The story of National Company cannot be told without telling the story of James Millen.

Millen was born in 1901 and attended high school in Long Island. He built his first spark transmitter in 1916 and obtained amateur radio callsign 2BYP in 1921.

On graduation from high school he attended the Stevens Institute in New Jersey and obtained a mechanical engineering degree there being no formal courses of study in electronic engineering at the time.

In 1922 he started writing articles for the Radio News Magazine and later the Radio Broadcast Magazine to help pay his tuition fees. These articles explained radio engineering to the growing number of people joining the craze of building their own radio receivers.

Later, in the 1930’s Millen would continue this role of educator by writing for QST Magazine.

On leaving college in 1926 Millen began a consultancy company. His clients included, the American Appliance Company (later to become Raytheon), RKO Studios and National Company.

In 1927 Millen dropped his other consultancy clients and joined National full time as chief engineer and remained with the company until 1939. Through this period National evolved into one of the leading US manufacturers of radio communications equipment.

Millen left National because of a disagreement over strategy. Warren Hopkins who then held the controlling interest in National wanted to turn production from the radio communications market to the domestic broadcast market. His purpose for this dramatic change was, he said, "to make National Company a household name". Millen wanted no part of it and he decided to leave and set up his own manufacturing company.

As it transpired the change to the domestic market never occurred because on the outbreak of World War II, the British ordered large numbers of HRO receivers on lease lend to equip its Y stations and when the US entered the war National Company received a US government mandate "start supplying HROs we’ll tell you when to stop".

Hopkins died of cancer in 1940 and its since been speculated that when he was told he had cancer in early 1939 and had only a short time to live he wanted to convert his assets into the maximum amount of cash possible.

The Millen company survived into the 1960’s manufacturing specialist radio components.