Timken Company
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The Timken Company is a major manufacturer of tapered roller bearings and specialty steels located in Canton, Ohio. Their products are used in transportation, industrial equipment, electronics, mining and drilling, and in military applications.
The company was founded by Henry Timken in St. Louis, Missouri in 1899 and incorporated as The Timken Roller Bearing Axle Company. A year earlier, in 1898, Timken got a patent for the tapered roller bearing for which the company would become known. At the time, Timken was a carriage-maker in St. Louis and held three patents for carriage springs. However, it was his patent for tapered roller bearings that allowed his company to continue into the 21st century.
Tapered roller bearings were a breakthrough at the end of the 19th century because bearings used in wheel axles had not changed much since ancient times. They relied on bearings enclosed in a case that held lubricants. These were called "friction bearings" and depended on lubricants to function. Without proper lubrication, these bearings would fail due to excessive heat caused by friction. Timken was able to significantly reduce the friction on his bearings by using a "cup" and "cone" design incorporating tapered bearings, which reduced the load placed on the bearings by distributing the weight and load evenly across the cups, cones, and bearings.
The company moved to Canton in 1901 as the automobile industry began to overtake the carriage industry. Timken chose this location because of its proximity to the American car manufacturing centres of Detroit, Michigan and Cleveland, Ohio, and because it was close to the American steel-making centres of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and Cleveland.
In 1916, the company began its steel-making operations in Canton. The reason for this was to have total control over the steel used in its bearings. Certainly, price was one consideration. The other was quality. Poor quality steel meant poor quality bearings, so the company felt the need to make its own steel to ensure the quality of its bearing products. By the late 1990s, the steel-making operations were selling 80% of its output to outside customers, and the operations accounted for one-third of the company's total sales.
In 2003, the company acquired one of its main competitors in the bearing business -- the Torrington Company of Torrington, Connecticut. Torrington had lower-cost operations in the southern United States, and most all of its plants were non-union. Because of these labour cost considerations, Timken announced that it would end its bearing manufacturing operations in Canton within five years and eliminate about 1,500 jobs in the Canton area. Recently, negotiations with the union representing Canton-area workers to lower costs at its facilities fell through when the union rejected the managements plan.