John J. and Miles W. O'Brien — the lathe twins

born Cork, Ireland, 1868 · the company founded 1906

The founding act: John J. and Miles W. O'Brien, identical twins born in Cork, Ireland, in 1868, founded their company in 1906 as the South Bend Machine Tool Company: one room, thirty by sixty feet, in the Dinan Building at Washington and Johnson streets, at $65 a month. The product was the engine lathe, the machine tool that makes machine tools, built to the twins' conviction that a lathe could be made affordable without being made cheap. The business prospered at once; in 1908 the company moved to East Madison Street, into the former Singer cabinet plant, and became the South Bend Lathe Works. By 1919 it offered 44 sizes of lathe, and a 1931 news report of a U.S. Department of Commerce study put South Bend Lathe's output at 47 percent of all engine lathes sold in the United States in 1929–30.

The run, and the workers' succession: The twins held the company for fifty-three years, until 1959, when American Steel Foundries — later Amsted Industries — bought it with a workforce of 360. In 1975 Amsted moved to close the division, and the employees bought it themselves: with a U.S. Commerce Department grant to the City of South Bend arranged under Mayor Jerry Miller, the workers formed an employee stock ownership plan on 1 July 1975, and the sale closed on 3 July 1975, leaving about 500 employees as owners — described in the press of the moment as the first 100 percent employee-owned company in the nation, a period claim printed as such in the Businesses section. Five years later the owners struck the company they owned, for two months. Employee ownership did not end the decline of the American machine-tool trade: the assets passed through creditors and successors, LeBlond Ltd. of Cincinnati bought them outright in 2002, and in 2009 the entrepreneur Shiraz Balolia bought the brand with its drawings and parts inventory. New South Bend lathes are manufactured in Taiwan and the company is based in Bellingham, Washington; the making left South Bend with the assets. The twins' house formed one more founder, in the next generation and another trade: Miles W. O'Brien's daughter Marion O'Brien Donovan, raised in the Lathe Works, became the inventor of the waterproof diaper cover — her record stands in the Inventors section.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "South Bend Lathe" (the twins' founding of 1906, the one room at $65 a month, the 1908 move and renaming, the 44 sizes of 1919, the 1931 Commerce study's 47 percent, the 1959 Amsted purchase, the ESOP of 1–3 July 1975 and the period "first 100 percent employee-owned" claim printed as a period claim, the 1980 strike, the LeBlond purchase of 2002 and the Balolia brand purchase of 2009).
2. Inventors & Inventions — Marion O'Brien Donovan, daughter of Miles W. O'Brien of the Lathe Works, cross-referenced.