Industry History | A. O. Smith — Baby-Carriage Iron Before the Water Heater
· 1874
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Industry History | A. O. Smith — Baby-Carriage Iron Before the Water Heater
kevin
People treat A. O. Smith as a Milwaukee campus that always made glass-lined tanks.
The first shop made iron fittings for baby carriages.
In the summer of 1874 Charles Jeremiah Smith opened Charles J. Smith-Machinist on Milwaukee's north side.
The work was hardware specialties and formed metal, not household plumbing.
Two sons joined him and the sign became C. J. Smith and Sons.
In 1889 the shop began rolling steel tubing from sheet metal for bicycle frames.
By 1895 the firm was the largest bicycle-parts maker in the United States.
In 1899 Arthur Oliver Smith, a son of the founder, pressed the first steel automobile frame as a lighter substitute for the timber chassis then in use.
Peerless, Cadillac, Packard and Oldsmobile ordered frames from the Milwaukee floor.
Arthur incorporated A. O. Smith Company in Milwaukee in 1904.
In 1906 Henry Ford ordered 10,000 steel frames, and the plant answered with a continuous assembly line that later became a landmark of industrial engineering.
The north-side works at Twenty-Seventh Street stacked finished car frames in yards that defined the neighborhood for half a century.
A glass-lined tank patent in 1936 turned the same enamel skill toward household hot water.
The automotive book was sold to Tower Automotive in 1997.
Headquarters remain in Milwaukee, at 11270 West Park Place, far west of the vanished frame plant.
The mechanism that survived is the one the bicycle shop proved: form sheet steel into a closed section, then sell that section to whoever is building the next machine.
Photo: Milwaukee skyline from the lake, via Wikimedia Commons.
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