Honeywell grew from a coal-furnace gadget into a computer maker
In 1885 a Swiss-born inventor named Albert Butz patented a device he called the damper-flapper, which opened and closed a coal furnace's air supply automatically so homes stayed warm without constant tending. That humble thermostat is the root of Honeywell, a company that later built autopilots, sold Japanese cameras and briefly competed with IBM in mainframes.
Butz fell out with his backers within three years and handed over his patents. The business limped through debt and several renamings until a shareholder, W. R. Sweatt, bought out everyone else by 1900. Meanwhile in Indiana, Mark Honeywell was selling his own heating invention. The two firms clashed as they grew, and in 1927 they merged, with Honeywell as president and Sweatt as chairman. Sweatt and his son Harold went on to lead the company for 75 years without a break.
Expansion came quickly. In 1934 it bought an instrument maker and opened distributors in Canada and the Netherlands, its first European office. By 1937 it employed over 3,000 people and took in 16 million dollars a year. War work brought tank periscopes, camera stabilisers and an autopilot, and afterwards the firm supplied controls for the first American nuclear submarine. Its best-known consumer product, the round T-86 thermostat, arrived in 1953, and for two decades it also imported Pentax cameras into the United States.
Computing was a bold detour. A 1955 venture with Raytheon produced its first machine two years later, and through the 1960s Honeywell was one of the seven smaller rivals nicknamed the dwarfs to IBM's Snow White. Buying General Electric's computer business in 1970 brought the Multics operating system, whose ideas shaped Unix. Honeywell also led the market for 14-inch disk drives for years. Yet from 1974 new leadership steered away from computers, and by 1991 the company had left the field entirely.
Its modern shape dates from 1999, when AlliedSignal merged with Honeywell and kept the better-known name. In 2025 the company announced plans to divide itself into three separate businesses.
Source: Honeywell
