In 1846, Maine passed the first state temperance law. Gradually, prohibitionists swept the nation. The 1906 formation of the Anti-Saloon League accelerated and intensified the movement, as bars were attacked and busted up. Demand for new bars began to shrink. Benjamin Bensinger saw the writing on the wall and feared for the future of the bar furnishing business, which made up one-fourth of company’s four million dollars in sales. He began cutting back on the production of the beautiful, expensive bars, ending production in 1912, seven years before the passage of national Prohibition. Benjamin began a search for new products to replace the lost sales.īeginning a long history of expansion into related niche products, Benjamin found several opportunities. First was another use for rubber, with which the company had expertise in both billiards and bowling. In 1912, Brunswick introduced the first rubber toilet seat, the Whale-Bone-Ite. The company was soon selling 120,000 toilet seats a year. An early adopter was Chicago’s Pullman Company, operator of the nation’s railroad sleeping cars.įor a brief period, Brunswick jumped on the piano boom, using its woodworking skills to make piano cases that were sold to the major piano makers. Getting in and out of different businesses became a Brunswick tradition throughout the 20th century. Shortly after founding the new company, someone showed young Brunswick a beautiful, heavy, expensive English billiards table. Despite historical connections with gambling and “the low life,” three-cushion and pocket billiards began to catch on in America. John knew he could build equally beautiful billiard tables, saving the expense of importing them from Europe. Brunswick Company to make carriages in 1845. The company soon expanded into making chairs, tables, and cabinets. Brunswick said, “If it is wood, we can make it. And we can make it better than anyone else.” In Cincinnati, John worked for a series of carriage makers as a journeyman. When one employer closed up, he took a job as a steward on an Ohio River steamboat. Brunswick showed a head for trading, buying low and selling high along the river. He soon had a nest egg big enough to start his own firm. The twenty-two-year-old woodworker opened The John M. Brunswick soon moved to the quieter Philadelphia, where he got on as an apprentice to a carriage-maker.įor four years, Brunswick learned carriage building in Philadelphia for before moving to Harrisburg as a journeyman to a German woodworker named Greiner. Brunswick soon married Greiner’s daughter Louisa and could have inherited Greiner’s business, but wanted to start out on his own. The booming city of Cincinnati, Queen of inland America and home to a large German community, drew John and Louisa, who settled there in 1840. John Moses Brunswick was born to a Jewish family in the German-speaking part of Switzerland in 1819. Seeking new opportunities, John took the forty-day Atlantic crossing to the United States just before he turned fifteen. Landing in New York in 1834, he found work as an errand boy for a German butcher. John Brunswick observed the massive number of carriages of all types, shapes, and sizes jamming Gotham’s streets. But the intensity was too much.
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