Timken: The Untold Story of America’s Steel & Bearing Empire

On September 26th, 1984, Ronald Reagan stood in the unfinished melt shop of the Faircrest steel plant near Canton, Ohio, and praised the Timken Company for putting about two-thirds of its value into steel. Timken had just lost money for the first time since the Depression, and it wasn't a steelmaker by origin. It made tapered roller bearings, and it had been melting its own steel for them since 1916. This documentary follows the reason back to its source. Henry Timken was a St. Louis carriage maker, an immigrant from Hanover who had built a model factory, patented a cross spring and watched the Supreme Court void that patent in 1894. The next year, with his sons and his nephew Reginald Heinzelman, he went after a problem every wagon builder knew: wheel bearings struggled with heavy loads from the side, as when a vehicle turns. People had been trying to roll axles for more than 150 years. The video looks at Jacob Rowe's friction wheels of 1734, a ball-bearing postchaise whose bearings wore an eighth of an inch in 500 miles, Valentine Gottlieb's roller axletree and John Garnett's roller bearing of 1787, and the roller axle boxes patented in Ohio and Indiana in the 1890s. Then it takes apart Timken's 1898 patents: conical rollers between a conical sleeve and a conical shell, rollers that ran without friction on their ends, and a single nut with a stack of thin washers that took up wear at both ends of the hub. A bearing built to be adjusted as it wore was a bearing whose life came down to its metal. The company moved to Canton in 1901 and rode the automobile. By 1922 it claimed bearings in more than 90 percent of the motor vehicles built in the United States and Canada. During the First World War it added a tube mill and a melt shop and became the first bearing maker to supply its own steel, a choice its biographer ties to quality control. The steel then went into the railroads, from 1923 streetcar tests to the Four Aces, a 4-8-4 built by ALCO in 1930 with sealed roller bearings on every axle, to the AP freight car bearing of 1954. Overseas, Timken guarded its markets by contract. A 1909 license with a Vickers company grew into British Timken and French Timken and a 1928 agreement that split the world into territories. The Justice Department sued, and in 1951 the Supreme Court ruled that a trademark cannot be used as a device to violate the Sherman Act. The later chapters cover the import years, from the 1973 dumping petition against Japanese bearings to the 1982 loss, and the building of Faircrest in the company's own words: a site at the edge of the Wisconsin glacier, 37 miles of piling, a single electric arc furnace and rolling mills run by a fraction of the old crews. They end with the 2004 closure of the three Canton bearing plants, including the company's first from 1901, and the 2013 decision, made in response to shareholders, to spin off the steel business that is now Metallus. Subscribe to Trade Archive for more histories of the machines and companies behind the trades.    / @tradearchive   Sources Bryden, David. "Valentine Gottlieb, Immigrant Engineer of Lambeth." Science Museum Group Journal, Spring 2021. Cable, Josh. "Learn How Timken's Faircrest Steel Plant Breaks Through Constraints." IndustryWeek, May 21, 2012. Dowson, Duncan, and Bernard J. Hamrock. History of Ball Bearings. NASA Technical Memorandum 81689, 1981. Lubinski, Christina. "Fighting Friction: Henry Timken and the Tapered Roller Bearing." Immigrant Entrepreneurship. German Historical Institute. National Inventors Hall of Fame. "Henry Timken." Olin v. Timken, 155 U.S. 141 (1894). Reagan, Ronald. "Remarks at the Timken Faircrest Steel Plant in Canton, Ohio." September 26, 1984. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. Richardson, Clive. "Timken Tapered Roller Bearings." Motor Sport, April 1977. Siuru, Bill. "Timken's 100 Years: From Buggies to Boxsters." Ward's Auto World, August 1, 1999. "The Timken Company." International Directory of Company Histories. Encyclopedia.com. Timken Company. "Brief Facts About The Timken Company's New $500 Million Steel Expansion and $97 Million Modernization Project." News release, c. 1984. Timken Company. "The Timken Company Announces Plan to Separate Its Businesses into Two Independent Publicly Traded Companies." News release, September 5, 2013. Timken, Henry, and Reginald Heinzelman. Roller-Bearings for Vehicles. US Patent 606,635, issued June 28, 1898. Timken Roller Bearing Co. v. United States, 341 U.S. 593 (1951). Trains. "Freight Car Basics: Roller Bearings." United States v. Timken Roller Bearing Co., 83 F. Supp. 284 (N.D. Ohio 1949).