MTR 100: BIRNS, Inc. - Celebrating 60 Years
BIRNS has supported the deep submergence oceanic community with products that deliver everything from faster, more robust communication to brilliance in the murky depths. The company’s contributions in the marine market began in the 1950s when it was asked to develop subsea systems for the US Navy for the highly classified Polaris underwater missile ejection project and later for Sealab. Today BIRNS is relied upon to provide powerful lighting solutions, from halogen to LED, as well as unique technologies like the BIRNS Titan, an intensely bright 4,000W, 380,000 lumen hydrargyrum medium-arc iodide (HMI) lighting system created for the Costa Concordia salvage project. In 1990, BIRNS launched its Connector Division in answer to increasing customer demand. BIRNS’ high performance connector lines quickly garnered major popularity, and the company went on to engineer highly successful lines like the 6km rated BIRNS Millennium range. These miniature, high-density metal shell connectors set the benchmark for elevated bandwidth delivery, and feature configurable inserts for both high (= 3.6kV) and low (= 600 V) voltage. BIRNS now leads the industry in fiber optics, with typical loss for cable assemblies of