Badger Foundry history

Self-equalizing metal expansion joints first became a large part of their business in about 1916, so the first expansion joints were designed, manufactured and placed into service approximately 100 years ago.

In 1919 Badger moved to a new facility that included the company's first foundry.

In 1924 Leach was replaced as president by Charles Wright, who would guide the company for the next three decades.

With steady sales to customers in Central and South America, by 1937 Badger's workforce, which had unionized the year before, had climbed to more than 200.

Bomb Fuses for the War Effort: 1939--51

Diversification Under James Wright: 1952--59

In 1954 Wright had built a new state-of-the-art nonferrous foundry in Fall River, Wisconsin, 70 miles west of Milwaukee, that he hoped would further diversify Badger's business by enabling it to take on other manufacturers' machining jobs.

Finally, in 1958 Badger acquired Measure-Rite Inc. of California, a maker of propeller-driven flow and irrigation meters, which became a new Badger division.

In 1966 Badger expanded into South America with a velocity meter manufacturing plant in Peru and then later established a subsidiary in Ecuador.

In 1967 it acquired W. Gottlob Volz, a Stuttgart-based meter maker that unfortunately ranked at the bottom of Germany's water meter industry.

By 1968 this had culminated in the unveiling of a magnetic resonance flowmeter (MRF) that could measure the flow of chemicals inside a pipe without coming into contact with the fluid, thus improving the accuracy of the measurement.

Retrenching and Restructuring: 1969--74

When President Nixon cut funding for the Environmental Protection Agency in 1973, however, Badger had to refocus its precision flowmeter marketing efforts from the wastewater control industry to the petrochemical and chemical industries.

Then, after 22 years at Badger's helm, Wright relinquished the presidency to company veteran Robert Pfeffer in 1974.

James Wright's diversification efforts two decades before had expanded the potential sources of Badger's revenues, and in 1975, for the first time in its history, more than half of the company's profits came from products other than residential water heaters.

In 1961 Badger had formed an international division to manage all foreign sales, which by 1970 were accounting for one third of Badger's total residential sales. It stubbornly remained there, and in 1978 Badger was forced to sell it off.

Faced with flagging demand, in 1982 new CEO James Forbes was forced to implement a wage freeze, a reduction in benefits, forced early retirements, and an employee downsizing program that reduced the company's workforce from 1,300 to 960.

Because Badger was strapped for cash and had already incorporated the telemetering technology of its California-based Electronics Division into its knowledge base, Forbes also felt he could afford to cut loose that division, selling it in 1983 to General Signal.

Its purchase of Precision Measurement Inc. of Dallas in 1985 came to little when its leading technology, a calorimeter for measuring the heat-producing capability of natural gas in gas pipelines, proved impractical.