A business is an institution when one of a city’s major thoroughfares and one of its fine hotels bears its name. That’s the way it is in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, where Collins Road runs near the Collins Plaza Hotel. There, in 1933, hometown boy Arthur Collins began the Collins Radio Co. in a basement factory to build the amateur radio transmitters that he had first designed and fabricated himself, and for which the 24-year-old was already nationally known.
Today, with 7,000 workers in Cedar Rapids alone, Rockwell Collins is the largest single employer in the city of about 125,000. But at first the company was hardly noticed beyond the city limits. With his father as vice president and his young wife the major stockholder, Collins saw his fledgling firm prosper not only in the amateur radio field, but in the commercial broadcast equipment field during the Great Depression, when many long-established companies struggled to survive. Over four decades, innovation, determination, a bit of genius and commitment to quality also earned Arthur Collins’ once-tiny family business renown for its military, airline and business aviation radio products.
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