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H. H. Scott, Inc.- A Brief History of Its Maynard Years
by Terry Jones - May 2026
The company is founded in 1947 in Cambridge, MA. by Hermon Hosmer Scott, born 1909, with a BA from MIT and a doctorate from the Lowell Institute. He will be awarded over one hundred patents, primarily in the field of electronics.
In 1957, Scott moves his company into a new facility at 111 Powder Mill Road, Maynard, as noted in History of Maynard, 1871-1971, published 1971 by the Maynard Historical Committee. “In 1957, the firm … became the first major industry in many years to build its own plant in Maynard. The ultra-modern quarters are situated on a fifteen acre plot of land on Powder Mill Road.”
Victor H. Pomper, an MIT grad who joins the company in 1950, is named President sometime in the 1960’s.
The company is a leader in high fidelity sound, and it continually innovates to meet the market. It develops and sells tuners (which are AM and FM radio receivers), amplifiers and speakers and packages them with turntables, speakers and if desired with wood cabinetry designed by Scott.
Scott also manufactures tape decks and sound level meters for industrial use. It offers compact stereos with stand-alone speakers. Some products are sold in kits for buyer assembly. The Wikipedia entry for the company notes the company’s many innovations.
The 1957 move to Maynard is made because the company is growing, and it continues to grow. In 1960 the company takes additional space in the Maynard Industrial Park, an expansion that coincides with a glowing article in the May 1960 edition of the Atlantic, written by John Conly.
Conly actually tours the Maynard facility on Powder Hill Road for his article. And after extolling Scott the man and Scott products, Conly describes what he sees. “My guide was Victor Pomper … All the pleasant ladies with their soldering irons called him Vic, and he knew all their first names too. What this means … is that living room listeners do not get H. H. Scott FM tuners or preamplifiers with fractured cold-solder joints. The things work and keep working because they were made with devotion and … pride.”
It seems very likely that Conly is right as to devotion and pride, and a quality workforce and constant product innovation pay off for H. H. Scott. In 1967 the company builds an addition on the Powder Mill Road plant that substantially increases the size of the company’s facility. [From History of Maynard 1871-1971 at page 52.]
The 1967 addition comes around the time of the company’s peak sales and presumably its peak profits. In 1968, Scott’s sales top $15 million, a figure reported in a 1972 Maynard Beacon article. $15 million dollars in 1968 is roughly equivalent to $140 million in 2026.
While the year 1968 is big for H. H. Scott, it is also big for the musicians whose new records are being played on Scott turntables. The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour goes to number 1. Richard Harris releases Macarthur’s Park. Simon and Garfunkel release Mrs. Robinson. Otis Redding gives the country The Dock of the Bay. The Box Tops, The Fifth Dimension, Sly and the Family Stone, The Temptations, James Brown, the Rolling Stones, The Supremes, Cream, The Bee-Gees, Steppenwolf, the Animals, Credence Clearwater Revival, Dione Warwick, Aretha Franklin, Gary Puckett and the Union Gap, and many more all have big hits. In theaters, Space Odyssey, Bullitt, Rosemary’s Baby and Planet of the Apes hit the big screen. Hair and The Great White Hope dazzle on Broadway for very different reasons. On television, folks love Gunsmoke, Bonanza, Mayberry RFD and Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.
But outside of entertainment, in 1968 America faces a series of tragedies and controversies. The U. S. takes almost 3,000 casualties at the Battle of Khe Sanh. Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy are assassinated. The Warsaw Pact invades Czechoslovakia to crush the Prague Spring, and the U. S. stands by and watches. The U. S. Supreme Court rules that burning a draft card is not free speech. The U. S. Olympic Committee sanctions Tommie Smith and Juan Carlos for making a black power salute at the Mexico Olympics. And tragedy or not - Nixon defeats Humphrey on an alleged plan to end the war in Vietnam.
If the year 1968 was a mixed blessing for the country, it was the same for H. H. Scott. While for over twenty years the company has been an innovative leader in offering high fidelity sound, and while 1968 sees peak sales, the company now faces brutal competitive pressures.
A Maynard Beacon article from the spring of 1968 is headlined “H. H. Scott Denies Rumors It Will Close.” In the article, Victor Pomper, Scott’s President, acknowledges a business slowdown and attributes it to “an inflationary recession courtesy of the U. S. Government….”
The Beacon article notes that Scott’s headcount is down from about seven hundred to about five hundred. However, Pomper denies rumors that Scott will close. “We are in a little slump as who isn’t, but we are only running about seven percent behind, and we hope to make that up during the summer months.” Pomper attributes Scott’s troubles to Japanese competition, adding that Scott is suing several Japanese firms for patent infringement.
Pomper is correct about Japanese competition, and it will soon get much worse. While the fully developed ‘Japan Inc’ is still a decade or more away, Pomper and many of H. H. Scott’s employees no doubt see, and must recoil at, the Time magazine cover of May 10, 1971, titled: “How to Cope With Japan’s Business Invasion.” The cover depicts a Sony TV held by a gloved hand, and above the hand is a sleeve decorated like an American flag.
Yes, American consumers are buying Japanese electronics. And Sony makes more than televisions. It makes high fidelity recording and radio sets and related components. Sony is in direct competition with Scott, but so are the Japanese companies Panasonic, Pioneer, Sanyo, Toshiba and Sansui.
