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The San Francisco Bay Area was an early center of ham radio with about 10% of the operators in the United States. William Eitel, Jack McCullough, and Charles Litton, Sr., who together pioneered vacuum tube manufacturing in the Bay Area, were hobbyists with training in technology gained locally who participated in development of short-wave radio by the ham radio hobby. High frequency, and especially, Very high frequency, VHF, transmission in the 10 metre band, required higher quality power tubes than were manufactured by the consortium of RCA, Western Electric, General Electric, Westinghouse which controlled vacuum tube manufacture. Litton pioneered the glass lathe which made mass production of reliable high quality power tubes possible.

While employed by the small San Francisco, California manufacturing firm of Heintz & Kaufman which manufactured custom radio equipment Bill Eitel (amateur radio call sign W6UF) and Jack McCullough (W6CHE) convinced company president Ralph Heintz (W6XBB) to allow them to develop a transmitting tube that could operate at lower voltages than those then available to the amateur radio market, such as the RCA UV-204A or the 852. Their effort was a success and resulted in production of the HK-354. Shortly after in 1934, Eitel and McCullough left H&K to form Eitel McCullough Corp. in San Bruno California.

The first product produced under the trade mark 'Eimac' was the 150T power triode. The new company thrived during World War II by selling tubes to the U.S. military for use in radar equipment.

Reference: Wikipedia.

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