7th January 2021 10:20 am
Thales UK CEO and Chairman Alex Cresswell believes that current and future challenges will provide opportunities for engineers that are too good to miss. Jason Ford reports.
Thales’ presence in the UK can be traced to Glasgow in the late 1880s when an engineer and a physicist responded to a tender from industry after the poor performance of artillery rangefinders during the Boer War.
The tender asked for improved equipment that could be operated by soldiers of ‘average intelligence’ and the two academics – who went onto form Barr & Stroud – cemented a relationship with the UK’s armed forces that continues to this day. Barr & Stroud’s range-finding technology was deployed on the Royal Navy’s first submarine and Thales has since gone on to provide periscopes, then optronic masts, to every single submarine in the Royal Navy.