Industry History | Snap-on — Five Handles and Ten Sockets at 134 Reed
· 1920-4
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Industry History | Snap-on — Five Handles and Ten Sockets at 134 Reed
kevin
People treat Snap-on as a Kenosha campus that always sent a white van to a dealer's bay.
The first book was five handles and ten sockets that clicked together.
On 21 April 1920 Joseph Johnson and William Seidemann incorporated the Snap-on Wrench Company at 134 Reed Street in Milwaukee, with $25,000 in 1920 capital.
Both men had just left Blackhawk Manufacturing, where Johnson had managed interchangeable sockets for the automobile trade.
The pitch was printed as a slogan: five tools do the work of fifty.
The pair sold more than 500 cash-on-delivery sets from sample kits and a short brochure before the shop was even a year old.
Stanton Palmer took the line on the road from Chicago and, with Newton Tarble, opened branch cities across the United States, Mexico, and Canada.
In 1929 the company bought an eleven-acre Kenosha site and moved headquarters there in 1930, folding Blue-Point into a wider tool book under the Snap-on Tools name.
Sales reached $1 million in 1935 dollars.
The company listed publicly in 1941.
The mechanism is still the Reed Street one.
A mechanic buys a handle once and snaps a socket to the job, instead of hanging fifty fixed wrenches on a board.
Reed Street in 1920 sat in industrial Walker's Point, foundries and freight, not a Kenosha lawn.
A visitor walking the old number finds later brick on the same south-side grid.
The sockets outgrew the street.
The street is where the set started.
Photo: Milwaukee streetscape via Wikimedia Commons.
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