PerkinElmer Brand Guidelines: Two Astronomers, 1937, Hubble & a 2023 Split

An astronomy lecture and a partnership.

PerkinElmer began with two amateur astronomers. English Wikipedia says Richard Perkin, who had studied chemical engineering at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn before trying Wall Street, and Charles Elmer, who ran a firm supplying court reporters, met when Elmer attended one of Perkin’s lectures on astronomy at the Brooklyn Institute of Arts and Sciences. Their shared interest led to a firm making precision optics, set up as a partnership on 19 April 1937 and run first from a small office in Manhattan, then from a production site in Jersey City.

The firm was incorporated in December 1939, moved to Glenbrook, Connecticut, in 1941 and soon afterwards to Norwalk, Connecticut, where it stayed until 2000, according to the same source. For most of that time it was styled Perkin-Elmer, with a hyphen; the one-word PerkinElmer came later.

War work came early. English Wikipedia says the Second World War brought significant expansion, as the company made optics for range finders, bombsights and reconnaissance systems, and that the US Navy gave it its first “E” for Excellence award in 1942. Military and space optics stayed a large part of the business for decades: Wikipedia credits the company with reconnaissance cameras for aircraft and balloons and then satellites, the optical systems of the KH-9 Hexagon satellites, built at Danbury, Connecticut, and the laser retroreflectors placed on the Moon during Apollo 11. The company was listed on the New York Stock Exchange in December 1960.

Spectrometers, chips and a mirror.

The laboratory business took shape from the 1950s. According to English Wikipedia, by the 1960s the company’s sites at Norwalk and Wilton in Connecticut were developing and making infrared, visible and ultraviolet spectrometers, gas chromatographs, atomic absorption spectrometers and Raman spectrometers. From 1954 to 2001 analytical instruments were also made in Germany by Bodenseewerk Perkin-Elmer at Überlingen on Lake Constance, and in England at Beaconsfield, in Buckinghamshire.

The company ranged well beyond the laboratory. Its Micralign projection scanning aligner, which used mirrors rather than lenses following work by the optical designer Abe Offner, made it for a time a leading vendor of chip-making equipment, Wikipedia says, before the division was sold to the Silicon Valley Group. A computer division, formed from the purchase of Interdata in 1973–74, was spun off as Concurrent Computer Corporation in 1985. In the early 1990s, with Cetus and later Hoffmann-La Roche, the company worked on equipment for the polymerase chain reaction.

Its most public setback came in space. NASA records that the primary mirror of the Hubble Space Telescope was ground at the Perkin-Elmer Corporation’s large optics facility, where it photographed the work in 1979. On 27 June 1990, two months after launch, NASA announced that the telescope was flawed. The board of investigation it formed on 2 July 1990 found that the mirror was too flat near its outer edge, because the test device used during polishing, the null corrector, had a lens spacing error of 1.3 millimetres. NASA corrected for the fault with new optics, including the COSTAR instrument package. English Wikipedia adds that the NASA investigation strongly criticised the company’s management and its handling of test data, and that the company later reached a settlement with the federal government.

Instruments on show.

Laboratory instrument makers tend to present themselves through the laboratory itself. Their pictures are usually of benchtop instruments in bright white rooms: chromatographs, spectrometers and titrators lined up on long benches, with sample trays loaded and a screen beside each one showing a chromatogram’s peaks or the curve of a spectrum. The instrument is often shown with its door open or a vial in a gloved hand, so that the scale of the work is clear.

People appear in a familiar costume. Scientists in white coats, safety glasses and nitrile gloves lean over a pipette, check a result on a monitor or load a rack of samples, and the setting is usually a clean, well-lit room rather than a factory floor. Lab automation brings its own imagery: pipetting robots moving across a deck of microplates, grippers lifting a plate from one station to the next, and close-ups of tips, tubes and wells.

The same settings recur across the category: product photographs on plain white or pale grey backgrounds, cut-away diagrams of an instrument’s inner path, and data shown as it would appear on the screen — a set of peaks, a spectral curve, a titration curve or a grid of wells coloured by result. In this kind of picture the instrument, the sample and the data carry the message, and a maker’s name usually appears as a badge on the casing or a logo in the corner.

Trade fairs remain central to how the industry shows itself. Exhibitions such as analytica in Munich, Pittcon in the United States and ACHEMA in Frankfurt bring instrument makers together on large stands, where new instruments are launched and demonstrated. The guides that follow look at what can be checked about each maker — who founded it, who owns it and how its name has changed — and keep the company’s own claims separate from what independent sources record.

One name, two splits.

The name has been divided twice. In 1999, English Wikipedia says, the non-government side of EG&G of Wellesley, Massachusetts, bought Perkin-Elmer’s Analytical Instruments Division along with the Perkin-Elmer name, forming the new PerkinElmer, written as one word. The old company, whose life-sciences groups were PE Biosystems and Celera Genomics, became PE Corporation. Over the following two decades the new PerkinElmer moved further into diagnostics and life sciences.

The second split came in 2023. In March 2023 PerkinElmer completed the sale of its Applied, Food and Enterprise Services businesses to the investment firm New Mountain Capital, Pharma Focus Europe and PE Professional reported, under an agreement reached in August 2022; those businesses kept the PerkinElmer name. The listed company, with the life-sciences and diagnostics businesses, relaunched as Revvity and began trading under its new name on 16 May 2023, BioSpectrum reported; English Wikipedia says the name combines “revolution” with the Latin “vita.”

Today’s PerkinElmer is privately owned and headquartered in Shelton, Connecticut, according to its website, which gives more than 5,000 employees, offices in 35 countries and customers in 168. It groups its work into BioPharma services, including OneSource laboratory services and Covaris; Applied Solutions for industrial, environmental and agriculture and food testing; and Food Solutions, including Perten. Its instrument range covers atomic spectroscopy, chromatography, mass spectrometry, infrared and ultraviolet spectroscopy and thermal analysis, and the company describes itself as having “Nearly 90 Years of Pioneering Innovation.”

For a design guide, PerkinElmer shows how a founders’ name can pass to a new owner while the original listed company takes another. Compare Agilent, another American instrument maker that began as a spin-off, and Thermo Fisher, a Massachusetts laboratory group. For this guide we use a deep teal, an amber and a cool grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep PerkinElmer’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.