Babcock & Wilcox history

In 1878 famed inventor Thomas Edison bought a B&W boiler for his work on electricity and a year later made a successful public demonstration of incandescent lighting, ushering in a new era of electric power.

In 1881 four B&W boilers were installed in the first central electrical station in the United States, which was owned by the Brush Electric Light Company of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.

A year later, in 1882, Edison brought electric street lighting to New York City, powered by four B&W boilers in the Pearl Street Central Station in lower Manhattan.

In 1889 Babcock fitted his yacht with a specially design boiler that became an immediate sensation.

Company Founders Die: 1893

Pratt died in 1896 and was replaced by Edwin H. Bennett, who died two years later.

In January 1901, B&W opened its first manufacturing plant, located in Bayonne, New Jersey.

Then, in 1903, Chicago's Fisk Street Station power generation plant installed 24 B&W boilers to become the first utility to rely solely on steam turbines to produce electricity.

In 1904 it bought the Pittsburgh Seamless Tube Company operation in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, and two years after that B&W acquired the Stirling Consolidated Boiler Company plant in Barberton, Ohio.

In 1926 B&W acquired a maker of pulverized coal equipment, Fuller Lehigh Company.

One of the notable contracts of the period was the manufacture of the penstocks, water-carrying steel pipes, used in the Hoover Dam project in 1932.

1933 B&W introduce the Integral Furnace boiler.

Another important development during this period was the 1935 installation of the first "black liquor" recovery boiler in the United States, using a byproduct of the pulping process as a fuel.

With war clouds developing over Europe and the Far East, the United States built up its Navy in preparation for another World War, and once the country entered the war in December 1941 the pace of construction of vessels of all types increased dramatically.

In 1953 it supplied many of the key components used in the United States Navy's Nautilus submarine, the first nuclear-power ship in history.

B&W continued to expand its product lines and capabilities during the rest of the 1950s. It acquired Milwaukee-based Globe Steel Tubes Company in 1955 to bolster its Tubular Products Division.

1956 The Atomic Energy Division is formed.

Also of note, in 1958 the Boiler Division moved its headquarters from New York to Barberton, which would eventually become B&W corporate headquarters as well.

Among the most important milestones of this period was the 1969 development of a construction technique that allowed a nuclear power plant to erect a complete outer shell before the major components were installed.

Unfortunately, B&W was also connected to the first case of melted fuel in a full-scale commercial nuclear power plant when, in March 1979, one of the units at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility in Pennsylvania came perilously close to causing a catastrophic nuclear accident.

1982 B&W begins settling asbestos liability claims.

In 1995 B&W opened the Clean Coal Environmental Development Facility, an Alliance, Ohio-based combustion and emissions testing facility that kept the company on the cutting edge of modern power generating technology.

The company's business was thriving, as demonstrated later in 2006 when B&W signed a deal in excess of $1 billion to supply Texas power plants with eight coal-fired boilers and related equipment, the largest North American boiler order in several decades.

In 2015, The Babcock & Wilcox Company spun off its power generation business to allow BWXT to focus on government and nuclear operations.