Defense Technology

When he became president of the company, J. Erick Jonsson applied GSI’s innovations to submarine detection. This was the company’s first step in from seismic detection in service to the petroleum industry to the young field of electronics. After World War II, Patrick E. Haggerty, who had purchased equipment from GSI for the United States Navy during the war, helped reorient GSI toward military electronics. In recognition of this change, 1951 the company renamed itself Texas Instruments (TI), and within two years it was publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange.

In 1941, Geophysical Service, Inc. launched equipment to detect submarines, an area in which it remained active throughout the twentieth century, after the organization became Texas Instruments. The Magnetic Anomaly Detection device was the first step in GSI’s transformation into TI.

The Air Force awarded a contract to Texas Instruments to build a computer with Integrated Circuits (ICs) in 1961. A module with a dozen solid circuit networks being plugged into a small computer appears on the left. On the right, the small unit appears next to a more traditional model with 8,500 components that carried out identical operations. Some scholars estimate that this was the first digital computer.

Technology developed by Texas Instruments guaranteed American security during the Cold War. The U.S. Air Force Minuteman II missile shown in this image from 1964 contained more than 2,000 TI circuits, which appear in the inset in the bottom left of the image.

In 1969, Texas Instruments developed laser-guidance systems for missiles. This image shows a technician of the U.S. Navy working on a Paveway laser-guided bomb for an F-117 stealth fighter.

Texas Instruments was a leader in the development and production of high-speed antiradiation (HARM) missiles, which targeted radar sites for destruction. HARM missiles like the one on this jet first appeared in the 1980s.