But this is not news to Pomper and his employees. Since the early 1960’s they will have seen articles warning of Japan’s ability to innovate, manufacture with precision and compete on price. As Pomper told the Beacon in 1968, he and the company need help against Japan. That help does not arrive.
A late 1972 article in the Beacon again addresses H. H. Scott’s financial condition, and now that condition is truly dire. Scott has undertaken a mass layoff and seeks bankruptcy protection under Chapter 11. While the article does not say, it appears that Scott enters bankruptcy when key suppliers refuse to deliver components and sue for money owed.
While the company’s headcount is roughly 700 only a few years earlier, by the time of the October 1972 mass layoff headcount is down to about 410. After the layoff, headcount is twelve. Those dozen are deemed essential to reorganize the company and emerge from bankruptcy. Victor Pomper remains President. The article quotes him: “We’ve not gone down the tubes….”
He is correct. If the company can get adequate financing, it will restart operations rather than see its assets liquidated. Pomper discusses how he hopes to convince new lenders to finance a reorganization. The company will acquire “computerized automation equipment to slash direct labor costs by up to seventy percent….”
That is both a dramatic potential savings, and a dramatic statement to the laid off personnel. If the company can reorganize, roughly seventy percent of the laid off employees who assemble, test, package and ship products will not be re-offered their jobs. And thanks to that Beacon article, we have real insight into who those people are.
The Beacon notes that roughly 40 clerical and supervisory personnel are laid off, roughly half being women, and that 355 layoffs are in assembly, testing and packaging of whom 250 are women, with approximately 100 of them being military wives from Fort Devens.
In the fall of 1972, America troop levels in Vietnam have fallen from a high of 540,000 in 1968 to 25,000. Some of those Fort Deven wives will have worked for Scott for some time. H. H. Scott may have offered a job that eased the absence of a husband at war, or even the loss or wounding of a husband. These women will have stories to tell of what H. H. Scott meant to them.
The Beacon article then adds: “President Pomper told the Beacon last month that the reason for the corporation’s grave financial crisis was the failure of the Federal government to come through with funds to alleviate import injury … H. H. Scott buying all its parts, equipment etc ... and doing all assembly, design etc … in the United States has been particularly hard hit by Japanese imports ... The Japanese industry which has come to the fore in the past three years is both government financed and protected….”
Pomper never does manage the reorganization of H. H. Scott, and at some point, I believe early in 1973, the company is acquired out of bankruptcy by SYMA of Belgium, Scott’s European distributor.
Herman Scott dies in 1975. At the time of his death he lives in Lincoln, MA. That same year the company he founded, built and then lost moves from Maynard to Woburn. In 1985, H. H. Scott is purchased by Emerson Electric. Today, Emerson sells hands-free car speakerphones under the H. H. Scott brand. I do not believe it offers stereo equipment under that brand.
The old H. H. Scott facility on Powder Mill Road still exists. It is a storage facility, the lowest tech usage imaginable for a place of once spectacular technical innovation.
The H. H. Scott company operates from Maynard for seventeen years (1957-1975) through the period of its greatest success and its demise. Was Scott done in by its commitment to buy American components, to build in America and to not fast track manufacturing automation to reduce employment? Quite possibly.
Victor Pomper is not wrong in saying that Japanese electronics companies innovated around (and stole) patents, had relatively low wages and faced low environmental standards, received Japanese government backing and faced low to nonexistent America tariffs.
At some point those advantages will overtake even an innovative company like H. H. Scott. Once high fidelity is more or less achieved by all of Scott’s competitors, then any incremental improvements made by Scott become harder to sell at a price that will be paid by any but the most committed audiophile.
For H. H. Scott, the game goes from high quality and continuous technical innovation to price and marketing. And Scott gets beaten at that new game.
The following is from an online forum by the name audiokarma on which in 2011 a contributor posts a picture of an H. H. Scott console and asks for opinions. This is one opinion: “There doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of info on the H. H. Scott consoles; probably because they didn’t sell a lot of them (like Fisher.) Or more likely the ones they did sell didn’t survive the millennium. Seems that Scott used the consoles to experiment with tube-transistor hybridizing during the early to mid-1960’s. Maybe it was a parts bin clearing exercise to make way for the wild new world of transistors … we may never know. Anyway, I expect that the model you are looking at may be one of those tube preamp power output/ transistor hybrid jobs. The two piece later model knobs mounted on the right side of the faceplate and the Garrard changer are tipoffs that’s something transitional may be lurking under the hood … my parents had a late model H. H. Scott console that was fully transistorized, circa 1968; Theirs was the midline Berkeley Model. There were five models: Copley, Exeter, Berkeley, Andover and Carlisle. It had a dual 10-10 changer mounted on a massive spring suspended platform to quell acoustic feedback, tradename ‘Isomount.’ On all these generation solid state units, the knobs are left of the tuner dial. If you look closely, you can see the round Scott “Field Effect Transistor’ logo just above the signal strength meter. In its heyday, it sounded pretty decent for what it was. These units even had guitar and microphone inputs. I wonder how many teens wound up blowing out some of the drivers and smoking the outputs …”