History

Our Legacy

Kaydon Filtration has been a leader in fuel and oil conditioning for more than 70 years. Our company, however, began its impressive growth more than 120 ago in Fort Wayne, Indiana with a single solution – the invention of a water pump.

Our founder, Sylvanus Freelove Bowser, needed a better way to draw water from a well. Rather than depend on a rope and a bucket, he began work on a self-measuring pump that would pull a pre-set amount of water from the well with every pump of a handle. Bowser didn’t realize it at the time, but his new invention would eventually revolutionize the oil industry.

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Bowser’s timing also happened to coincide with the development of the first automobiles – machines that needed to be fueled on a regular basis. As cars became more popular and the demand for convenient access to gasoline grew, Bowser’s self-measuring pump became the foundation of computing pumps – devices that not only measured how much liquid was dispensed, but also calculated the cost of the liquid. Another solution was born. By the end of the 1920s, Bowser’s firm, Bowser Briggs Company, was selling more than $13 million worth of gas pumps to users around the world.

In 1938, Bowser Briggs introduced a new solution, the 832P, the lubricating oil conditioning system that set industry standards for performance into the 21st century. By the mid 1950s, Bowser Briggs Company had operations in Fort Wayne, as well as in Chicago, Illinois. In the early 1960s, the company was sold and became a division of Keene Corporation.

In 1968, entrepreneur and investor, Glenn W. Bailey purchased Keene Corporation, and the assets of Bowser Briggs. At the time of the sale, Bowser Briggs manufacturing plants still operated in Fort Wayne, as well as in Cookville, Tennessee. Shortly after the sale, the Fort Wayne operation was closed, and a new plant in Greenville, Tennessee was opened to make meters for gasoline pumps. In 1974, the Cookville facility was closed. In 1975, a new facility dedicated to making the cartridges that supported our filtration solutions was opened in LaGrange, Georgia. In 1981, the assets of Bowser Briggs and Kaydon Bearings Corp. were combined into a new company, Kaydon Filtration.

Kaydon Filtration has continued to revolutionize the fuel and oil-conditioning marketplace. In 1987, the company introduced the Turbo Tocã Turbine Oil Conditioning System, the first oil conditioning system to effectively use coalescing technology to condition heavy turbine lubrication and hydraulic oils. This solution quickly revolutionized the power generation business. For the first time, it was possible to effectively remove both water and particulates from lubrication oil reservoirs in a matter of hours – not days.

In 1999, Kaydon Filtration purchased Clean Fuels Incorporated. We re-engineered their key product offering and developed a filtration system for back-up power generators, now known as Clean Fuel Systems. In the same year we also purchased Filterdyne, which expanded our product offering to include vacuum distillation systems.

Building on our strength in the coalescing technology sector, Kaydon Filtration introduced the explosion-proof KA-XP systems to the refinery marketplace in 2001. To support ongoing product development, we renovated our engineering lab in 2005 to include multi-testing equipment.

Our momentum continued in 2006, as we developed OEM solutions for the mining and oil & gas industries, and introduced a new system that offers filtration for high flow-rate diesel fuel conditioning and transfer. 2007 marked the development of a seal oil reclamation system targeted at the refinery market. This solution removed water, entrained hydrocarbons, and performed submicronic filtration. And in 2008, we introduced the VURSA™ Gear Oil Filtration System, an innovative, compact solution for domestic and international refineries.

Today Kaydon Filtration continues to provide solutions power generation companies, oil and gas firms, fuel producers and refiners, and chemical manufacturers. In addition, we partner with a wide variety of OEM customers, as well as governments around the world, to develop new applications or improve existing filtration system performance.

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