Good Afternoon, All --
There were some interesting goings-on behind Pratt and Whitney Machine Tool in the 1900's, but the corporate who's-doing-what-to-whom goes back to Niles Tool Works of Cincinnati (originally) and Hamilton (later), Ohio.
I started to research this story several years ago, but got sidetracked and now can't find my notebook . . . so the dates are from memory.
In the late 1890's the Niles Tool Works bought one of their competitors, Pond Machine Tool. A year later Niles bought another competitor, Bement, Miles, and Company of Philadelphia and merged the three companies into Niles-Bement-Pond. (I speculate -- for reasons that become evident later -- that Niles-Bement-Pond continued to operate Niles Tool Works as a division of the parent company.)
At about that same time, Niles opened a subsidiary in Germany and actually exported American machine-tool manufacturing technology to Europe. (As you would expect, American ownership of the German subsidiary was a casualty of war.)
Only a couple of years later, Niles-Bement-Pond bought Pratt & Whitney and several smaller machine-tool makers, becoming the "800 pound gorilla" of US machine tool makers.
Meanwhile, in the mid 1920's, several senior executives and engineers at Wright Aeronautical had become frustrated enough with Wright that they decided to leave Wright to start a new company to make a modern aircraft engine. The "ringleader", a Frederick Rentschler, had a personal relationship with Pratt & Whitney's president (??), and went to Hartford to ask for financial backing.
Pratt and Whitney Machine Tool loaned Rentschler and his associates a quarter of a million dollars to get his new aircraft engine manufacturing company going, and rented the new company manufacturing space. At this point, it is not clear if the aircraft engine maker licensed the Pratt & Whitney name or not . . . there is at least one report that the P&W name was originally applied to the aircraft engine maker by mistake; it seems that P&W Machine Tool's foundry made the cast the crankcase for the first engines and had cast their name into the crankcase. Then, a Navy clerk keeping test records for the engine trials misunderstood the intent of the Pratt & Whitney label cast into the crankcase, and recorded Pratt & Whitney as the engine maker. Supposedly Rentschler and his associates quickly realized that it would be better to license the Pratt and Whitney name for their aircraft engine company than to try to change the government records.
Niles wasn't the only machine builder in Hamilton, Ohio . . . Frederick Rentschler's father had, many years earlier, founded a company by the name of Hooven, Owens, and Rentschler in Hamilton that primarily built stationary steam and diesel engines. [A H-O-R diesel, a double-acting two-stroke, was used in a dozen US submarines at the start of WWII . . . but it wouldn't withstand the flexing of the hull. All subs originally fitted with the H-O-R engines were quickly retrofitted with GM Winton (aka GM Cleveland) or Fairbanks-Morse OP engines.]
In 1928, Niles merged with H-O-R and the merged company took a new name, General Machinery Company. Then, in 1947, General Machinery merged with Lima Locomotive to form Lima-Hamilton. Two years later, Lima-Hamilton was merged into Philadelphia's Baldwin Locomotive, creating Baldwin-Lima-Hamilton Corporation.
But there's some mud in the water, because records show that in 1945 Chandler-Evans absorbed Niles-Bement-Pond. (My speculation: If N-B-P was still in operation in 1945 under the N-B-P name, then it must have been a Niles-named subsidiary of N-B-P that merged with H-O-R eighteen years earlier.)
Now we need to introduce another player, the Pennsylvania Coal and Coke Corporation. As Pennsylvania Coal diversified from mining into manufacturing they changed their name to Penn-Texas Corporation in 1954. Very shortly afterward, Penn-Texas bought control of Colt's Firearm Manufacturing of Hartford, Connecticut.
The next year, in 1955, Chandler Evans merged into Penn-Texas Corporation. Three years later, Penn-Texas merged with Fairbanks-Morse, and the name of the combined company was changed to Fairbanks-Whitney.
Several years later, in 1964, Fairbanks-Whitney changed their corporate name to Colt Industries.
At the end of 1966 Lufkin Rule Company sold their precision measuring tool product line, including designs and manufacturing machinery to the Pratt & Whitney Division of Colt Industries. Pratt & Whitney moved the machinery from Saginaw to Hartford and replaced the Lufkin branding with P&W.
After several years, Colt/P&W "pulled the plug" on their ex-Lufkin line of precision measuring tools. (I have heard that the line was severely curtailed in 1969 and dropped totally in 1971.)
P&W's last days as a machine tool builder in Hartford were under Colt ownership, and as Colt was having severe financial problems of their own in the 1980's they sold off the profitable bit of P&W -- metrological equipment -- and closed down the rest.
Cincinnati Milacron bought the machine-tool intellectual property and design files, and Milacron's successor today, Cincinnati Machine, sells OEM parts for some of the P&W machine tools.
Colt Industries sold their firearms-making business and changed their name to Coltec. Coltec eventually bought B F Goodrich's non-tire businesses and took the B F Goodrich name for the whole.
I understand that today's Niles-Simmons is the US marketing and servicing subsidiary of the German-owned successor of Niles Tool Work's German subsidiary.
Whew!
And if any of you can fill in any missing pieces of this story . . . PLEASE do.
John
