Corporations: Just Plain Honeywell

To most Americans, Minneapolis-Honeywell is a familiar name on the trusty thermostats that make unnecessary that trip downstairs to adjust the furnace. Heating controls still account for a third of the company’s $596 millionannual sales, but Honeywell today is as comfortable in outer space as it is in the basement. It is now the world’s largest and most sophisticated manufacturer of automatic control systems, turning out 13,000 products so diverse that they encompass a 600 microswitch and a $3,000,000 electronic data processing system. “We pride ourselves,” says a Honeywell executive, “on being able to control damned near anything.” Every manned space flight, from Mercury to Dyna-Soar, depends on intricate controls made by Honeywell.

Honeywell’s researchers have developed infra-red sensing tubes that can detect a frying pan’s heat from five miles away — or spy out a distant rocket — and a humidity register so sensitive that it knows when a teaspoonful of water is brought into a room. It took a Honeywell gyroscope to measure the Empire State Building’s maximum sway (onequarter inch) and bury forever the tourist canard that the world’s tallest building rocks in a high wind. Eye examinations will eventually be more comfortable because of a Honeywell device that measures eyeball pressure with a quick and painless puff of air.

Pitch-Black Room. Even Honeywell’s heating controls have become more sophisticated. In Detroit’s Cobo Hall, a Honeywell control panel not only regulates air conditioning but also operates the public address system, lights and fire alarms and monitors the 1,800-car garage; whenever the carbon monoxide gets too strong, Honeywell’s Data Center automatically turns on exhaust fans. Altogether Honeywell has installed some 1,000 such units, including two in Manhattan’s massive Chase Manhattan Bank building. Last week the company signed a $100,000 contract for a distant and unusual control project: a centrally controlled heating and air-conditioning system for the humid mansion of Liberia’s President William Tubman.

Honeywell has barely been able to control its own growth. Founded in 1885 by Minneapolis Inventor Alfred Butz to manufacture the first automatic damper controls for furnaces, Honeywell grew and diversified steadily over the years by improving and elaborating on the basic principle of automatic control established by Butz. For years it plowed its sales dollars back into research to make better home controls, in World War II began to branch out in earnest by making Air Force automatic pilots and a radar sensitive enough to record so much as a twitch in a pitch-black room.

Today Honeywell sees its greatest future in automation, which Chairman Paul Wishart, 65, prefers to call “instrumentation.” “It’s the biggest single investment in a product that we have ever made,” says President James H. Binger, 47, the company’s chief operating officer. Honeywell makes computers both for data processing and industrial use, after a late start in entering the field has sold or rented 190 so far. Its computers help machines run other machines in dozens of U.S. plants. But Honeywell lags far behind front-running IBM and is still losing money on its computer operation—while its overall profit rose 8% to $26.8 million in 1962.

Hard-Riding Polo. Over the next three years, Chairman Wishart will gradually step aside for lean, taciturn James Binger, a onetime lawyer who went into manufacturing because “I wanted to develop my own set of problems to solve.” A Yaleman (’38) who plays hard-riding polo on weekends to shuck off the burden of bringing home a full briefcase every night, Binger has already revamped Honeywell’s sales approach, placing emphasis on profits rather than on volume. Now he is stepping up international sales (the company has plants in six countries), which so far account for 12% of business. With everything else well under control, Binger is ready to change the company’s official corporate name: Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co. From now on, it will be just plain Honeywell, a more suitably sized name for a company whose business is simplifying the tasks of U.S. industry.