U.S. Hose history

In 1821, James Boyd patented rubber lined, woven jacketed fire hose.

Hose and hose technology have come a long way since Walter Henry Willcox established his firm in 1876 on the south bank of London selling fasteners and hoses.

The first “wire-bound hose” was advertised in January 1888, when The National Geographic Society was established in Washington D.C. along with Marvin Stone patenting the first wax drinking straw in the USA.

The United Flexible Metallic Tubing Company took over a former Grout and Baylis crape factory in 1894 and established a manufacturing facility on the outskirts of London in the town of Ponders End, where they proudly advertised, as illustrated in the following ad,

Willcox continued adding to his business with the addition of oil handling and selling in bulk in 1899.

The Flexonics forerunner was established in 1902 as “The Chicago Tubing and Braiding Company” with its chief product being a gas tight flexible hose for use in gas heating and gas street lighting.

At the turn of the century a young American meteorologist by the name of Weston Fulton also saw the need for flexibles and developed and patented his own design of seamless bellows in 1904 in The State of Tennessee.

During the 1930’s, Willcox began publishing catalogs of their engineering supplies and developed them to be the bible for engineers worldwide.

By 1940, over 50 millions sylphons had been sold in the USA.

Around 1959 he started as well the manufacturing of cables using fluoropolymers as core materials.

As sales grew in the 1960’s additional Habia companies were created to focus on the expanding medical tubing and cabling businesses.

TIFT Limited at its Delph factory that had manufactured and sold worldwide its range of large diameter marine hose assemblies such as Oilmaster® and Chemiflex® then developed its first LNG Cryoflex® 200 transfer hose in 1973.

In 1986, the British engineering firm Siebe purchased Robert Shaw and used the Fulton plant to manufacture car parts

Snap-tite purchased PONN Fire Hose the following year, in 1989.

In 1999, Willcox Composite Hose located in Houston Texas was purchased and added to the existing TIFT-Compoflex composite hose product range.

With the history, heritage, hose manufacturing technology and “can do attitude”, US Hose Corp was selected from others by Boeing Aerospace in 2011 to develop and supply hose assemblies for NASA in The International Space Station.

A unified sales team will sell all products worldwide under a consolidated marketing banner of “United Flexible” in 2016.