Fairbanks Morse

Fairbanks, Morse and Company was an American manufacturing company that existed from 1823 until 1958. It began when the inventor Thaddeus Fairbanks opened an ironworks in St. Johnsbury, Vermont, to make a cast iron plow and a heating stove, and it grew on the platform scale he patented in 1832. A Fairbanks employee, Charles Hosmer Morse, opened a Chicago office, widened the product line and brought in the Eclipse windmill pumps designed in Beloit, Wisconsin, so that the firm became Fairbanks Morse and Company. Over time it made pumps, gas and diesel engines, windmills, coffee grinders, radios, farm tractors, feed mills, locomotives and industrial supplies, and its engines powered railway and marine work from the 1930s. The Penn-Texas conglomerate bought it in 1958. Three separate companies, Fairbanks Scales, Fairbanks Morse Defense and Fairbanks Nijhuis, each claim its heritage without being a full direct descendant.