Contract Manufacturing | U Zámečku, Pardubice — The Telegraph Works That Makes Computers Again

The blue letters on the roofline say FOXCONN. The block underneath them was put up by a Czechoslovak state enterprise to build computers. Telegrafia, československá továrna na telefony a telegrafy was founded on 18 October 1919, in a republic one year old, with the state holding sixty per cent of the shares and the employees forty. The reasoning was strategic. Czechoslovakia was in conflict with Hungary, disputing territory with Poland, and unwilling to buy its telephones and telegraphs from Austria or Germany. The works became Tesla Pardubice, which made radios and tape recorders and, late on, the Tamara passive radar. From 1970, under the director František Utíkal, Tesla began building computers and raised a tall block for the purpose. It raised it beside a killing ground. Between 3 June and 9 July 1942, in the reprisals that followed the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, 194 people were shot at a firing range in the grounds of the Larisch villa here — Pardubice civilians, people who had helped the Silver A parachutists, and the inhabitants of Ležáky, held in the villa's cellars and killed the same day. Tesla acquired the Zámeček grounds in the second half of the 1950s, and the factory halls that went up in the park are what separated the execution site from the villa. Tesla went bankrupt in 1991. The site emptied between 1990 and 1993, equipment leaving in circumstances never established, and the enterprise was formally wound up in 2011. Foxconn registered its Czech company in May 2000 at U Zámečku 26, later number 27, bought part of the Tesla complex, and began assembling desktop computers — the product Tesla had brought to this ground thirty years earlier. It also acquired the Larisch villa, which went on deteriorating until the Československá obec legionářská took it over in the mid-2010s and started restoring it. The execution ground is a national cultural monument, and its museum opened in 2021. Foxconn's Pardubice plant employed 700 people in 2002. A second plant opened at Kutná Hora in 2008, and the two now employ around 4,500 between them, building computers, printers, monitors, servers, switches and routers. Forty lorries a day leave Pardubice, and Foxconn is among the largest exporters in the country. The memorial and the factory gate are a few minutes' walk apart on the same street. Photo: Nadkachna, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons