Thermatool history

Von Lepel who had founded the business way back in 1926 and was run by George Einhellinger.

For the next 20 years, however, Spinelli's system and Brailsford's findings remained little more than scientific curiosities until, in the early 1950's, General Engineering picked them up and tried to adapt them to induction heating applications.

The knowledge of this impending tragedy had come in such innocent, everyday form, in an article in the June 1951 Reader's Digest.

Logan had called again in December, 1952, some three months after I'd turned down his first job offer, to say he still wanted me to come work for Magnethermic.

It looked as if it had been accumulating antiquated and redundant equipment and material since the day it opened its doors for business. Thus, in May, 1953, Inductotherm was born.

It remained to be seen if he could build a team "Down Under" to match the one I'd built back in Delanco, but the parallels between our infant company in 1954 and the new Australian subsidiary were striking.

Wollaston had an idea where the ex-naval officer could find that challenge; in June, 1957, he brought the former navy officer around to see our company and to meet me.

The rental program he'd suggested and outlined on a sheet of paper to me back in 1958 was still paying dividends years later, while bringing the advantages of induction melting to foundries which could not otherwise afford our technology.

My frustration returned after an April 16, 1960, sales call on a new company called Seaway Nickel, in Jersey City.

Against this backdrop of frenetic growth, moving day finally arrived on August 20, 1961, and an air of excitement prevailed as the moving trucks pulled up outside the Delanco plant.

In 1963 they opened their first manufacturing plant in Skokie, Illinois.

Once in my office, he explained what he wanted to do for us. It began in June of 1964 with a visit from the president of a leading foundry design firm from Chicago; he flew in and landed on the grass airstrip behind our plant in his twin-engine Piper Aztec.

Metcalf complained that Logan wasn't willing to make the commitment to vacuum melting, however, and when Ajax got out of the vacuum melting business in 1966, Metcalf formed his own furnace company with Chuck Cragnolin; they took the first syllable of each name and called their new company Cragmet.

In 1968, Bob Buss was calling on us to sell capacitors made by High Energy Corp., a company he had founded a few years before.

In 1970, after he had transferred to the parent furnace company, he was working as Assistant Service Manager under Cal Mason when he got word that a 15-ton furnace operated by Grede Foundry, in Wichita, Kansas, was down.

At the nine-month goal in May 1971, almost to the day after the project had been launched, Taylor, Mellon, and Stokely gathered around the crude inverter unit they'd tacked together.

By 1972 Wooding had apparently either insulted or offended sufficient numbers of his customers that sales dropped to only one-third of that peak level.

By 1974 Inductotherm Europe was well on its way to disproving the myth that English companies couldn't compete.

"There's more to a business than just profits," wrote Jess in a 1975 memo alluding to what he called Inductotherm's "spiritual leadership." Roy was disinclined to start up manufacturing subsidiaries in foreign countries.

The rest of the board didn't agree, however, and in January 1976, after Peschel had been given six years to achieve profitability, the vote was four to one, with Roy Ruble, Tom Pippitt, Bob Hotchkin, and Betty voting to fire Peschel, and me voting to keep him.

He turned in phenomenal profits as the shutter king of the world as annual sales reached 1,500,000 pair of high-quality, decorative shutters from recycled battery chips. (1978)

With each vote, the union's margin of defeat grew larger and larger, until on December 14, 1979, the Teamsters were again beaten, this time 3.4 to 1.

In 1980, eight years after Consarc's previous CEO had posted a loss of $1 million, Myers led the company to $20 million in sales and $5 million in profits

But, in 1981, my daughter and her husband had begun to do some genuine soul-searching about where their futures, their obligations, and their greatest opportunities lay.

In 1982 Mathews saw an opportunity to expand overseas as well as domestically when a foundry operated by the Bendix Corporation in Neunkirchen, Germany, went on the market.

The busy year passed and in July 1984, Consarc Engineering began shipping the nine furnaces and two presses to the Soviet Union.

Several more weeks passed, with no further action from either government; then, in February 1985, after having told Metcalf three times to proceed, the British government passed an emergency regulation blocking the sale of the rest of the equipment.

SONOBOND ULTRASONICS, INC., West Chester, Pennsylvania, a manufacturer of ultrasonic welding equipment for the automobile, aerospace, medical, defense and electronics industries. (1986)

In a way, what Ginny did for our advertising was similar to what that Dale Carnegie course did for our sales efforts some 31 years earlier. It had begun on April 1,1990, with a routine solicitation for funds from a fundraiser for a nearby college, Glassboro State College.

In 1991, Inductotherm acquired Lemont Engineering Co. which was headquartered in Lincolnwood, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago.