A.O. Smith: A Frame Every Eight Seconds

Charles Jeremiah Smith started his Milwaukee machine shop in eighteen seventy-four making baby carriages and bicycle frames. His son Arthur Oliver saw something in the automobile business and by eighteen ninety-nine had developed the world's first pressed-steel automobile frame. The car industry was young enough that what frame the cars used was still an open question. A.O. Smith answered it.

The company incorporated in nineteen oh four and began supplying pressed-steel frames to the growing automobile manufacturers of the Midwest. By the nineteen twenties the company's engineers had designed and built the first fully automated automobile frame factory in the world. The factory could produce a finished frame every eight seconds. It ran essentially without pause from its opening until nineteen fifty-eight.

Think about that number: a frame every eight seconds, for thirty-odd years. The arithmetic produces a number exceeding one hundred million passenger-car frames manufactured in Milwaukee. Fifty million more truck frames came out of the same facility. At its peak in nineteen seventy, the A.O. Smith Automotive Products division employed approximately eight thousand people.

The company was less famous than the cars it supplied parts for, which was typical of the industrial substrate that made American manufacturing what it was. The name on the car was Ford or General Motors. The frame was A.O. Smith. The same logic applied throughout Milwaukee's industrial base, to the electrical controls that Allen-Bradley supplied and the water heaters that A.O. Smith eventually became better known for making.

Milwaukee's manufacturing base was the invisible layer under the visible American economy. The city made the parts for the things that made other things possible.