Motortronics UK

Motortronics UK began life as Fairford Electronics, founded in 1979 by Ray Bristow, who went on to become known across the industry as “the father of the soft-start.” Bristow was one of the first people to recognize the potential of semiconductor-based motor controls, and in 1982, just three years after founding the company, Fairford became the first in the world to design and produce a digital three-phase soft starter with automatic energy optimization, a technology that went on to earn patents in the US, Japan, Australia, and Europe. Bristow spent years representing the UK on IEC committees, and when he retired from that role in 2009, colleagues honored his work by naming him the “father of soft starts.” The company’s purpose-built Devon premises, Bristow House in Ivybridge, still carries his name today.

Ownership changed hands more than once over the following decades. Italian company SIEI acquired Fairford at one stage before selling it in 2006 to another Devon business, the Crown Graphic Group, under Julian Tope. The bigger shift came when Motortronics, a Florida-headquartered manufacturer of solid-state AC motor controls founded in 1982, bought Fairford outright, bringing together Motortronics’ strength in medium-voltage and ANSI soft-starters with Fairford’s expertise in low-voltage IEC soft-starters. At the time of the deal, roughly 86% of Fairford’s business already came from outside the UK, and the two businesses continued trading under their own names initially before the UK operation eventually took on the Motortronics name directly.

Today, Motortronics UK Ltd operates out of that same Ivybridge site, more than 45 years after Bristow first set up Fairford, and still positions itself around the same core innovation he pioneered. Its soft starters are used across sectors, including cooling and refrigeration, food and beverage, heating, panel building, quarrying and mining, manufacturing, and water, with its Intelligent Energy Recovery System, combining the company’s proprietary Energy Optimizing Algorithm with internal bypass relays, still central to how the company sells energy savings and improved motor control to customers. The wider Motortronics group now operates across the UK, US, Korea, and China and has shipped more than two million soft starters worldwide, continuing a line of work that traces back directly to Bristow’s original 1982 breakthrough.