Leading the way for 250 years

Kelvin Hughes is today a privately owned company but it can trace its history back for more than two hundred and fifty years when predecessors supplied mariners with chronometers and sextants to help navigate them around the new worlds.

Two companies: Kelvin Bottomley & Baird and Hughes & Sons had existed side by side for many years. The former was originally based in Glasgow, Scotland and had been a manufacture and supplier of technical equipment designed by the great Lord Kelvin of Largs an academic now buried in Westminster Abbey. The Hughes family were originally clock makers in the East End of London who progressed into supplying sextants and chronometers to ships coming into the Thames.

The two companies joined in the late 1940s to form Kelvin Hughes Limited which then became part of Smiths, a UK based instrument maker, in the early 1960s.

Today the company is privately owned and is a world leader in the design and manufacture of marine navigation systems and the supply of navigational data world-wide.