Fairbanks-Morse

Founded in 1823 as a manufacturer of weighing scales, it later diversified into pumps, engines, windmills, coffee grinders, radios, farm tractors, feed mills, locomotives, and industrial supplies.

Though unsuccessful in fabricating for fiber factories, another of Morse's inventions, the platform scale, formed the basis for the later company.

[citation needed] In Wisconsin, former missionary Leonard Wheeler designed a durable windmill for pumping water, the Eclipse windmill.[when?]

It grew to include typewriters, hand trucks, railway velocipedes, pumps, tractors, and a variety of warehouse and bulk shipping tools.

The company became an industrial supplier distributing complete "turn-key" systems: tools, plumbing, gauges, gaskets, parts, valves, and pipe.

[3] The company also had brief forays into building automobiles, tractors, corn shellers, hammermills, cranes, televisions, and refrigerators, but output was small in these fields.

After the expiration of Rudolf Diesel's American license in 1912, Fairbanks Morse (FM) entered the large engine business.

The company's larger Model Y semi-diesel became a standard workhorse, and sugar, rice, timber, and mine mills used the engine.

The Y-VA engine was the first high-compression, cold-start, full diesel developed by Fairbanks Morse without the acquisition of any foreign patent.

CO marine engines were installed in British decoy fishing ships to lure German submarines within range of their 6" naval guns.

In 1939 Fairbanks-Morse developed a marine engine using an unusual opposed piston (OP) design, similar in arrangement to a series of German Junkers aircraft diesels.

Fairbanks-Morse ranked 60th among United States corporations in the value of World War II military production contracts.

[15] The early locomotives soon proved unreliable, as high-stress railroad service exposed weaknesses in the engine that had not been seen in less demanding marine applications.

[17] In late 1949, the company's new cab units, named the Consolidated Line, were introduced to replace the Erie-builts in its catalog.

This is in addition to the pump and engine division, which produced Canadian Fairbanks Morse-branded products for farms, factories and mines.

Export offices were established in Rio de Janeiro and Buenos Aires; a factory was opened in Mexico, where model Z engines were built well into the 1980s.

It dated from 1902, when Cooper Sheep Shearing Machinery Ltd was set up in Sydney, and became an agent for Fairbanks Morse in that hemisphere.

The company sold and updated the Eclipse model of windmill pumps in North America until they became obsolete with widespread rural electrification in the 1940s.

Low-cost electricity from the grid eliminated the need for local power production by small and medium diesel plants.

While many Fairbanks Morse engines dutifully served into the late twentieth century, they could not compete with modernization, regional plant closures, and electricity.

Regional sales offices were closed, and the one-shop model no longer appealed to buyers in the new consumer age.