Warner & Swasey Company

The Warner & Swasey Company was an American manufacturer of machine tools, instruments, and special machinery. It operated as an independent business firm, based in Cleveland, from its founding in 1880 until its acquisition in 1980. It was founded as a partnership in 1880 by Worcester Reed Warner (1846–1929) and Ambrose Swasey (1846–1937). The company was best known for two general types of products: astronomical telescopes and turret lathes. It also did a large amount of instrument work, such as equipment for astronomical observatories and military instruments (rangefinders, optical gunsights, etc.) The themes that united these various lines of business were the crafts of toolmaking and instrument-making, which have often overlapped technologically. In the decades after World War II, it also entered the heavy equipment industry with its acquisition of the Gradall brand. While it was astronomical telescopes that made the company famous, its profits came from machine tools, especially turret lathes, and military instruments; telescope-making "essentially amounted to astronomical philanthropy," rooted in the founders' life-long interest in astronomy.

History In 1866, Swasey and Warner met as fellow apprentices at the Exeter Machine Works in Exeter, New Hampshire. Within a few years they went together to Pratt & Whitney in Hartford, Connecticut, which was one of the leading machine tool builders of the era. There they both rose through the ranks, with Warner rising to be in charge of an assembly floor and Swasey rising to be foreman of the gear-cutting department. There Swasey invented the epicycloidal milling machine for cutting true theoretical curves for the milling cutters used for cutting gears. In 1880, Swasey and Warner resigned from Pratt & Whitney in order to start a machine-tool-building business together. They investigated Chicago as a place to build their works, but they perceived the Chicago of 1880 as too far west and lacking a sufficient labor pool of skilled machinists. So they went to Cleveland, Ohio, where their company would stay for the next century. They worked together for 20 years without a formal corporate agreement, during which time their partnership's principal products were various models of lathes and milling machines. From the beginning, the partners built both machine tools and telescopes, which reflected their interests in toolmaking, instrument-making, and astronomy. After nearly 20 years of successful growth, the partners realized that their business was growing enough that it should be given a formal corporate structure, so in 1900 they reorganized it under the official name of The Warner & Swasey Company. During the early- to mid-20th century, the company was well known in American industry. Its products, both turret lathes and instruments, played very prominent roles in the war efforts for both world wars. Warner & Swasey took part in the transition to numerical control and computer numerical control machine tools during the 1950s through 1970s, but like many other machine tool builders during those decades, it ultimately was affected by the prevailing winds of merger and acquisition in the industry. Bendix Corporation acquired Warner & Swasey in 1980 for nearly $300 million, beating out a competing bid by AMCA International. Warner & Swasey's last plant, in Solon, Ohio, closed in January 1992. In 2019, the Warner & Swasey Company Building was listed on the National Register of Historic Places. In 2022, the Trademark for Warner & Swasey was acquired by the company Geissele Automatics, and subsequently used to promote their upcoming red dot optic.

Products

Telescopes

The first Warner & Swasey telescope, built in 1881, was sold to Beloit College for its new Smith Observatory and had a 9.5-inch lens made by Alvan Clark & Sons. Among the notable instruments the company built were the telescopes for Lick Observatory (1888, 36-inch, refracting); the United States Naval Observatory (1893); Yerkes Observatory (according to the 50th-anniversary book, this was a 40-inch refracting telescope completed in time for display at the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893, although its installation at Yerkes was apparently in 1897); and Canada's Dominion Astrophysical Observatory (1916, 72-inch, reflecting). In 1919, the company's founders donated their private observatory (built between their neighboring houses on Euclid Avenue) in East Cleveland, Ohio to Case Western Reserve University. Today's Warner and Swasey Observatory grew from that facility. The company's 50th-anniversary book describes the firm's giant-telescope-building work as unprofitable overall but a labor of technological love.

… excerpt ends here. Continue reading the full article.