Company’s manufacturing heritage includes new products, meeting challenges
According to a company history, the local plant has a manufacturing heritage that goes back more than a century to a merger of the National Meter Co., which was formed in 1870 in Brooklyn, N.Y., and the Pittsburgh Meter Co., founded in 1886 by George Westinghouse of the air brake fame. Willard F. Rockwell, who as a young engineer joined Pittsburgh Meter in 1923, bought the company in 1945 and renamed it the Rockwell Manufacturing Co.
Rockwell Manufacturing Co. merged with North American Rockwell (another Rockwell family business) in 1972 to become Rockwell International. Rockwell’s son, Willard Jr. (Al), became chairman of this worldwide organization.
The Uniontown facility opened in November 1953 to manufacture the Arctic, Tropic and Empire positive displacement (disc and piston) meters; Eureka “B” turbine meters; and a newly designed single register compound meter.
Drafted during a unique community/government push to replace lost coal-mining jobs with manufacturing ones, the Rockwell plant’s primary reason was to build a revolutionary new piston type water meter called the SR (sealed register) meter.
In 1957, after more than $5 million in development and testing costs, the 5/8″ size SR meter was put into production.
The meter and accompanying marketing plans took the water industry in a new direction over the next two decades and made Rockwell number one in the water meter industry. To date, more than 40 million SR meters are in service throughout the United States, Canada, Mexico and other countries around the world.
“In the 1960s, the Turbo-Meter line of high performance turbine meters was developed. The rest of the industry followed, and a whole new class of turbine type meters evolved. Remote meter reading came along in the early 1970s; first the generator, then encoders such as TTR (TeleTape Remote) and in 1984, the TouchRead System, with its digital electronic ECR (Electronic Communication Register). The TouchRead System accomplished for meter reading what the SR had done for meter design; it established a new standard for the industry. TouchRead was the first truly reliable, automated system for obtaining accurate meter readings in electronic form, ready for the billing computer,’ the history said.
“The Uniontown facility expanded four times from its original size of 85,000 square feet to its present 255,000 square feet. The operation became vertically integrated when a new bronze foundry was built on-site in 1964 and the molded plastic operation was added in 1972. In 1981, the compound, propeller and Turbo-Meter product lines were transferred to the Smith-Blair, Texarkana, Ark., clamp and coupling manufacturing facility of Rockwell to provide more space to build the SR meter and other new products.’ The SR-II meter replaced the SR in 1985 with production beginning that year at the local plant. “This family of new piston type water meters, along with upgraded electronic encoded registers (ECR II) and state-of-the-art reading and billing capabilities (TouchRead, telephone and radio based Automatic Meter Reading) are providing the thrust for the company as it moves into the 21st century.’ Rockwell combined the water meter business with its gas meter and valve operations in the Measurement and Flow Control Division. Rockwell International made a strategic business decision in the late 1980s to concentrate on what was determined to be its core businesses. “With this strategy, in March of 1989, the entire Measurement and Flow Control Division was sold to BTR plc of London, England for $437 million.’
BTR renamed the company Sensus Technologies. In 1997, BTR bought Pollux Meter Group of Europe, grouping it with Sensus.
In January 1999, Smith-Blair Inc., producer of Sensus large meters and Smith-Blair clamp and coupling products, also became part of a unified water industry business group consisting of Sensus Technologies, Sensus de Mexico, Precision Meters and Smith-Blair.
“BTR plc management undertook a restructuring to transform BTR into a dynamic global engineering company consisting of fewer, but more technologically focused, market-leading businesses. This plan was accelerated in late 1998 when BTR announced that it would merge with Siebe, an engineering firm with a leadership position in the global Controls and Automation industry. The new company is called Invensys Metering Systems.’