Lear Siegler

Its products range from car seats and brakes to weapons control systems for military fighter planes.

Over the next decade and a half, Brooks, who became Siegler's first president, established a reputation for supervising numerous startling acquisitions.

In June 1955, seven months after the merger, Hallamore Manufacturing Company, an electronics firm, became Siegler's first "technology" acquisition.

John G. Brooks (Echo Products, Zenith Radio, and US Army Air Corps) headed up the new enterprise.

The merger was based on Brooks' plan of acquiring and growing successful but possibly unrelated operating companies (with resources and management in common) into one of the first conglomerates (with a focus on aerospace, defense and consumer markets), and Lear's goal of divesting his ownership interest in Lear to pursue development of his Learjet corporate aircraft (the first pure jet private aircraft) as well as other engineering innovations.

The business climate was strongly influenced by the political undercurrent that accelerated when Sputnik was launched, and amplified when President John F. Kennedy set as a national goal putting an American astronaut on the Moon by the end of the 1960s.

Robert Campion, then company Secretary, followed Brooks as Lear Siegler's president and chief executive officer.

Delays in other government projects, steep start-up costs at a modular housing factory in Hawaii, and a strike at General Motors also damaged the company's profits.

[citation needed] Because the new minicomputer systems required inexpensive operator consoles (compared to teletype printers), the terminals became a success.

In 1976, LSI released ADM-3A, one of the earliest computer video terminals, with a new industry low single unit price of $995.

Subsequently, most of LSI's divisions were sold off leading to such independent companies as Safeflight, Smith and Wesson, Piper, Lear Siegler Seating and BFM Aerospace.

The division that produced fly by wire systems and unmanned aircraft was purchased by British Aerospace, now part of BAE, the largest defense contractor in the world.

In 1997, LSS Holdings, LLC acquired the operating assets of Lear Siegler, Inc. and its subsidiaries UNC Lear Siegler Services, Inc. and Burnside OTT Training Center, Inc.[5] LSI provided aircraft maintenance support services on F-5 aircraft under a contract with a Saudi Arabian government ministry, ending in 2000.