Textron
American industrial conglomerate
Textron Inc. is an American industrial conglomerate based in Providence, Rhode Island. Textron's subsidiaries include Bell Textron, Kautex, Textron Aviation (which itself includes the Beechcraft and Cessna brands), and Lycoming Engines. It was founded by Royal Little in 1923 as the Special Yarns Company.
In 2026, Textron employed over 45,000 people in 25 countries. The company ranked 265th on the 2021 Fortune 500 of the largest United States corporations by revenue.
History
Early history
Textron started as a textile company in 1928, when 37-year-old Royal Little founded the Special Yarns Corporation in Boston, Massachusetts. The company manufactured synthetic yarns, a niche product at the time. By the start of World War II, the company was known as Atlantic Rayon Corporation and manufactured parachutes. As war production wound down, the company started making civilian products as well and was renamed Textron: "Tex" for "textiles" and "tron" from synthetics such as "Lustron".
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 18, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2140315. VIAF identifies the subject as 159434052. The Library of Congress control number is n79055291. 1 of 5 selected statements include explicit references; 2 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1923, 2026, 2021 and 1928.
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This entry incorporates text from “Textron” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.