Saturday, February 16, 2013

When America Used to be a Manufacturing Power House...


 
 
I went through some old family slides and found this.  It is a picture of the Stewart Warner company in Chicago during what appears to be the 1950s.   I believe one of my family members worked there.  America used to be a power house of manufacturing and a good factory job could support a family and the worker could retire with a pension, too.  Too bad we can't change things back to the days when we were self-sufficient and providing for our own needs.
 
According to wikipedia:
 
Stewart-Warner was a US manufacturer of vehicle instruments, a.k.a. gauges and many other products.
The company was founded as Stewart & Clark Company in 1905 by John K. Stewart. Their speedometers were used in the Ford Model T. In 1912 John Stewart joined with Edgar Bassick to make vehicle instruments and horns. Bassick owned Alemite Co and Stewart had bought the Warner Instrument Company, thus the name was changed to Stewart-Warner Corporation. The company started in Chicago and built a manufacturing plant on Diversey Parkway. The building kept expanding and finally covered one-million square feet (93,000 m²) and six floors. They also made radios and refrigerators, among other products, and produced the ubiquitous "zerk" grease fitting, named after its inventor, associated with the company. In the last years of the company's Chicago factory, it owned a number of aging six-spindle Brown & Sharpe and New Britain screw machines.
They also made heat exchangers starting in the 1940s under the "South Wind Division", but since then it became independent of its parent. They still use the Stewart-Warner name, and the web site is hyphenated: http://www.stewart-warner.com/
In the 1980s some parts of the company were bought by BTR plc who in the early 1990s decided to relocate to Juarez, Mexico and spun off its Stewart-Warner instruments business to a company named Stewart Warner Instruments Corporation. In early 1998 Stewart-Warner Instruments Corporation was sold. Its instruments assets were later bought by Datcon Instrument Company (later renamed to Maxima Technologies), which sells some of its products under the Stewart-Warner brand.
 
by Rita Jean Moran (www.thelibrarykids.com)
 
 
Source:
 
 
 
 

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