor in the world by 2012 and the third-largest defense contractor in the United States by 2015, and it was the world largest producer of guided missiles. It merged with United Technologies in 2020 to form Raytheon Technologies, renamed RTX Corporation in July 2023, and its headquarters have moved among several Massachusetts towns.