Milacron history

Soon, other shops began requesting machines, and by 1882, Cincinnati Screw and Tap found itself adding milling machines to its product line.

In 1884, the company became incorporated to raise the capital it needed to produce the more costly machines and to finance a move to a larger facility near the Ohio River.

In 1887, Frederick A. Geier, while doing business with the Cincinnati Screw and Tap Co., became excited about this innovative company's potential.

In early 1889, the stockholders approved the sale of the screw and tap business to a group of employees.

By 1905, the company had moved to the Cincinnati suburb of Oakley.

By 1907, land was purchased in the nearby community of Oakley, financing had been secured for the move, and work on the foundry began.

Management also worked closely with the Mutual Aid Committee, which was founded in 1916 as an employee insurance association and used as a relief organization for those hardest hit during the Depression.

1917: Sales reach $7 million under wartime production.

In 1919, in an attempt to temper the cyclical nature of the business, Geier announced a plan to build a warehouse for storing the milling machines produced by the company until a time when orders exceeded capacity.

As Geier sought to keep his employees in work year-round, and for the highest possible wages (a strategy known as "work-spreading"), Mill employees remained generally disinterested in forming unions or becoming involved in strikes during the labor union wars of the early 1920s.

In September 1921, the company bought controlling interest in the Cincinnati Grinder Co. and the following year moved production of the grinding machine to Oakley.

In 1932, the Mill agreed with Heald Machine Co. of Worcester, Massachusetts, to share engineering, research, and patents.

Frederick A. Geier died in 1934, and although Geier's son, Frederick V. Geier, was felt by some to be too young, he took charge and ran the company for the next quarter century.

In 1943, Geier began meeting regularly with four other key executives in an effort to identify strategies for postwar growth.

1946: First public offering of stock is held.

1952: Construction of a machine tool factory in the Netherlands is completed.

By 1957, the Mill was working with glass reinforced plastic components and had formed the Cimastra division to oversee production and sales of the materials.

The company continued to improve on its use of the technology, and, in 1966, the Mill introduced a new generation of controls for its machines using miniaturized integrated circuits rather than the cumbersome vacuum tubes and mechanical relays it had relied on.

In 1974 they acquired Heald Machine Co. for their line of grinding machinery.

By 1977, the Mill was the largest United States maker of plastics machinery.

In 1980, the Mill sold its profitable specialty chemical operations to the Thiokol Corporation in order to focus more strongly on its three more closely allied divisions: machine tools, plastics machinery, and industrial specialty products.

1984: The Mill is among the world's largest suppliers of silicon wafers for semiconductors.

Under the leadership of Daniel Meyer, who succeeded Jim Geier in 1990, a campaign began that would help fine tune the company for the 1990s.

According to an April 1992 article in The Cincinnati Enquirer, each team was charged with improving the quality of Milacron's machines while removing up to 40 percent of the cost and 40 percent of the components.

In 1993, excess capacity in machine tool facilities prompted the Mill to consolidate operations.

The January 1994 issue of Cincinnati Magazine has an excellent article on Frederick V. Geier.

In 1998, the machine tool business line was sold to Unova, and portions operated as Cincinnati Machine Company.

In 2001, the company adopted both Six Sigma and Lean programs in an effort to reduce overhead and increase working capital.