Federal Telegraph Company

The company was founded in Palo Alto, California in 1909 by Cyril Frank Elwell, and was first known as the Poulsen Wireless Company, after licensing Valdemar Poulsen's arc transmitter for use in the United States.

The company initially developed high-powered transmitters used for long distance radiotelegraph communication.

[1] In 1911–13, Lee De Forest and two assistants worked at Federal Telegraph on the first vacuum tube amplifier and oscillator, which De Forest called the "Oscillaton" after his earlier Audion.

In 1931, Dr. Ernest O. Lawrence, inventor of the cyclotron, convinced Federal Telegraph to donate an 80-ton magnet they had developed for a canceled project in China to his first cyclotron project on the campus of the University of California Berkeley.

Lawrence's invention of the cyclotron was the basis of his being awarded the Nobel Prize in 1939.

California Historical Landmark No. 836 at the corner of Channing and Emerson in Palo Alto, California at the original location of FTC laboratory