Pye Ltd. was an electronics company founded in Cambridge

Cambridge

The city of Cambridge is a university town and the administrative centre of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It lies in East Anglia about north of London. Cambridge is at the heart of the high-technology centre known as Silicon Fen – a play on Silicon Valley and the fens surrounding the...

, England

England

England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and is currently wholly owned by Philips

Philips

Koninklijke Philips Electronics N.V. , more commonly known as Philips, is a multinational Dutch electronics company....

.
W.G. Pye & Co. Ltd. was founded in 1896 in Cambridge by William George Pye

William George Pye

William George Pye was born on 27 October 1869 at Battersea, London.In 1896 he started a company called W G Pye which manufactured scientific and optical equipment....

, an employee of the Cavendish Laboratory

Cavendish Laboratory

The Cavendish Laboratory is the Department of Physics at the University of Cambridge, and is part of the university's School of Physical Sciences. It was opened in 1874 as a teaching laboratory....

, as a part time business making scientific instruments. By the outbreak of World War I

World War I

World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...

 in 1914 the company employed 40 people manufacturing instruments that were used for teaching and research. The war increased demand for such instruments and the War Office

War Office

The War Office was a department of the British Government, responsible for the administration of the British Army between the 17th century and 1964, when its functions were transferred to the Ministry of Defence...

 needed experimental thermionic valves.