Huntington Alloys Corporation history

In 1922, Robert Crooks Stanley began a 30-year tenure as president--and later chairman--of Inco, intent upon building new markets in fields other than munitions.

In 1928, Inco decided it would be wiser to join forces rather than fight over the world's largest nickel mine.

The antitrust action was settled in 1948 when Inco signed a consent decree, agreeing only that it would sell nickel in the United States at fair prices; its worldwide monopoly, however, was beyond the reach of the United States Department of Justice.

After several years of exploration, a major find was made in northern Manitoba in 1956, a field it christened "Thompson" after company Chairman John F. Thompson, successor to Robert Stanley.

After the 1958 recession, sales of nickel took off once again.

Except in 1974, a boom year for commodities, the nickel market was generally soft for the rest of the decade.

Additionally, Inco's new battery subsidiary was floundering, and in the severe recession of 1981 Inco found itself in deep trouble.

A rebound in the nickel market in 1987 brought the boost Inco needed: an increase in market share to nearly 35 percent and a year-end profit of US$125 million.

Finishing 1993 with sales of only US$2.13 billion, the company had managed to post a profit of US$28 million rather than another loss.

Responding to what Maclean's called "the largest single source of sulphur dioxide pollution on the continent," Inco launched a series of abatement programs (with a price tag of over $500 million) to substantially lower emissions by 1994.

Though development of so-called telemining was expensive and not always smooth, the company stood to gain a lot in saved labor costs. It continued to investigate high-tech mining, investing in a joint-venture Mining Automation Program in 1996.

Bad weather forced the company's Indonesian mine to shut down for part of 1997, and a strike in Sudbury further chipped away at Inco's profits.