Brown, Boveri & Cie

Brown, Boveri & Cie, usually called BBC or Brown Boveri, was a Swiss group of electrical engineering companies founded in 1891 at Baden near Zurich by Charles Eugene Lancelot Brown and Walter Boveri, who had both worked at the Maschinenfabrik Oerlikon. It made heavy electrical equipment such as electric motors for locomotives and power-generating plant for Europe's railways. Because the Swiss home market was small, it set up subsidiaries across Europe early, in Italy, Germany, Norway, Austria, Czechoslovakia and the Balkans, and at times those subsidiaries were larger than the parent. A licensing agreement of 1919 let the British firm Vickers make and sell its products across the British Empire, and a similar arrangement tied it to the Dutch firm Heemaf. In 1988 it merged with the Swedish firm ASEA to form ABB. Engineers such as Arthur Scherbius sold patent rights to the company and worked within its development group.