The Pye History Project is an industrial, technical and social history program operated by the Pye History Trust to research, document and record the history of the Pye Group of Companies from 1896 and the present day and is funded by the Pye Foundation Trust. The Pye Group was always headquartered in Cambridge, England.
The Trustees of the Pye History Trust launched a permanent Pye exhibition at the Cambridge Museum of Technology (CMT) on Tuesday 21 May 2019. It was opened by Professor Sir Mike Gregory, former Head of the Manufacturing and Management Division of the Engineering Department at the University of Cambridge, and of the Institute for Manufacturing. It was attended by many distinguished guests and former Pye employees.
The exhibition is in the dedicated Pye Building at CMT and includes eight cabinets displaying a varied range of Pye products dating from the beginning of the 20th century to the 1990s. The history of Pye is also graphically displayed in a timeline from the point that William G. Pye set up the Company making scientific instruments, before resigning from his job as workshop supervisor at the Cavendish Laboratory, University of Cambridge.
From this modest beginning Pye grew to become one of the leading global technology groups in the UK and began the so-called Cambridge phenomenon. The Pye museum is particularly significant to Cambridge because Pye was the biggest private sector company in the Cambridge area, employing some 8,000 employees locally and more than 25,000 across the UK. At one time there were 24 different Pye companies in and around Cambridge designing and manufacturing a diverse range of electronic and scientific products and components.
The Pye museum opened to the public in on 7 June 2019 and it is hoped that the story of Pye and its display of scientific and electronic products through the ages will inspire the young scientists and engineers of the future.
The Pye group was led for 40 years by Charles Stanley (known as C.O. Stanley) whose inspiration and vision led to the growth and success of the Company. Pye was taken over by Philips Electronics in 1967 and many parts of the Pye Group absorbed into Philips companies. Pye Telecommunications continued under the Pye name until 1986. From then it traded as Philips Radio Communications Systems and from 1996 as Simoco International. Today the former Radio Systems division of Pye Telecom trades as Simoco Wireless Solutions and the Tetra digital portable business as Sepura PLC.