Sperry Marine Brand Guidelines: A 1910 Gyrocompass Name, Decca, C. Plath & New Malden

An inventor’s gyrocompass company, 1910.

The Sperry name goes back to the American inventor Elmer Ambrose Sperry. English Wikipedia says he incorporated the Sperry Gyroscope Company on 14 April 1910 in Brooklyn, New York, to make navigation equipment based on his own inventions, chiefly the marine gyrostabilizer and the gyrocompass, a compass that finds north from the spin of a gyroscope rather than from magnetism. Sperry Marine’s website tells the same founding story and says the gyrocompass served Allied navies in both world wars.

A British arm followed quickly. Wikipedia says Sperry began making gyrocompasses for the Royal Navy at a factory in Pimlico, London, in 1913, and that the business became the Sperry Gyroscope Co Ltd in 1915, later expanding to Brentford, to Stonehouse in Gloucestershire and to Bracknell. In the United States the parent changed hands and shape: North American Aviation acquired it in 1929, and in 1933 it became a subsidiary of a new holding company, the Sperry Corporation. During the Second World War the company grew with wartime demand, and after the war it moved further into electronics and computing, according to Wikipedia. Its large gyroscope plant at Lake Success, on Long Island, also served as the temporary headquarters of the United Nations from 1946 to 1952.

Marine work got its own home in the 1950s. Around the time Sperry bought Remington Rand in 1955 and renamed itself Sperry Rand, the gyroscope business decided to open a plant that would make marine instruments almost exclusively. Wikipedia says the plant was built in Charlottesville, Virginia, where the Sperry Piedmont Division began producing marine navigation products in 1956; the division was later renamed Sperry Marine.

Decca, C. Plath and Litton.

The parent company did not survive the 1980s. In September 1986 Sperry Corporation merged with Burroughs after a hostile takeover bid, and the combined business was renamed Unisys. Several Sperry divisions were then sold; Sperry Marine went to the industrial group Tenneco in 1987, Wikipedia says. By then the parent had already narrowed its focus: in 1978 Sperry Rand sold several divisions to concentrate on computing and dropped “Rand” from its name.

The present company dates from 1997. Sperry Marine’s website says it was formed that year from three names in the marine industry: Sperry Gyrocompass, Decca and C. Plath. English Wikipedia places that merger under the American electronics group Litton Industries, whose divisions included Sperry Marine, C. Plath and Decca Radar, the last formerly part of Racal. Decca, as the company tells it, began as the British gramophone and record business and moved into military and marine engineering during the Second World War; in August 1949 it launched its first marine radar, the Model 159. Sperry Marine’s site credits Decca with the first true-motion radar and the first type-approved colour radar. C. Plath, the Hamburg maker of magnetic compasses, brought close to 150 years in that trade, the company says.

In 2001 Northrop Grumman bought Litton Industries, and Sperry Marine became part of the American group; Wikipedia places it within Northrop Grumman Mission Systems. The company’s product families include VisionMaster integrated bridge systems, radar and ECDIS, NAVIGAT gyrocompasses and NAVIPILOT autopilots. Its website lists radars, compass systems, steering systems, speed logs and integrated bridge and control systems among its lines.

Bridge equipment and documentation.

Marine equipment makers sell to shipyards, shipowners and operators rather than to the public, and their identities reflect that. Their marks have long histories of their own: Schottel’s square S has been in use since the 1980s, its centenary history says, and Becker Marine Systems introduced its present logo with its new name in 2001, by the company’s account. The palettes in this guide are our own interpretation, in sea-going blues with warm accents, and none is taken from a company’s files.

The products themselves carry much of the visual weight. Thrusters, rudder propellers, rudders, deck machinery and bridge systems appear in this guide only as the companies publish and describe them, and their scale is part of the story: a regional magazine described one Schottel drive in Wismar in 2021 as twelve metres long once assembled.

Products are presented by vessel type as well as by name. Schottel says its RudderPropeller is used in more than 120 vessel types, from harbour tugs to ferries and offshore ships, and Becker presents rudders, nozzles and steering gear as parts of a single manoeuvring system for a given ship. Service matters as much as sale: both companies describe networks of subsidiaries and offices across Europe, Asia and the Americas, and German Wikipedia lists fourteen Schottel sales and service companies, from Brazil to South Korea.

Newer pages cover data. Schottel lists condition monitoring and data platforms among its products, and Becker sells monitoring systems for steering and rudder bearings. Trade fairs remain a fixed point in the calendar: Becker’s own history records a meeting at Nor-Shipping in Oslo that changed its management in 2001, and in 2022 Schottel’s holding company announced an agreement there, a trade paper reported.

New Malden, Hamburg and the integrated bridge.

Despite its American origins, Sperry Marine is run from Britain. Its website says it is headquartered in the United Kingdom, and English Wikipedia names New Malden, in south-west London, as the headquarters, with engineering departments in New Malden and Hamburg. The company says it serves more than 6,000 vessels from more than 20 locations, with offices and partners in Europe, the Americas and Asia, and it describes its customers across the commercial maritime industry. Charlottesville remains part of the story as the place where the marine division began in 1956.

Recent work centres on integrated bridges. In September 2025 MarineLink reported that Sperry Marine had been chosen to supply its integrated bridge systems for two hydrogen-powered container ships ordered by Samskip and under construction at Cochin Shipyard in India, due for delivery in 2027 and planned for a route between the Oslo Fjord and Rotterdam. At the owner’s request each system was to have an open architecture so that later autonomous-navigation tools could be added. The package included the new NAVIPILOT 4500N autopilot, Advanced ARPA target tracking and a cybersecurity gateway. MarineLink described the autopilot as adjusting itself to each vessel’s characteristics and to conditions at sea.

The company’s own pages lean on that long line of names. Its About Us page sets out separate timelines for Sperry Gyrocompass, Decca Radar and C. Plath, and its homepage calls the company “The Navigation Experts.”

For a design guide, Sperry Marine shows how a founder’s surname, first attached to one instrument, can carry a company assembled from several older brands. Compare Kelvin Hughes, a British bridge-equipment name with nineteenth-century roots now under a German owner, and Furuno, the Japanese marine electronics maker. For this guide we use an ocean blue, a steel grey and a signal orange with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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