page_title: Plantronics
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Plantronics / History
caption_attribution_description: English: Le MS 50 de Plantronics Français&#160;: Le MS 50 de Plantronics
context_page_description: Plantronics, Inc. is an American electronics company producing audio communications equipment for business and consumers. Its products support unified communications, mobile use, gaming and music. Plantronics is headquartered in Santa Cruz, California and most of its products are produced in China and Mexico.
  On March 18, 2019, Plantronics announced that it would change its name to Poly following its acquisition of Polycom.
context_section_description: In the early 1960s, airline headsets were so large and cumbersome that many pilots had switched back to the use of handheld microphones for communications. The speed and complexity of jet airliners caused a need for the introduction of small, lightweight headsets into the cockpit. In 1961, United Airlines solicited new designs from anyone who was interested. Courtney Graham, a United Airlines pilot, was one of the many who thought the heavy headsets should be replaced by something lighter. He collaborated with his pilot friend Keith Larkin to create a small, functional design which was robust enough to pass airlines standards. (Larkin had been working for a small company called Plane-Aids, a Japanese import company which offered spectacles and sunglasses that contained transistor radios in their temple pieces.) The final design, incorporating two small hearing aid-style transducers attached to a headband was submitted to United Airline approval. UAL's approval of the innovative design caused Graham and Larkin to incorporate as Pacific Plantronics (now called Plantronics, Inc.) on May 18, 1961. They introduced the first lightweight communications headset, the MS-50, to the commercial marketplace in 1962.
  In the mid-1960s, the Federal Aviation Agency selected Plantronics as the sole supplier of headsets for air traffic controllers, and thereafter was selected to supply headsets to the operators of the Bell Telephone company.
  On December 27, 2018, Plantronics agreed to pay $36 million to settle a bribery investigation connected to Polycom, a newly-acquired subsidiary. In 2019, after the Polycom merger, Plantronics rebranded as Poly.
caption: Early Plantronics headset
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