Taylor Instrument Companies

Taylor Instrument Companies was an American maker of temperature and process control instruments based in Rochester, New York. Its roots lie in 1851, when George Taylor and David Kendall founded Kendall and Taylor to produce thermometers and other instruments for monitoring temperature. Kendall left in 1853 and the firm passed through several names, including Taylor and Richardson and the Taylor Brothers Company, before it was incorporated as the Taylor Instrument Company. In the 1890s it expanded by buying other firms, beginning with the Watertown Thermometer Company in 1891, and it opened a branch in London in 1898. Its best remembered contribution to automation came in 1941, when two of its employees, John Ziegler and Nathaniel Nichols, devised a defined method for tuning controllers and presented it in a paper to a meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The company merged with Ritter Pfaudler in 1968 to form the holding company Sybron Corporation, and Combustion Engineering acquired it from Sybron in 1983.