Rapiscan Systems Brand Guidelines: A 1972 British Division, OSI Systems & the Secure 1000

A British division, then a Californian parent.

Rapiscan Systems began in Britain. English Wikipedia says it was formed in 1972 as the Security Products Division of International Aeradio Limited (IAL). That division bought the metal-detector maker Adams Electronics in 1984, and two years later its X-ray division and Adams were combined as IAL Security Products, based at Crawley in West Sussex, the encyclopedia says.

The American connection came in 1993. Opto Sensors, Inc., a California maker of optoelectronic devices founded in 1987, formed Rapiscan Security Products, Inc., which bought the British Rapiscan business; Opto Sensors later renamed itself OSI Systems, and English Wikipedia gives May 1997 for the change of name. Rapiscan’s own website says it has worked with government agencies and private security operators “since 1993.”

OSI added more businesses around Rapiscan. In 1998 it bought the security-products business of Metorex International of Finland, English Wikipedia says; in 1994 it had formed ECIL-Rapiscan Security Products in India in partnership with Electronics Corporation of India Limited, the encyclopedia adds. Rapiscan’s Metor walk-through metal detectors trace back to the Finnish mining group Outokumpu, where detectors first built to find broken drill-bit fragments in ore on conveyor belts were adapted for security screening, according to a 1992 ASTM paper cited by Wikipedia. Rapiscan’s catalogue still includes industrial conveyor metal detectors and a Satmagan magnetite analyser for mining.

In 2002 OSI took a minority stake in CXR Limited of Surrey, which became a wholly owned subsidiary in December 2004, Wikipedia says. CXR had first developed the fast CT scanner for hold baggage that Rapiscan sells as Real Time Tomography, or RTT, and the UK’s Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council funded work at the University of Manchester on the mathematics of its image reconstruction, the encyclopedia adds.

Torrance, Salfords and Espoo.

Rapiscan is not a listed company in its own right. It is a division of OSI Systems, Inc., whose shares trade on NASDAQ under the symbol OSIS, as an August 2026 company announcement put it; OSI’s other businesses include Spacelabs Healthcare and OSI Optoelectronics, English Wikipedia says. Rapiscan says it is headquartered in Torrance, California, and in 2026 it called itself a Los Angeles-based company.

English Wikipedia describes Torrance as the main site for research, engineering, manufacturing and customer support, and Salfords in Surrey, near Gatwick Airport, as the European headquarters and the centre for hold-baggage X-ray systems. It says the Metor detectors were designed and made in Espoo, Finland, and lists further facilities in Australia, Singapore, Malaysia, India and the US states of California and Mississippi, citing a company page from 2008.

On 12 September 2016 OSI completed its purchase of American Science and Engineering (AS&E), adding X-ray backscatter inspection systems such as the Z Backscatter Van and the portable MINI Z, Intelligence Community News reported two days later. Rapiscan’s catalogue now carries the AS&E name on products such as the Z Portal for passenger vehicles.

The range runs from checkpoint X-ray machines and tray-return systems to trace detectors, radiation portals, gantry and mobile cargo scanners and under-vehicle cameras, its website shows. In April 2008 Rapiscan Systems UK won the Queen’s Award for International Trade, English Wikipedia says. In August 2026 Rapiscan announced that it had been named Official Provider of Physical Screening and Security Technology Hardware/Software Solutions of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.

Screening and identity hardware.

Security screening and identity hardware is mostly seen in passing: the X-ray tunnel at an airport checkpoint, the arch a traveller walks through, the grey trays that slide back along a roller track. The companies that make this equipment sell to airports, customs services, border agencies, banks and governments rather than to the public, and their brands are built for procurement teams, regulators and trade-fair visitors.

Their imagery follows the equipment. Websites and brochures show security lanes with scanner tunnels and conveyor belts, walk-through metal detectors, cargo portals and gantries that a lorry drives through, and the operator screens on which bags appear as layered X-ray images. Identity makers work at a different scale: card printers small enough for an office desk, and the production lines on which passports, bank cards and ID cards are made and personalised.

Much of the business is about approvals and contracts. Makers name the regulators whose lists or standards their machines appear on, such as the US Transportation Security Administration or the European Civil Aviation Conference, and announce orders airport by airport and agency by agency. New products are shown at trade fairs such as Passenger Terminal Expo for airport equipment and Security Essen in Germany, where screening, access-control and identity companies exhibit side by side.

Ownership in this field changes often. Some of the makers in this guide were built from acquisitions or sit inside larger listed groups, and some have changed hands recently: Smiths Detection passed from Smiths Group to CVC Capital Partners in June 2026. This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it and where it says its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

The backscatter years.

The product that brought Rapiscan the most public attention was the Secure 1000, a backscatter X-ray scanner for screening airport passengers, which English Wikipedia calls controversial. Because the scans raised privacy concerns, the US Congress ordered that such scanners either produce a more generic image or be removed by June 2013, the Associated Press reported in January 2013.

Rapiscan acknowledged that it could not meet that deadline, and on 18 January 2013 the Transportation Security Administration said it had ended its contract with Rapiscan for the software, according to the AP report carried by The Spokesman-Review; the agency said it would remove all 174 backscatter scanners from the 30 airports where they were in use. The Atlantic, in a report republished by Nextgov, described the same decision. The government had not bought any of the scanners since 2011 and had already taken them out of seven major airports in October 2012, among them Chicago’s O’Hare and Los Angeles International, the AP added; the body scanners the agency kept, made by L-3 Communications, used millimetre waves. OSI said it would help the agency move the machines to other government departments.

In its August 2026 announcement, Rapiscan described its work as screening hardware, access control, security software, training and operational support, and listed earlier deployments at major events and infrastructure in Australia, Qatar, the United Kingdom, France and Italy.

For a design guide, Rapiscan Systems shows how a British airport-security name kept its identity under a Californian parent for more than three decades. Compare Smiths Detection, which was likewise built from acquisitions, and Astrophysics, another California screening maker. For this guide we use charcoal, grey and a lane blue with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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