Raising the Standard ASD $52.50 -0.44
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| Raising the Standard ASD $52.50 -0.44 |
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Company History
ORIGINS: Multiple mergers create American-Standard: American Standard traces its roots back to 1872, when John B. Pierce opened a tinware shop in Ware, Massachusetts. With the business skills he forged in this shop, he would later found the Pierce Steam Heating Company, one of three companies that would merge in 1892 to become the American Radiator Company. In 1929, the American Radiator Company merged with The Standard Sanitary Manufacturing Company. Products from the combined company could be found in about half of the homes in the U.S. and Europe. For the next 18 years, the business was known as the American Radiator & Standard Sanitary Corporation. By 1948, people had informally shortened the name of the company to American-Standard, so the company began to refer to itself by that name. An entrepreneur and visionary founds Trane: James Trane, the co-founder of the company that bears his name, was an immigrant from Norway who settled in La Crosse, Wisconsin in 1864. He found work as a steamfitter and eventually started his own plumbing business. In 1913, with his son Reuben, he founded The Trane Company to make heating products for both residential and commercial customers. A moment of inspiration in a perilous era leads to WABCO: George Westinghouse, according to legend, was traveling by train from Troy, New York to Schenectady, New York one day in 1867 when his travel plans were derailed—literally. Two freight trains had collided on the tracks ahead. Back then, train travel was a perilous venture. There was no way to stop a speeding train other than to have a crew member run from car to car manually pulling a hand brake. Westinghouse pondered the problem and came up with a revolutionary solution. Westinghouse invented a new kind of brake that used compressed air to slow a train, and in 1869 he started his Westinghouse Air Brake Company (WABCO) to sell his brake to locomotive companies. On March 13, 1914, an editorial in The New York Times declared that George Westinghouse's railroad air brake had saved more lives than had been lost in all wars combined. The Modern Era: 1929 - American-Standard became a publicly traded company. 1968 - WABCO joined the American Standard family of companies. That same year, American Standard drops the hyphen from its name. 1984 - Trane joined the American Standard family of companies. 1988 - After the threat of a hostile takeover, American Standard's management led a leveraged buy-out that removed the company from the stock market. 1990 - American Standard sells the locomotive braking division of WABCO. 1995 - In February of this year, American Standard re-emerged as a publicly traded company. The initial price of the stock was $20. 1999 - Fred Poses becomes the company's new CEO.
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