BAE Systems Canal Street, New Hampshire

The defense contractor BAE is often ranked as the largest employer in New Hampshire, with around 4,000 local employees, working at a half dozen office and tech complexes around Nashua. The company’s origins in Nashua started when Sanders Associates, a company spun out of Raytheon, moved from Waltham, Massachusetts, into this empty mill building on Canal Street, downtown, in 1952, helping to revitalize the former textile mill town. Sanders Associates specialized in flexible printed circuits, radar, and intelligence systems used by NASA and the military, but is also known for the side work of one of one of its engineers, Ralph Baer, who created the first interactive television games, which were released commercially on a device made by Magnavox, then modified by Atari, as Pong, which launched the electronic gaming industry. The company’s main work was electronic defense systems for the military though, and Sanders was bought by Lockheed Martin in 1986. This division of Lockheed was bought by BAE Systems, the British defense contractor, in 2000, and is part of the company’s Electronic Systems, specializing in radar defense and electronic warfare technology. The Canal Street mill building is still owned and occupied by BAE.