
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.

Scales, Windmills, Engines, Tractors, Radios, Pumps, Locomotives.įairbanks, Morse and Company was an American manufacturing company in the late 19th and early 20th century.
