Harris Corporation in Melbourne: Radiation Inc. to L3Harris

Harris Corporation became a Melbourne company through Radiation Inc., which opened in 1950 in an old Naval building at the airport. Harris-Intertype merged with Radiation on July 12, 1967, took the Harris Corporation name in 1974 and moved its headquarters from Ohio to Melbourne in 1978. L3Harris, formed by the 2019 merger, still lists 1025 West NASA Boulevard, Melbourne.

Harris Semiconductor, the chip business plenty of people remember, belongs to the same line, and so does the 1999 sale of nearly all of it. After the Radiation merger the parent changed names twice: Harris Corporation in 1974, L3Harris in 2019.

Where did Radiation Inc. start?

Homer Denius and George Shaw founded Radiation Inc. in 1950. Florida Tech’s special collections say the company was first located in an old Naval building at the Melbourne Airport, and L3Harris’s own timeline agrees that Radiation launched in an old airport building. A Florida Heritage Landmark marker at the airport records a 129-building Naval Air Station built at the Melbourne Municipal Airport at the start of World War II, commissioned on October 20, 1942 and closed on February 15, 1946, after training more than 2,200 Navy and Marine pilots in Wildcat and Hellcat fighters. Four years after it closed, an old Naval building at the same airport housed a new electronics company.

What Radiation built was telemetry and tracking gear. Florida Tech’s finding aid says the company focused on PCM telemetry systems, digital data communications and tracking antennas, with Boeing, Northrop Grumman, RCA, General Electric and General Motors among the entities that contracted it. The library’s exhibit of Radiation’s annual reports lists programs including Courier, Doppler radar, Apollo, Saturn, Titan, Minuteman, the Lunar Excursion Module and the Orbiting Astronomical Observatory. Facilities followed in Palm Bay and Orlando, along with expansions across Melbourne.

The customers were the missile and space programs up the coast. That same economy produced Brevard Engineering College in 1958, the start of Florida Tech. Melbourne had been incorporated since 1888 when Radiation opened (the charter story), and its neighbor Eau Gallie (its own story) was still a separate city.

How did a printing-equipment company end up owning Radiation?

By the 1960s Harris was a printing-equipment maker shifting toward electronics. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History traces it to the Harris Automatic Press Company, founded in Niles, Ohio, in 1895, with a Cleveland factory from 1917, and says it became Harris-Intertype after merging with the Intertype Corporation in 1957. Florida Tech’s exhibit gives the date Radiation joined it: July 12, 1967. L3Harris’s timeline calls the result a print and electronics company and the foundation of the modern firm.

Radiation was big for a company seventeen years old, though Florida Tech’s own pages disagree on how big. The special-collections finding aid says more than 3,000 employees at the merger; the library’s digital collection says 5,000. Either way, the Florida side shaped what came next. In 1972, per L3Harris’s timeline, Joseph Boyd, the former head of Radiation, was named president of Harris. By 1970 electronics supplied half of Harris’s $380 million in sales, according to the Cleveland encyclopedia, and the company opened a new plant in Melbourne that year.

When did Harris move its headquarters to Melbourne?

In 1978. Both L3Harris’s timeline and the Encyclopedia of Cleveland History give that year, and the encyclopedia says the move was from Cleveland. The company had renamed itself Harris Corporation four years earlier, as its focus shifted from mechanical to electronic communications. The timeline says Harris built a new facility just down the street from the old airport building where Radiation had started.

The move followed the business. It also wasn’t a move to a pure defense house. Harris’s fiscal 1996 annual report put its executive offices at 1025 W. NASA Boulevard, Melbourne, counted about 27,600 employees and described four core businesses: advanced electronic systems, semiconductors, communications and an office-equipment distribution network. Defense electronics was one of the four, not the whole company.

Year	What happened	Source
1950	Radiation Inc. opens in Melbourne, in an old Naval building at the airport	L3Harris timeline; Florida Tech special collections
1957	Harris-Seybold merges with Intertype and becomes Harris-Intertype	L3Harris timeline
1967	Harris-Intertype merges with Radiation Inc. (July 12)	Florida Tech Evans Library
1974	Harris-Intertype is renamed Harris Corporation	L3Harris timeline
1978	Headquarters moves from Ohio to Melbourne	L3Harris timeline; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History
1996	Executive offices at 1025 W. NASA Boulevard, Melbourne; about 27,600 employees	Harris 10-K405
1999	Substantially all of the semiconductor business sold to Intersil; sale completed August 13	Harris 10-K405 (September 1999)
2015	Harris acquires Exelis and opens a 464,000-square-foot technology center in Palm Bay	L3Harris timeline
2019	Merger with L3 completed June 29; headquarters stays in Melbourne	L3Harris timeline; joint proxy

Dates as published by the sources named, read October 29, 2026.

