Boston-born Willard Rockwell (1888–1978) made his fortune with the invention and successful launch of a new bearing system for truck axles in 1919.

He merged his Oshkosh, Wisconsin-based operation with the Timken-Detroit Axle Company (current Meritor Inc.[1]) in 1928,[2] rising to become chairman of its board in 1940.

[2] After various mergers with automotive suppliers, it comprised about 10 to 20 factories in the Upper Midwestern U.S. and southern Ontario, and in 1958 renamed itself Rockwell-Standard Corporation.

He was appointed member of the Board of Directors of Rockwell GmbH Germany and Dikkers Valve Products LLC Netherlands.

Prior to Rockwell, Michael Hodges was a physicist with NASA and aerospace management with Martin-Marietta Corp. in Orlando, Florida.

The founder's son, Willard Rockwell Jr., appeared taking the company in a new direction, replacing the founder's model of strong medium-size manufacturing companies with diverse industrial products with strong industrial engineering and quality control in multiple locations – to a new model leveraging assets of the profitable seven manufacturing divisions of Rockwell Manufacturing Company into a new business model of a dominant government-serving (NASA, Defense Dept.)

aerospace company, named Rockwell International, which included North American Aviation, of products such as the Space Shuttle.

During the 1980s, Anderson, his CFO Bob dePalma, and the Rockwell management team built the company to #27 on the Fortune 500 list.

The end of the Cold War and the perceived "peace dividend", however, prompted accelerated divestitures and sweeping management reforms.

At the end of the 1980s, the company sold its valve and meter division, formerly Rockwell Manufacturing, to British Tyre & Rubber.

Rocketdyne, which had been spun off by North American in 1955, was re-merged into Rockwell, and by that time produced most of the rocket engines used in the United States.

In addition to the manufacture of nuclear missiles and bombers, Rockwell also produced key components of the bombs they carried, including plutonium triggers at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado.

[15] In 1990, a group of Colorado homeowners filed a lawsuit against Rockwell and the Dow Chemical Company, accusing the operators of reducing the value of their properties as a result of plutonium releases from the plant.

It was also involved in providing custom electronic intelligence equipment to the Imperial Iranian Air Force as part of Project Ibex and paid bribes to the Shah of Iran in order to secure contracts there.

Rockwell International had a major research laboratory complex in Thousand Oaks, Ventura County, California.

[23] The laboratory invented Metalorganic vapour-phase epitaxy (MOVPE), also commonly known as Metal Organic Chemical Vapor Deposition (MOCVD).

[24] It also achieved fame in selected areas of information science, notably human-computer interaction, augmented reality, multimedia systems, and diagnostics.