Laurence Marshall

Laurence Marshall was a Boston-area electrical engineer and entrepreneur who co-founded American Appliance Company in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1922. Marshall had a background in industrial engineering and saw commercial opportunity in improving radio receiver technology for home use. He assembled a group of scientific collaborators — most notably Vannevar Bush, then a professor at MIT — and Charles Smith to develop a practical rectifier that would allow radio sets to run on household alternating current rather than cumbersome batteries. His practical business instincts and fundraising ability were instrumental in sustaining the early company through its commercial launch period, during which the rectifier product found genuine consumer acceptance.

Laurence Marshall served as President and then Chairman of the company that would become Raytheon Manufacturing Company from its founding in 1922 through the mid-1940s. Under his leadership, the company transitioned from a components supplier to a defense electronics manufacturer of critical strategic importance. Marshall's most consequential decision was committing Raytheon's manufacturing capacity to magnetron production during World War II, a bet that transformed the company's scale, capabilities, and government relationships. He was less successful in navigating the postwar transition to consumer electronics, and the company went through leadership and strategic changes in the late 1940s and 1950s. Marshall's legacy is as the founder of a company that became central to American defense electronics capability, even though the consumer electronics chapter of the company he built proved difficult.