The Y-VA engine was the first high-compression, cold-start, full diesel developed by Fairbanks Morse without the acquisition of any foreign patent. The model Y was available in sizes from one through six cylinders, or 10 to 200 horsepower (150 kW). The company's larger Model Y semi-diesel became a standard workhorse, and sugar, rice, timber, and mine mills used the engine.
The company also had brief forays into building automobiles, tractors, corn shellers, hammermills, cranes, televisions, and refrigerators, but output was small in these fields.Īfter the expiration of Rudolf Diesel's American license in 1912, Fairbanks Morse entered the large engine business. Fairbanks-Morse radios are well known for their colorfulness. After a 1939 factory fire FM decided to exit the radio business. In 1934, Fairbanks-Morse entered the radio business by acquiring the Audiola Radio Co. The Model N was popular in stationary industrial applications. Fairbanks Morse power plants evolved by burning kerosene in 1893, coal gas in 1905, then to semi-diesel engines in 1913 and to full diesel engines in 1924. Small lighting plants built by the company were also popular. Electricity generation and oilfield work also used these engines. The Fairbanks Morse gas engine became a success with farmers.
They had the idea that an engine could be used as backup power for when one of their Eclipse windmills wasn't getting wind. The Fairbanks Morse Company began producing oil and naptha engines in the 1890s with the purchase of the Charter line of engines (the first commercially available gas engine).
Canadian and American cities had branch dealerships, with Fairbanks first coming to Montreal, Quebec, Canada, in 1876 and later opening a factory there.įairbanks Morse model 32 was a 1932 update of the Model Y diesel engine. Morse later became a partner in the Fairbanks Company and by the end of the nineteenth century, it was known as Fairbanks Morse & Company and was headquartered in Chicago.
As part of this expansion, Morse brought Wheeler and his Eclipse Windmill pumps into business with the Fairbanks company. At about the same time, a Fairbanks & Company employee, Charles Hosmer Morse, opened a Fairbanks office in Chicago, from which he expanded the company's territory of operation and widened its product line. Soon half a million windmills dotted the landscape throughout the West and as far away as Australia. Wheeler set up shop in Beloit just after the Civil War. In Wisconsin, a former missionary named Leonard Wheeler designed a durable windmill for pumping water, the Eclipse windmill. It became the leading manufacturer in the US, and the best-known company the world over until Henry Ford and the Ford Corporation assumed this title in the 1920s. Fairbanks scales won 63 medals over the years in international competition. Fairbanks & Company was selling thousands of scales, first in the United States, later in Europe, South America, and even Imperial China. That device was patented in June 1832, and a generation later, with his brother Erastus Fairbanks, the E. Though unsuccessful in fabricating for fiber factories, another invention by Thaddeus, the platform scale, formed the basis for a great enterprise. In 1829 he started a hemp dressing business for which he built the machinery. Johnsbury, Vermont, to manufacture two of his patented inventions: a cast iron plow and a heating stove.