As a supplier of high-performance instruments selected to make the journey to Earth’s glowing natural satellite with the Apollo 11 mission, Teledyne Hastings Instruments is famous for the reliability of its top-quality products and outstanding customer care.
This year, it celebrates 80 years of loyalty as a business partner to some of the world’s greatest industry leaders. And, with many big names across many industries utilizing its products for myriad purposes, the company’s reputation is indeed stellar. Providing a vast global audience with top-notch vacuum measurement instruments alongside gas mass flow control and metering instrumentation, Teledyne Hastings also provides its customers with trusted repair and calibration services.
Teledyne Hastings is well-known for premium precision and custom engineering. From attachments that regulate flow, to sensors, and data logging equipment, the team has the necessary tools to develop whatever solution customers need to keep their operations and equipment running smoothly. From its base in Hampton, Virginia, Teledyne Hastings Instruments also provides customers with high-end customization services. Whatever the challenge, the team supports its customers through every part of the process of instrumentation creation.
To ensure good process flow and optimal customer experience, these processes are made as clear and simple as possible and are initiated early in team meetings where Teledyne Hastings ascertains the scope of a project and its customers’ needs. Face-to-face conversation is followed by establishing product specs according to the finest details of the client’s particular operational needs.
Top technology
The company consistently invests in maintaining a strong presence in its field, and that means ensuring that its technology remains current. By concentrating on this aspect of the business, other advantages such as top-class efficiency, quality, and product durability follow.
A natural result of this real commitment to meeting every client’s specific needs is that Teledyne Hastings has developed and introduced so many unique, high-quality products. One that stands out is the 300-VUE series of mass flow meters and controllers. Lauded for its plug-and-play technology and ease of operation, it provides clients with unique functionality. Another is the HVG-2020-B vacuum gauge, as convenient and versatile as it is robust. Each of these comes with optional touchscreen displays enhancing user experience, plus free software.
Indeed, the company’s investments have always been strategic. Having grown into one of the leading vacuum and thermal mass flow companies in America through the ’60s, and becoming a part of Teledyne Incorporated in 1968, Teledyne Hastings became part of the parent company’s instrumentation division and has flourished with its support ever since the amalgamation. Today, Teledyne Hastings operates within the Teledyne Instruments Group.
Teledyne Hastings Instruments has been working with automation experts along with a sister company, Teledyne Dalsa, in incorporating automation technology into their manufacturing processes. “This will be a big step forward in automating our production environment, which will improve our efficiencies and consistent reliable end product,” says Scott Paris, Controller and Site Lead.
Supported by more extensive investment in research and development, the company will launch another vacuum product in early 2025.
People power
Together with intelligent strategy, mindful attention to its people is a large part of the company’s success. Its team is a motivated one, with several of its employees making this their forever job. Within the company’s doors, it’s common to find folks who have come to work here daily for three or four decades. Naturally, the value of such continuity is huge. “We have a long history of dedicated employees who have been with the company forever, ever since they left high school or college—a strength of our company,” says Paris.
Here, continuity not only refers to team spirit and internal systems but also to the expertise passed down from one generation to the next. Customers reap the benefits, enjoying consistent quality instrumentation that supports valuable infrastructure in innumerable ways. “Teledyne Hastings is a great place to work,” agrees Douglas Baker, Director of Sales and Business Development.
A consequence of taking good care of its people is that the company has built a sterling team. With the surprising number of employees who have spent most of their working lives here, the company warmly appreciates the people who make its existence possible. Good leadership guides the team forward, and regular open discussions among its managers fire up communication, and at the same time enrich relationships between staff and leadership.
But Teledyne Hastings is more than a fantastic employer; the company also takes care of its communities through charitable contributions to organizations and initiatives like local community projects, Toys for Tots, and several others. Team members play a part in the company’s green initiatives, whether by replacing traditional lighting with LED bulbs or pitching in for beach clean-ups. In addition, the team celebrates Arbor Day and Earth Day while also providing a list of environmentally aware actions that customers can take at work and home to help protect the environment. The company hosts safety days and other gatherings to mark important dates that align with company values, and beyond all these commitments, the company is also committed to reducing its greenhouse gas emissions by 40 percent by the end of 2040.
Aiming high from the start
Teledyne Hastings has enjoyed an interesting history since its founding in 1944 by Mary and Charles Hastings. Charles, born in 1914 and with a penchant for building radios from a young age, was an aeronautical engineer. Becoming involved with the earliest iteration of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which, in 1944, was operating as the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), Charles received the go-ahead from the government to establish himself in private business on the back of a few groundbreaking concepts he had developed.
Establishing a small home-based outfit called Hastings Instrument Company (HICO), the two Hastings made a formidably visionary team, with Mary taking care of administration and Charles developing equipment that broke new ground, often making history as he went along.
Mary was also instrumental in establishing the company in other ways. At one point, initial calibrations were based on set speeds achieved in her car driving down the road. She later had an assistant who gave her a hand in taking notes and managing instruments attached to the car to collect data on air measurements. The couple’s entire home became part of their operation as the paintwork of the company’s first Air Meter was dried in their kitchen oven.
Growth followed for the company as the Hastings’ instruments gained traction. There were two divisions at one stage, with one of them, Hastings-Raydist, founded on the groundbreaking radio instrument that measured distance, unlike other instruments of this type that, until then, had only measured speed. This division focused solely on radio equipment.
The other division focused on instrumentation and was—pardon the pun—instrumental in the company’s expansion into its present-day place in the market. Eventually, in 1968, its supply of a pioneering vacuum sensor to Apollo 11 for the safe preservation of geological samples collected on the moon helped put the company on everybody’s map.
Growing organically
Teledyne Hastings Instrumentation’s commitment to its customers’ projects remains second to none, as evidenced by the amount of repeat business the team enjoys.
“We are here for our customers,” says Baker. “When we meet a customer, the first thing we want to do is to listen to what their instrumentation needs are in terms of vacuum and flow.” And considering the reputation of the company’s products for robustness and durability, this strong customer loyalty makes sense. As a result, organic growth continues to push Teledyne Hastings’s capabilities and reach ever further, spurred by its ongoing product research and development and agility in responding to market needs.
Sending out a message of sincere thanks to its customers, employees, and suppliers for driving its success, Teledyne Hastings is set to reach greater heights than ever.
