CB1100 Monthly Photo Challenge

[Delphisa]

After two weeks with bad weather, yesterday was ok for a ride…

Here is a place I cannot access anymore, but we can have a view when passing along the street. Behind this old farm, a rather large electronics factory was built at the end of fifties years - first building in 1955. It is located in Saint-Egrève, town of the suburbs of Grenoble. Before 1955, there was only this farm house and grange. The house was transformed in a private restaurant, for customers and guests, and the grange became a large multi-purpose room. As far as I can see, this part of the plant, called “Elektra” is the only one unchanged along the years!




I have been working there (in the buildings behind the farm) for 17 years, from 1981 to 1998. I was in charge of some special purpose cathode-ray tube developments, in Thomson-CSF electron tubes division. I have some very good souvenirs of this period, my job was quite interesting. Yet cathode-ray tubes technology was mature, but for some special purposes it remained an essential component for advanced electronic devices (air traffic control, avionics displays, photographic reproduction…) and new developments were conducted all along the time I was involved in this product line. It declined mid of ‘90s, when LCD technology emerged. Then I moved to an other plant, still within Thomson-CSF, but dealing with some other electronic components, for X-Ray imaging.

The Saint-Egrève plant kept on producing special purpose electronic components, but only semiconductor devices. Tubes manufacturing buildings were destroyed, now on about half of the space they used, there are living flats. Thomson-CSF changed his name to Thales, and later sold the semiconductors manufacturing facilities. It is now Teledyne e2V. That’s life! e2V (“English Electric Valve”) has been a Thomson-CSF competitor for years and years…;-)

Here is an aerial view of the plant, beginning of 1970 years :


And a video showing all the transformations along the years…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-x_plk5a...e38.org%2F

Some more information about the history of this area can be found here. https://www.tedimage38.org/histoire/hist...st-egreve/
Sorry, it is in French. But many pictures and videos can be understood however.

Jean-Pierre