The exact page text, read by your browser's voice.
The Businesses leg carries Polygon as a company; this article carries it as an invention, and the invention is filament-wound and braided composite bearing stock — the replacement of metal and oil with fiber and fluoropolymer, worked out in Walkerton from 1949. The company's own history states the founding "in a small facility in Walkerton" in 1949 and claims, as its own claim, printed as one: that Polygon was "the first to develop pultrusion technology" and the first thermoset pultrusion company in North America. The documentary spine beneath the claim is Samuel Shobert's patent line (the person-by-person article above): the 1964 hollow self-lubricating bearing; the braided tubular bearing method; the 1974 fabricating method; and the 1975 carbon-fluorocarbon composite — PTFE thread embedded in resin, enrobed in carbon fiber — which is the filament-wound composite of this item's charge, patented, dated, and assigned to the Walkerton works. The trade press of the industry prints the assessment at its own strength: the company's original mid-1960s composite-bearing patents "stand as hallmarks in the development of journal bearing technology," and Shobert "eventually patented the composite formula now widely used to produce golf-club shafts" (Industry Today, 2016).
The invention's reach is itself documented, in other firms' patents: a surgical-instrument patent of 1996 (U.S. 5,573,535) specifies a fibrous composite "commercially available from Polygon Company of Walkerton, Indiana"; medical-device patents of 1998 and 2016 (U.S. 5,782,764; U.S. 9,375,274) build on Polygon's PolyMed® composite tubing; a cylinder patent of 2013 (U.S. 8,449,265) names the company's PolySlide® stock as its material. No other Walkerton line surfaces in the patent record at this class; the industry-defining invention of this town is one company's, and it is this one.
Sources: U.S. Patents 3,832,255; 3,870,589; 5,573,535; 5,782,764; 8,449,265; 9,375,274 (patent documents, read November 2026); Polygon Company corporate history and process record (company publication); Industry Today, Polygon Company profile (2016); Businesses (plants, 2026 investment — pointer).