Heathkit
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Heathkits were products of the Heath Company, Benton Harbor, Michigan. Their products included electronic test equipment, home audio equipment, Black & White and Color TV receivers, ham radio equipment, and the influential Heath H-8 hobbyist computer, which were sold in kit form for assembly by the purchaser.
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Founding
The Heath Company was originally founded as an aircraft company in the early 1900s by Edward Bayard Heath. Starting in 1926 it sold a light aircraft, the Heath Parasol, in kit form. Heath died during a 1931 test flight. In 1935, Howard Anthony purchased the now-bankrupt Heath Company, and focused on selling accessories for small aircraft. After World War II, Anthony decided that entering the electronics industry was a good idea, and bought a large stock of surplus wartime electronic parts with the intention of building kits with them. In 1947, Heath introduced its first electronic kit, an oscilloscope that sold for US$50 -- the price was unbeatable at the time, and the oscilloscope went on to be a huge seller.
What made a Heathkit special
After the success of the oscilloscope kit, Heath went on to produce dozens of Heathkit products. Heathkits were influential in shaping two generations of electronic hobbyists. The Heathkit sales premise was that by investing the time to assemble a Heathkit, the purchaser could build something comparable to a factory-built product at a very significantly lower cash cost. During those decades, the premise was basically valid. Commercial factory-built electronic products were constructed from generic, discrete components such as vacuum tubes, tube sockets, capacitors, inductors and resistors, and essentially hand-wired and assembled. The home kit-builder could perform the same assembly tasks himself. In the case of their most expensive product, the Thomas electronic organ, building the Heathkit version represented a very substantial savings.
One category in which Heathkit enjoyed great popularity was amateur radio. Ham radio operators had frequently needed to build their equipment from scratch before the advent of kits, with the concern of procuring all the parts separately and relying on often-experimental designs. Kits brought the convenience of all parts being supplied together and the assurance of a predictable finished product, and many Heathkit models became well-known in the ham radio community.
The exterior fit and finish of the Heathkit enclosures was not always quite up to the standards of most factory-built products, but a Heathkit amplifier did not look out of place in a living room. The technical characteristics of many Heathkits were good. The ordinary consumer would, of course, buy a factory-built phonograph from the likes of RCA; but an audiophile who was serious enough to assemble a system from individual components could and frequently did give serious consideration to Heathkit products.
In the case of electronic test equipment, Heathkits often filled a low-end niche. Where a Hewlett-Packard product might have metal vernier dials or ten-turn pots with digital readouts, a Heathkit would might use a simple plastic pointer and a scale silk-screened onto the front panel. A $40 Heathkit oscilloscope might not be remotely comparable to a factory-built oscilloscope—but there were no $40 (or even $100) factory-built oscilloscopes.
Building a Heathkit required time, patience, and the ability to follow directions; given these, the risk of failure was small. Heathkits were absolutely complete except for tools. The instruction books were models of clarity, beginning with basic lessons on soldering technique, and proceeding with explicit directions, illustrated with line drawings, and a box to check off as each task was accomplished.
No knowledge of electronics was needed to assemble a Heathkit. The assembly process did not teach much about electronics, but provided a great deal of what could have been called "electronics literacy," such as the ability to identify tube pin numbers or read a resistor color code. Many hobbyists began by assembling Heathkits, became familiar with the appearance of components like capacitors, transformers, and tubes, and were motivated to find out just what these components actually did. Heath developed a relationship with electronics correspondence schools, where they supplied electronic kits to be assembled as part of the course, with the school basing its texts around the kit.
There were other vendors of electronic equipment in kit form; Allied Electronics, an electronic parts supply house, had its KnightKits, Radio Shack made a few forays into this market (mainly with reconfigurable "100-in-1"-type systems), Dynaco made its audio products available in kit form (Dynakits), as did H. H. Scott, Inc., and many garage industries supplied less polished kits based on build-it-yourself articles in the electronics hobbyist press; but none had anything comparable to the influence of Heathkits.
Diversification and the digital era
After the death of Howard Anthony in 1954, Heath was bought by Daystrom Company, a furniture maker that was diversifying into electronics. Daystrom would eventually be absorbed by oilfield service company Schlumberger Limited in 1962, and the Daystrom/Schlumberger days were their most successful. In 1974, Heathkit started Heathkit Educational Systems, which expanded their manuals' clear writing style into general electronics and computer training materials. Heathkit also expanded their expertise into digital and, eventually, computerized equipment, producing among other things digital clocks and weather stations with the new technology.
The last great flourishing of the electronic product in kit form was probably the 1978 introduction of the Heathkit H-8 computer. The earliest computers had been sold as kits to begin with. Unlike some of the other companies, Heath had real experience in producing electronics in kit form and the Heath name carried confidence with it. The H-8 was successful, and seeing the potential in personal computers, Zenith Radio Company bought Heath Company from Schlumberger in 1979, renaming the computer division Zenith Data Systems (ZDS).
The kit era comes to a close
By the 1980s, the introduction of printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, discount pricing, and overseas assembly eroded the basic Heathkit premise. Assembling a kit might still be fun, but it could no longer save much money. The switch to surface mount components and LSI ICs (many of which were custom made and not easily available to the general public, much less Heath) finally made it impossible for the home assembler to construct an electronic device which was competitive with assembly line factory products. As its sales of kits dwindled during the decade, Heath relied on its training materials and a new venture in home automation and lighting products to stay afloat. When Zenith eventually sold ZDS to Groupe Bull in 1989, Heathkit was included in the deal.
On March 30, 1992, the end came. Heath announced that it was closing out its kits and leaving the business after 45 years, the last maker of name-brand kits to leave the market.
The Heathkit company still exists (and is still located in Benton Harbor), and now concentrates on the Educational Systems side of the business; it has not resumed making kits, though it does still have the schematic and manual library, and has pointers to people that can help with the older equipment. Heathkit has been through several owners since 1989; in 1995 it was sold by Bull to a private investor group called HIG, which then sold it to another investment group in 1998. Wanting to only concentrate on the educational products, this group sold the Heath/Zenith name and products to DESA International, a maker of specialty tools and heaters.
References
- Fisher, Lawrence M. "Plug is Pulled on Heathkits, Ending a Do-It-Yourself Era", The New York Times, 30 March 1992, page A1.
- Rostky, George. "A Tale Of The Unstoppable Electronic Kit", EE Times, 2 October 2000. reprinted here
External links
- Official Site
- The Heathkit Virtual Museum History, pictures and descriptions of many Heathkits, including the classic Heathkit VTVM
- Heath H8 information, including a simulatorde:Heathkit