Oak Industries, Inc. was an American electronics company that manufactured a variety of products throughout seven decades in the 20th century. In existence from 1932 to 2000, the company's business lines primarily centered around electronic components and materials, though the company made a high-profile and ultimately failed extension into communications media in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The firm was founded in Crystal Lake, Illinois, moving its headquarters to Rancho Bernardo, California, in the late 1970s and again to Waltham, Massachusetts, in 1990. Corning Inc. purchased Oak in January 2000 primarily for its Lasertron division, a manufacturer of lasers.
Early history Oak Industries was founded in 1932 as Oak Manufacturing in a 400,000-square-foot (37,000 m2) plant in Crystal Lake, Illinois, by Edward S. Bessey, during the Great Depression. Initially a manufacturer of electrical switches and Bakelite, as well as dial light bulbs and light bulb socket assemblies, the company quickly leaned into the burgeoning radio industry in the 1930s. Oak manufactured radio components, such as tube sockets, for the next decade and a half before finding success with television tuning dials (rotary switches) amid the mass introduction of TV in the early 1950s. This prompted the company to expand its reach in television component manufacturing, acquiring competitors and establishing business units for component manufacturing and materials processing for printed circuit boards between 1956 and 1970. Oak reincorporated in Delaware in 1960. Everitt A. Carter joined the company in 1958 and became chairman in 1963. The next year, Oak renamed itself Oak Electro-netics Corporation in an attempt to characterize its increasingly diverse businesses. The corporate name was changed again, to Oak Industries in 1972. For many years, Oak was the largest employer in Crystal Lake. A 1991 profile of the company's history regarded the late 1960s and early 1970s as its zenith; at one time, the company struggled to hire people and had to rent additional office space because it was growing so quickly. Having traded publicly since its initial public offering in 1944, Oak became listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 1967. Around this time, the company came to own an electrical equipment manufacturing business in South America, a gas valve and electrical control company in Mexico, and Adec, a maker of energy management solutions. In 1976, the company formed a joint venture with Anaconda Copper and Mitsui Mining to form Oak-Mitsui, of which 68.6 percent was owned by Oak, 19.1 percent by Mitsui, and 12.3 percent by Anaconda. When Anaconda backed out, Oak's share rose to 78.2. Oak-Mitsui primarily manufactured copper sheet and foil for precision instruments. Initially only used to support Oak's own materials processing division, Oak-Mitsui grew rapidly in 1979 and by next year was the third-largest supplier of copper foil in the United States. By 1984, the venture had begun supplying foil for outside circuit board laminators.
Media expansion and ON TV
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