Badger Meter history

Since frozen water pipes were an all too common occurrence in Wisconsin's bitter winters, Badger found a ready market and by 1910 was selling close to 3,700 eight-dollar meters a year.

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.

Fuse production--seven million in all were made--soon accounted for 95 percent of its total output, and in the space of a few months in 1942 Badger's employment more than doubled to 550.

1948 Roy Horton resumed Bob Huggins valve and founded REsearch COntrol® (RECO®).

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 1960 it therefore merged the Systems Division into Noller's Control System Division and pulled back from projects that would have led it into large computer systems and medical data collection systems.

Badger improved the Easy-Read still further in 1963 when it introduced the Read-O-Matic, a register that could be used with Easy-Read to read the meter's data remotely.

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

1967 Badger Meter purchased W. Gottlob Volz, a 65-year-old meter manufacturing company located in Stuttgart, Germany.

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.

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.

In 1993 Badger won a $15 million contract to supply TRACE-equipped Recordall meters to Mexico City, the world's largest residential water meter project at that time.

By 1995, Badger had broken the $100 million level in sales and set the goal of reaching $200 million in sales by the turn of the century.