Beatty Brothers Limited was a major international manufacturer of agricultural machinery, barn and stable equipment, and household appliances, which was based in Fergus, Ontario, Canada.
George, however, left home at the age of 18 to apprentice as a machinist with Haggert Brothers in Brampton, a firm specializing in the manufacture of threshers.
At the time, agricultural machinery in Ontario was only beginning to be manufactured according to standardized designs, and George was dissatisfied with the quality of the implements being made.
[4] However, this did not create many possibilities for the implementation of advanced designs or allow for efficiencies of scale in production, which caused many of the small firms of the 19th century to gradually expand and modernize or be absorbed by larger manufacturers.
[5] Grindley was a manufacturer of a wide range of products, from agricultural machinery like reapers and ploughs to more domestic items, such as stoves and kitchen utensils.
This would mark the entry of Beatty Brothers into the growing washing machine and domestic appliance market, where they would ultimately produce some of their most notable designs.
As home electrification took Ontario by storm, electric appliance sales became an increasingly lucrative source of income for manufacturers, and there was a strong desire to market these products to a national, rather than regional, customer base.
[3] These acts, both successful and unsuccessful, reflected the level of Beatty influence in Fergus, and were also typical behaviour from industrialists at the time, who saw the local communities near their factories in a managerial light.
While the Beatty family expressed their influence through the Methodist Church and political Methodism in order to try to align the local community with their vision of a harmonious society, their actions were not dissimilar to the archetypal paternal industrialist of the era, Henry Ford, whose Sociological Department attempted to use quasi-scientific justifications for monitoring and managing the private lives of his workers and their families, attempting to "weed out" disgruntled employees, labour militants, and workers who had not sufficiently assimilated to a 20th-century American lifestyle and culture.
[3] Factors such as these made the Beatty brothers unwilling to relocate to a more significant manufacturing centre such as Hamilton or Toronto, despite the logistical and workforce supply advantages this would convey.
By 1925, it was reportedly the largest producer and exporter of barn and stable equipment in the British Empire,[3] and in 1928, it was selling a range of over 600 different products throughout Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.
The company reached its technological peak in 1927, when it pioneered the use of the agitator in the design of washing machines, which spun clothes around a tub in circular fashion, preventing them from getting clumped or tangled.
The company suffered during the Great Depression, but focused on retaining the workforce of longtime employees it had carefully cultivated, allowing it to eventually emerge relatively unscathed.
In 1937, the company had offices in Saint John, Montreal, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Vernon, Vancouver, London (England), and Wellington, New Zealand, as well as its headquarters in Fergus.
Without the capital to continue to acquire patents through acquisition of other companies, or the design and engineering talents of George Beatty, the company became increasingly hemmed in, as major American manufacturers such as Westinghouse and General Electric began to overcome pre-NAFTA trade barriers by establishing plants in Canada, a common business practice at the time for American manufacturers hoping to break into the Canadian postwar consumer market.
It still remained a significant regional influence within the manufacturing centres of southern Ontario west of Toronto, with a number of companies operating feeder plants that produced parts for Beatty Brothers appliances.