Lucas history

In 1875 Lucas founded the Tom Bowling Lamp Works, named after the ship's lamp which was its main product, and Joseph Lucas's business began to prosper.

From about 1880 the management of the company passed increasingly into the hands of Joseph's son, Harry, and in that year Joseph Lucas received a patent for The King of the Road bicycle lamp that made the company's name and fortune.

The partnership of Joseph Lucas & Son, set up in 1882, was vigorous in defending the patent against the numerous copies that appeared, and in expanding the range of goods offered in its catalogs, with the aim of supplying everything that cycle repairers and manufacturers might need.

By 1897, when Joseph Lucas & Son was incorporated as a public company, it had achieved a leading position in this area and was ready to move into what Harry Lucas called "motoralities."

Joseph Lucas died in 1902, just as investment in research on motor vehicle components was causing the company's profits to fall.

Lucas Industries's automotive division, the basis of the company's activities since before 1910, accounts for nearly two-thirds of the company's turnover, and makes Lucas one of the ten largest suppliers of automotive components in Europe.

Yet it may have seemed that the government was giving to Lucas with one hand and taking away with the other, for the introduction of British Summer Time--daylight savings--in 1916 led to a permanent fall in the sales of cycle lamps.

Thomson-Bennett (Magnetos) was renamed the Lucas Electrical Company in 1919, probably in order to maximize the benefits of the parent company's reputation.

In 1923 Harry Lucas went into semi-retirement as a consultant director.

The biggest acquisitions of the interwar years took place in 1925, when Lucas bought out two rivals in the motor accessories business, CAV--which dominated the supply of components for commercial vehicles--and Rotax.

In other cases Lucas mixed acquisition with restrictive agreements, for example in 1930, when S. Smith & Sons sold its lighting, starting, and ignition operations to Lucas, and the two companies then drew up lists of products each could manufacture only with the other's consent.

Again, in 1931, Lucas and its former rival Bosch of Germany set up a joint venture, CAV-Bosch, to develop diesel engines, and made an agreement to stay out of each other's markets for motor components.

George Lucas, in full George Walton Lucas, Jr., (born May 14, 1944, Modesto, California, United States), American motion-picture director, producer, and screenwriter who created several of the most popular films in history.

In 1951 Lucas set up a series of divisions each based on the respective subsidiary company, with central control limited to matters of personnel and finance, under a renamed holding company, Joseph Lucas (Industries) Ltd. Its chairman was Bertram Waring, who had been joint managing director with Peter Bennett from 1948, when Oliver Lucas died.

Star Wars, which borrowed heavily from the ideas of mythographer Joseph Campbell and from the story of Kurosawa’s Kakushi-toride no san-akunin (1958; The Hidden Fortress), was immediately popular and went on to become the top-grossing motion picture in history.

At the same time, the cycle-accessories business from which all these modern activities had developed was in decline, and Joseph Lucas (Cycle Accessories) was closed in 1962.

In 1973 the non-aerospace elements of the former Rotax subsidiary were spun off to a new company, Lucas Defence Systems.

The renaming of the group in 1974, as Lucas Industries, was accompanied by the introduction of a uniform corporate identity for all its subsidiaries.

First seen in the movie Star Wars (1977; later retitled Star Wars: Episode IV—A New Hope), the towering, black-clad Darth Vader is a menacing villain.

The group was back in profit by 1983, thanks to its nonautomotive divisions, and from then on the group's activities moved largely out of the United Kingdom into overseas markets.

Lucas created the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles (1992–93), about the adventures of Jones as a child and teenager in the early 20th century.