Wheelabrator: the export record whole, from the company's own historian

1930s – 1964

The one complete export history a Mishawaka house left: The Wheelabrator Corporation's historian, Tony Harris, wrote the company's history on 1 June 1964 with a chapter headed "The export market," and it is the fullest outward record in this build — the company's own account, printed here as the company's, its figures standing at his strength. In the 1930s, Harris writes, Wheelabrator's exports ran around one or two percent of total sales, handled by correspondence off unsolicited inquiries. In 1953, with postwar Europe booming, the company opened an aggressive overseas marketing program, and over the next ten years exports increased 500 percent, to over ten percent of sales; the company was, he records, one of the first United States manufacturers to receive the E for Export Award from the Department of Commerce. The mechanism was licensing before it was plants: foreign licensee arrangements were concluded with companies in Switzerland, England and Brazil — to cover, in his mapping, the European continent, the British Isles and Latin America — and a licensee was obtained for Australia. Then the orders he names: in 1957 a company in Mexico bought the largest-capacity Wheelabrator sold anywhere up to that time; the following year five equally large were ordered by Japanese steel producers. The second phase put Wheelabrator operations physically abroad: the first facility outside the United States was Canadian — a Toronto warehouse acquired in 1957, become by 1964 the Wheelabrator Corporation of Canada Limited, a five-acre plant assembling blast-cleaning equipment and fabricating air-pollution systems; a Rotterdam warehouse followed early in 1960. In February 1961 the company joined the Société des Hauts-Fourneaux et Forges d'Allevard to form Société Wheelabrator-Allevard, 51 percent Wheelabrator's, and built at Le Cheylas, in southern France, what Harris calls the most modern steel abrasive facility in Europe — the first heat poured 10 November 1961. In 1963 came two more: a 40 percent interest in Graber & Wening AG of Neftenbach, Switzerland, building Wheelabrator equipment for Europe and Scandinavia, and Sintobrator, Ltd. of Nagoya, Japan — 40 percent Wheelabrator, 60 percent Sintokogio, which had already built Wheelabrator machines under license — in full production by the fall of 1963. And in January 1964 an agreement with Tilghman's of England and the New Standard Engineering Company of India created Indabrator, Ltd., its plant site chosen at Goregaon, near Bombay, its stock to be offered on the Indian stock exchange. Harris closes the chapter by placing the whole system under one roof: "The Mishawaka plant, in 1964, is still the principal manufacturing facility and world headquarters of Wheelabrator" — a sentence from the same history's plant chapter. The export record's end on Mishawaka ground is the Businesses section's: the equipment business was wound down here in pieces in the 1980s and consolidated at LaGrange, Georgia, in 1991, while the name the Mishawaka works coined in 1932–33 remains a world brand in surface preparation, headquartered today in England — the one Mishawaka product whose outward flow never came home.

Sources:

1. Tony Harris, "Wheelabrator History" (the company's history, 1 June 1964, as preserved in the shot-peening trade library) — the export chapter whole: 1930s exports at one to two percent of sales; the 1953 overseas program; exports up 500 percent in ten years to over ten percent of sales; among the first recipients of the Commerce Department's E for Export Award; licensees in Switzerland, England, Brazil and Australia; the 1957 Mexican largest-capacity sale; the 1958 Japanese steel orders; the Toronto warehouse of 1957 become the Wheelabrator Corporation of Canada Limited; the Rotterdam warehouse of 1960; Société Wheelabrator-Allevard (February 1961; Le Cheylas; first heat 10 November 1961); Graber & Wening (1963, 40 percent); Sintobrator of Nagoya (1963, 40 percent); Indabrator (January 1964; Goregaon, near Bombay); and the Mishawaka plant in 1964 "still the principal manufacturing facility and world headquarters."
2. This build's Businesses section, Wheelabrator entry — the name's Mishawaka origin in 1932–33; the 1980s wind-down and the 1991 LaGrange consolidation; the modern Wheelabrator Group's English headquarters.