Dynatron Radio Ltd was the trade name used by H.Hacker & Sons for their wireless products. The firm started trading in 1927 and operated independently until being bought by

Ekco EKCO (from Eric Kirkham Cole Limited) was a British electronics company producing radio and television sets from 1924 until 1960. Expanding into plastic production for its own use, Ekco Plastics produced both radio cases and later domestic plasti ...

in 1955. The rights to the Dynatron name are currently held by

Roberts Radio Roberts Radio is a British consumer electronics company that produces radios and related audio equipment. Based in Mexborough, the company has been making radios since its foundation in 1932 and claim to be the oldest active radio manufacturer i ...

. Dynatron was also a successful business with making record players; most of them were made in the sixties and seventies. Priced in the pro-sumer market sector, the average household would have had to save the equivalent of three weeks salary to buy one.

Early history

The Hacker brothers, Ron (born 1908) and Arthur (born 1910), shared a strong interest in radio, and started a company producing high quality radiograms and wireless receivers at the ages of just 19 and 17 respectively. As they were too young to become directors of a company, the firm was set up using their father's name, Harry Hacker, in 1927. The firm began in a room above the family grocery shop on

Maidenhead Maidenhead is a market town in the Royal Borough of Windsor and Maidenhead in the county of Berkshire, England, on the southwestern bank of the River Thames. It had an estimated population of 70,374 and forms part of the border with southern Bu ...

High Street, and the first product emerged in 1928 - the Dynatron U53 radiogram. A factory was built in the large rear garden of the family house "Little Gables" in Ray Lea Road in Maidenhead, measuring just 50 by 25 feet initially, but extended several times. In 1936, the company name was changed to Dynatron Radio Ltd. The Hacker brothers always pursued the highest possible technical quality, and released designs incorporating many valves at a time when their competitors concentrated on reducing the number of valves in their products. For many years, they persisted with TRF principle, only adopting

superhet A superheterodyne receiver, often shortened to superhet, is a type of radio receiver that uses frequency mixing to convert a received signal to a fixed intermediate frequency (IF) which can be more conveniently processed than the original carri ...

designs after some 10 years of development.

World War II

During the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, Dynatron contributed to the war effort on a not for profit basis, expanding the work force from around 70 employees to 160. The operation continued from the family home and expanded into a requisitioned factory, amounting to around 15,000 square feet of space. They produced airborne guidance systems such as Gee for the RAF, and after the war, Ron Hacker was awarded the

M.B.E. Mbe may refer to: * Mbé, a town in the Republic of the Congo * Mbe Mountains Community Forest, in Nigeria * Mbe language, a language of Nigeria * Mbe' language, language of Cameroon * ''mbe'', ISO 639 code for the extinct Molala language Molal ...

, though this was accepted with some reluctance as he felt that his brother also deserved the recognition.

Post war period

After the war, austerity measures and component shortages caused the company significant difficulties. The Dynatron range had always been aimed at the top of the market, but achieving this in post-war times was always going to be problematic. In 1954, an offer from

was accepted, and control was handed over in 1955. At the time, there were 150 employees, and a new factory in St. Peter's Road had just been built. The Hacker brothers were retained as joint Managing Directors, and the company was successful; by 1959 there were 250 employees. However, the brothers decided to leave the group in September 1959 to start

Hacker Radio Ltd Hacker Radio Limited manufactured domestic radio and audio equipment. The company was formed in Maidenhead by brothers Ron and Arthur Hacker in 1959, and traded successfully until 1977. Financial difficulties resulted in the company being sold an ...

. Shortly afterwards in 1960, Ekco merged with Pye, and then Pye was bought by

Philips Koninklijke Philips N.V. (), commonly shortened to Philips, is a Dutch multinational conglomerate corporation that was founded in Eindhoven in 1891. Since 1997, it has been mostly headquartered in Amsterdam, though the Benelux headquarters i ...

in 1967. During this time, Dynatron was moved from Maidenhead to King's Lynn. In 1981, Philips sold Dynatron to

. During the 1980s, Roberts, a company already marketing portable radios at the premium end of the market sector, used the Dynatron brand for lower-end portable radios and clock-radios. This tactic was needed in order to prevent Dynatron and Roberts products from competing against each other in the same market sector, but unfortunately it also very much cheapened the image of the brand. Roberts manufactured the last Dynatron-branded radios in the late 1980s. Since then the brand has been in a state of permanent hiatus.

References

{{Reflist

External links

Hacker Radio Yahoo Group
- contains details of transistor radios made by Dynatron covering a period from 1958 to 1969.
The Dynatron Museum
is a comprehensive website detailing the history of the company and showcasing many of their products. Electronics companies of the United Kingdom Defunct manufacturing companies of the United Kingdom Companies based in Maidenhead History of radio