History
PerkinElmer traces its history back to a merger between divisions of what had been two S&P 500 companies, EG&G Inc. (formerly NYSE: EGG) of Wellesley, Massachusetts and Perkin-Elmer (formerly NYSE: PKN) of Norwalk, Connecticut. On May 28, 1999, the non-government side of EG&G Inc. purchased the Analytical Instruments Division of Perkin-Elmer, its traditional business segment, for US$425 million, also assuming the Perkin-Elmer name and forming the new PerkinElmer company, with new officers and a new Board of Directors. At the time, EG&G made products for diverse industries including automotive, medical, aerospace and photography.
The old Perkin-Elmer Board of Directors and Officers remained at that reorganized company under its new name, PE Corporation. It had been the Life Sciences division of Perkin-Elmer, and its two component tracking stock business groups, Celera Genomics (NYSE: CRA) and PE Biosystems (formerly NYSE: PEB), were centrally involved in the highest profile biotechnology events of the decade, the intense race against the Human Genome Project consortium, which then resulted in the genomics segment of the technology bubble.
EG&G began in 1931; It was started by two MIT professors, Harold Edgerton and Kenneth Germeshausen in a Boston garage. The company was originally incorporated in 1947 as EG&G.
Perkin-Elmer was founded in 1937 by Richard Perkin and Charles Elmer as an optical design and consulting company. In 1944, Perkin-Elmer entered the analytical-instruments business, and in the early 1990s, partnered with Cetus Corporation (and later Hoffmann-La Roche) to pioneer the polymerase chain reaction (PCR) equipment industry. Analytical-instruments business was also operated from 1954 to 2001 in Germany, by the Bodenseewerk Perkin-Elmer GmbH located in Überlingen at Lake Constance.
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