|  | 
| |
 |
| |
The "Barrel
Making Machine"
The story
of what is today
Greenlee began in Crawford County,
Pennsylvania over 160 years ago.
Born on the family farm in April
of 1838, Robert and Ralph were the
twin sons
of Edmund Greenlee, a
farmer of
some ingenuity. Among
the labor-saving devices Edmund
created was a line of wooden barrel
making
machines he patented when the
boys were young. Growing up in this environment
seems to have fostered some valuable skills in the brothers;
both demonstrated
mechanical aptitude and inventiveness, and, before they
were 20, proficiency as coopers (barrel makers).
A company biography, Round Bits...Square Holes, written in
1962, stated, "No training could have been more timely." Indeed,
shortly after the twins turned 21 in 1859, Edwin Drake drilled
the region's first successful oil well only a few miles from
the Greenlee home, others soon followed, and the resulting
demand for
oil storage barrels soon exceeded 1,000 per day, "more
than all the barrel makers in northeast Pennsylvania combined
could
produce." Ralph and Robert put their father's machines
to good use; what would one day become Greenlee Textron
had begun...
|
|
|
| |
The
Move to Chicago
As
both oil production and barrel supply began to stabilize over
the next couple of years, the brothers considered taking their
operation to a city, where many additional markets could be found;
at the time, wooden barrels were used for storage and shipping
of innumerable products.
Father Edmund apparently
|
|
encouraged
this and even agreed when the young men decided, in 1862, to
move
their business all the
way
to Chicago, where the wooden barrel market was growing as fast
as the city, a major shipping point for grains and meat. The
onset of the Civil War and the Union Army's use of the city as
a primary
arsenal and supply point also created a greater demand for new
barrels.
Within
one year of their 1862 arrival in Chicago, Ralph and Robert were
well established, and as the barrel machine business
grew, they |
| expanded further
by becoming general suppliers of other manufacturers' production
machinery. However, the brothers' primary interest was always in
developing new products, and Greenlee Brothers & Co was officially
formed in 1866 with partner William Brooks. (It is interesting
to note that during this time, the brothers wooed and wed Brooks'
daughters, Robert to Emily and Ralph to Elizabeth Brooks!) When
the Great Chicago Fire of 1871 left
Greenlee Bros unscathed, the greater demand for woodworking machines
during reconstruction only added to the already solid business
of supplying furniture makers and other wood products manufacturers.
An 1873 magazine article
reported the brothers had "25 men employed building planers, matchers, shapers,
saws......and other products." |
|
|
|
| |
The "Hollow
Chisel Mortiser"
Promising
in an early catalog "if
a machine we build is equaled by any other make, we either improve
it or cease its manufacture", Ralph and Robert achieved
another triumph with the invention of the "hollow chisel mortiser" in
1874. Similar in size to a table saw, this revolutionary tool combined the cutting
edge of a four-sided chisel with the boring ability of a rotating bit to produce
square holes in wood (a design used worldwide to this day and the inspiration
behind the Greenlee "Square G" logo, top of page), enabling speedier,
more accurate and more solid construction of wood products. The mortiser
proved so successful that the brothers purchased a lot for the construction
of a new
factory (ironically, only one block from the site on DeKoven Street where
Mrs O'Leary's infamous cow supposedly started the Chicago Fire). |
|
|
|
| |
The "Greenlee
Tie Machining Car"
After
the Civil War ended, the nation continued expanding westward
at an increasing rate, and
the completion of the first transcontinental railroad line
in 1869
further fueled this migration, helping to bring thousands of settlers west
of the Mississippi. This in turn prompted the building of thousands
of miles of
new railroad track; from 1870 to '80, 40,000 miles of new track was laid, and
in the next decade, another 65,000 new miles were added, every one of them
requiring several thousand wooden ties to support the track.