What was Harris Semiconductor?

Harris’s chip business, which the 1996 annual report places in Palm Bay rather than Melbourne itself. Its origin is murkier than a quick read of the timeline suggests. L3Harris dates “its first microelectronics facility” to 1960 and says it became the Harris Semiconductor Sector, but that timeline also carries entries for companies that joined the family later, such as Airborne Instruments Laboratory (1954) and L-3 Communications (1997), and it doesn’t say where the facility stood. The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History says the 1967 Radiation merger “provided for the company’s initial entry into the semiconductor and communication systems business.” Read together, the two sources point to the 1960 facility coming from the Radiation side of the family, not from Harris-Intertype. By fiscal 1996 the sector had sales of $707.7 million, 20 percent of company sales, with an operating profit of $101.0 million. The annual report listed its owned semiconductor plants in Palm Bay, Florida; Findlay, Ohio; and Mountaintop, Pennsylvania, so Palm Bay was the only Florida site on that list.

Then Harris sold it. The board approved the sale of the power-products business in April 1999 and of the semiconductor business as a whole in June. Harris signed the agreement with Intersil Corporation, a subsidiary of Sterling Holding Company, a Citicorp Venture Capital portfolio company, on June 2, 1999. It covered substantially all of the business; a suppression-products unit that Intersil didn’t buy was expected to be sold separately. The sale closed on August 13. Harris received $520 million in cash, $90 million in subordinated notes and a 10 percent equity interest, and recorded an after-tax loss of $61.3 million on the disposal. The business had $602 million in fiscal 1999 sales.

The Intersil name survives in local records. Palm Bay’s financial report for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2024 lists “Renesas (Formerly Intersil)” among the city’s principal employers: 338 people in 2024, down from 391 in 2015.

How did L3Harris end up headquartered in Melbourne?

Through a clause in a merger agreement. Harris bought Exelis in 2015, which L3Harris’s timeline calls the largest acquisition in company history. Three years later, on October 12, 2018, Harris and L3 Technologies signed an Agreement and Plan of Merger; the joint press release followed on Sunday, October 14. The proxy statement describes a merger of equals in which L3 would become a wholly owned subsidiary of Harris, which would take the name L3Harris Technologies. The agreement set the combined company’s headquarters in Melbourne, Florida, and the new certificate of incorporation repeats it. The proxy described a combined company of about 48,000 employees. L3Harris’s timeline gives the closing date: June 29, 2019.

L3Harris’s annual report for fiscal 2025, filed February 12, 2026, reports approximately 45,000 employees, 90 percent of them in the United States, and gives its principal executive offices as 1025 West NASA Boulevard, Melbourne, Florida 32919. Its property list puts Corporate in Melbourne and Arlington, Virginia.

How many people does L3Harris employ in Melbourne?

By the city’s own count, 1,778. The City of Melbourne’s financial report for the fiscal year ended September 30, 2025 ranks L3Harris fifth among principal employers, at 4.29 percent of total city employment. Northrop Grumman leads that table at 6,818, ahead of the Brevard school board (3,354), Florida Institute of Technology (2,510) and Health First (2,371). Palm Bay’s report for fiscal 2024 ranks L3Harris first in that city, at 4,300 employees.

Year	City	L3Harris (Harris Corp. before 2019)	Rank	Share of city employment	Report
2014	Melbourne	2,029	3	5.51%	Melbourne FY2023
2015	Melbourne	1,918	4	5.46%	Melbourne FY2024
2016	Melbourne	2,532	3	7.13%	Melbourne FY2025
2023	Melbourne	1,688	3	3.90%	Melbourne FY2023
2024	Melbourne	1,688	4	4.10%	Melbourne FY2024
2025	Melbourne	1,778	5	4.29%	Melbourne FY2025
2015	Palm Bay	2,901	1	6.16%*	Palm Bay FY2024
2024	Palm Bay	4,300	1	7.73%*	Palm Bay FY2024

Employees counted within each city’s limits, as printed in the cities’ principal-employer schedules, read October 29, 2026. *Palm Bay’s printed percentages do not reconcile with its own headcounts, so treat them as printed, not as a computed share.

These are city-limits counts, so neither is a Brevard County total. Melbourne credits its Revenue Department and the companies themselves as the source, and the same 1,688 appears in both the 2023 and 2024 tables, so read the series as approximate. Read side by side, the tables show fewer L3Harris employees inside Melbourne than in 2014 and more inside Palm Bay than in 2015. L3Harris’s timeline places its 2015 technology center in Palm Bay; neither city’s report says why the counts moved.

The city these tables count is the one Melbourne and Eau Gallie formed in the 1969 consolidation, nineteen years after Radiation opened in an old Naval building at the airport. For the wider record, start with what Old Melbourne means or the history page.