Industry History | Illinois Tool Works — An Economist Ad at Huron and Franklin
· 1912
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Industry History | Illinois Tool Works — An Economist Ad at Huron and Franklin
kevin
People treat Illinois Tool Works as a Glenview campus that always bought fastener companies.
The first shop opened because a banker placed a want ad.
In December 1911 Byron Laflin Smith, founder of Northern Trust, advertised in The Economist for capital to put into a high-class manufacturing business in or near Chicago.
A group of Rockford tool inventors answered with a plan for hob grinding and metal-cutting tools.
Illinois Tool Works opened in 1912 at Huron and Franklin Streets, a few blocks north of the river.
The named co-founders on the shop floor were Frank W. Englund, Paul B. Goddard and Oscar T. Hegg.
Smith died in 1914. His son Harold C. Smith took the presidency and kept the book on cutting tools.
In 1920 the firm bought Shakeproof Screw and Nut Lock Company.
Shakeproof's toothed lock washers solved a vibration problem that was loosening fasteners on early automobiles, including the Model T.
That washer, not the original grinding shop, became the product that paid for the next fifty years.
Harold Byron Smith, the founder's grandson, became president in the 1930s at twenty-seven, after his father died.
The company recorded a profit in every year of the Great Depression.
A wartime wafer cutter sped the rifling of artillery barrels.
After 1945 the same metal skill moved into plastic fasteners and, later, the Hi-Cone six-pack carrier.
Headquarters now sit in Glenview. The mechanism that survived is the one the want ad implied: own a small, patented part that a larger machine cannot do without.
Photo: Franklin Street Bridge over the Chicago River, via Wikimedia Commons.
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