The Greenlees responded by
developing a larger and more complex innovation than any of their previous
machines, the "railroad tie machining car", a self-contained rolling tie-milling
factory in a boxcar. Fed rough timber on one side, this could produce up to 6
finished ties per minute sliding out the other. (By 1911, Greenlee was building "self-powered
tie machining & spike driving cars" and other extra-heavy duty tenoning,
mortising and cutting machines for both railroads and railcar builders.) A manager
of the Pullman Car Company wrote Greenlee Bros "They in all respects excel,
rather than fall short of, what you claim for them." |
|
|
|
| |
The "Self
Feed Power Rip Saw"
In
1875, the first Greenlee catalog was produced, and 1881 saw the
brothers
achieve another milestone when they introduced the "self-feed power
rip saw". Designed to speed production times as well as prevent the
loss of digits common among sawyers until that time, this table-sized machine
immediately
proved even more popular than the mortiser; by the time 2,000 mortisers were
sold, there had been 9,000 rip saw sales, with customers reaching all the
way to South America, Europe, and even Australia. For a while, when an ordered
saw was being shipped, an entire railcar would be filled with the same machine,
with word sent ahead of this; along the way, the whole carload would be purchased. |
 |
|
|
|
| |
The
Move to Rockford
By
the turn of the century, Greenlee had outgrown a succession of
buildings in Chicago, including
two foundries
for casting their own parts. After their own
Great Fire left the principal manufactory "an ice-covered ruin" on
a sub-zero night in 1897, the brothers began searching for a piece of land
with railroad accessibility large enough for about 20,000 square feet of
new buildings
and foundry, and with acreage for future expansion. In 1903, they chose a
large piece of land in Rockford, Illinois, (already a furniture manufacturing
center,
it was home to many of Greenlee's customers), where the Illinois Central
Railroad could (and did) build rail lines right into the new plant in 1904.
Shortly
before World War 1, Greenlee made their first tools for metal working machinery,
and soon followed with the company's first metal working production
machines; both automobile and railcar manufacturers—heavily reliant on
Greenlee machinery—had begun replacing wood vehicle frames with
metal. In 1927, a
separate firm, Greenlee Tool Company, was established to carry on the small
tools business
while the machine tools remained with Greenlee Brothers & Company.
Within a year, Greenlee Tool introduced a line of metal hole "knockout" punches,
followed in 1930 by the "hydraulic-powered pipe & conduit bender",
among the first products developed especially for electrical contractors.
The long line of benders which developed from this beginning—and a host
of other
products developed especially for this trade—continue as an important
part of Greenlee business to this day. |
|
|
|
| |
The "Automatic
Transfer" Machines
While
additional woodworking machinery, small tools, and electrician's
products continued to be developed, by 1935 Greenlee was building "automatic
transfer" metal
production machinery incorporating hydraulic feed & clamping mechanisms;
operators had
only to load raw parts and
press a button. During
World War II, |
 |
Greenlee
built an $800,000 175-foot long automatic transfer machine to mill
the
cylinder heads
for B17 Flying Fortress engines; loaded with 130 cylinder heads
at a time, in 49 seconds it performed
162 machining operations previously requiring 300
man hours. Part of this machine |
| subsequently
joined the machine tool exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C. The post-war years saw Greenlee producing massive
machines capable of milling a hundred engine connecting rods or
refrigerator compressor bodies per
hour and, in 1953, Greenlee built—in only eight months—eight
262-foot long machines which each turned out 100 transmission cases
per hour for General Motors. |
|
|
|
| |
Greenlee
Today & Tomorrow
In
the decades since, many changes have occurred at Greenlee, including
becoming a part of global
manufacturer Textron, Inc. in 1986, and acquiring Fairmont
Hydraulics in 1992 and German tool manufacturer Klauke in 1996.
Expansion into the data/tele
communications equipment industry has been facilitated with the purchase
of Datacom Technologies in 1998, Progressive Electronics and
RIFOCS in 1999, and both IMAP
Corporation and U.K.-based Chesilvale Electronics in 2000.
Greenlee
continues to enlarge its product offerings, as well as developing
totally
new ones for the electrical, public utility, agriculture, construction,
plant maintenance, and data/tele communications industries. Today,
hundreds of
pages catalog the product lines offered by thousands of Greenlee
distributors worldwide.
Greenlee
is a very different company than in years past, but the innovative,
adventurous spirit of
Ralph & Robert Greenlee to invent and deliver the
highest quality products and service possible lives on. With Textron's
commitment and
our ongoing growth through new products and acquisitions, Greenlee continues
looking boldly toward the future. |
|
| |
