Decker & Seville were millwrights who made equipment for flour milling. Allis was an entrepreneur who in 1860 bought a bankrupt firm at a sheriff's auction, the Reliance Works of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which had been owned by James Decker and Charles Seville. Buescher (1991) said that Allis-Chalmers "was a conglomerate before the word was coined." Whether or not it is literally true that Allis-Chalmers predated the sense of "conglomerate" meaning a widely diversified parent corporation, Buescher's point is valid: Allis-Chalmers, despite its common theme of machinery, was an amalgamation of disparate business lines, each with a unique marketplace, beginning in an era when consolidations within industries were fashionable but those across industries were not yet common.Įdward P. Financial successes and failures brought them together." įormer marketing executive Walter M. He observed that it "grew by acquiring and consolidating the innovations" of various smaller firms and building upon them and he continued that " Metal work and machinery were the common background. Its successors today are Allis-Chalmers Energy and AGCO.Īuthor-photographer Randy Leffingwell (1993) aptly summarized the firm's origins and character.
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In the 1980s and 1990s, a series of divestitures transformed the firm and eventually dissolved it. During the next 70 years its industrial machinery filled countless mills, mines, and factories around the world, and its brand gained fame among consumers mostly from its farm equipment business's orange tractors and silver combine harvesters. It was reorganized in 1912 as the Allis-Chalmers Manufacturing Company. Allis Company ( steam engines and mill equipment), Fraser & Chalmers (mining and ore milling equipment), the Gates Iron Works (rock and cement milling equipment), and the industrial business line of the Dickson Manufacturing Company (engines and compressors). The first Allis-Chalmers Company was formed in 1901 as an amalgamation of the Edward P. Its business lines included agricultural equipment, construction equipment, power generation and power transmission equipment, and machinery for use in industrial settings such as factories, flour mills, sawmills, textile mills, steel mills, refineries, mines, and ore mills. manufacturer of machinery for various industries. Generators, engine-generators, tractors, threshers, combines, farm implements, bulldozers, milling machinery, othersĪllis-Chalmers was a U.S.
Industrial machinery, grain-milling machinery, power plant equipment, mining equipment, agricultural machinery, heavy equipment (construction) American industrial machinery manufacturer Allis-Chalmers