Trijicon was founded by Glyn Bindon, at the time an aeronautical engineer at Ford Motor Company who had worked previously on the U.S. Navy’s F-8U Crusader and other NASA projects, was visiting a family friend with his brother in South Africa in 1981.
His brother, had a friend who made gun sights. Specifically, the tritium-illuminated red dot Armson OEG.
Glyn’s first Armson sale was for six pieces. Then 12 pieces.
The Armson OEG red dot was similar to the original single-point used in 1970 Son Tay raid in Vietnam, but with more robust features and a variety of mounting systems for popular rifles and shotguns.
Armson then supplied Glyn with the first tritium-illuminated gunsight, from Armson OEG, available for sale in stores in 1983. At the time, Glyn ran sales and warehousing out of the family house, with his children helping.
For days, possibly weeks, an opened pair of binoculars sat on Glyn Bindon’s work bench. (He would often take apart optical technologies, dissect them and explore them.) This one in particular gnawed at him.
Glyn wondered if moving the prism in a riflescope (much like in a pair of binoculars) could make the riflescope more compact than the big, bulky scopes currently on the market.
In 1987, Trijicon introduced the TA01 4×32 Advanced Combat Optical Gunsight (ACOG®), which was included in the U.S. Army Advanced Combat Rifle program almost immediately.
The meaning behind Trijicon stems from the combination of two words: “Tritium” the key element in the company’s innovative illumination technology, and “icon” meaning a picture or image. The “j” was added to combine both words to form Trijicon.
