Antique Snap-on Tools — A Fascinating Early Company History
June 20, 2008
If your car were to break down today you would probably not have trouble locating a mechanic who had the right tools to fix it. You might be annoyed at what it would cost you, but at least for the right price you could get the work done. This has not always been the case. With the vast number of gas stations, car dealerships, and car repair shops around today it’s difficult to keep in mind that it has only been 100 years or so since the Ford Motor Company started producing cars.
The money in automobiles around 1910 was in making them, not in keeping them running. After all at this point in our nation’s history there were only about 450,000 car owners in the country, so finding a qualified automobile mechanic was sometimes not an easy undertaking. There were many new manufacturers of cars and many different schools were required to repair them all. If a different wrench size was required for the nuts and bolts on many different automobiles this required a large investment in the tools necessary to repair the cars.
Because of the hard work and entrepreneurial spirit of two young men there is now an active market and interest in antique Snap-on tools. It’s a fascinating and interesting story about the development of this company.
A young man with training as a cost clerk and expediter is an unlikely candidate as the inventor of a line of hand tools. But in 1919, Joseph Johnson must have been thinking to himself that there must be a better way for mechanics who had to purchase hand tools. After all, every time they purchased a new wrench they were also buying another handle. There were only about 8 million cars on the roads in 1919, and Johnson reasoned that this was unnecessarily expensive for the mechanic.
William Seidemann was a young manager who also worked at American grinder. He and Joe Johnson soon became good friends, and they enjoyed talking about the best way to create a new set of tools for the mechanics. They finally decided that the best way to do it was to have 10 different socket sizes and pair them with five distinct handles. In this way they could offer the mechanics 50 wrenches which were each different.
What happened next must surely make any businessman cringe. Johnson discussed his idea with the management at American Grinder. Management felt like his concept of ten sockets and five handles would actually hurt their individual sales. They turned him down. Johnson had given a American Grinder the opportunity to take his idea and capitalize on it and since they decided it not to do it, Johnson and Seidemann could now move forward on their own.
After hours, Johnson worked on his concept. A few weeks later he had created the original set of five handles and Seidemann agreed to help him fabricate a set of sockets which could be snapped on. Thus was born the name Snap-on Tools and the first company motto “Five can do the work of 50″.
With no money, everything was being done by hand. They were milling the sockets from bar steel, and stamping the stock numbers on also. The last few dollars that they had went into the printing of 2,000 brochures. These would be used to advertise the new snap-on tools.
They only had the one, original, set of hand tools they had just created. They had no manufacturing and no sales force. They did manage to find a traveling tire salesman who covered only the state of Wisconsin. As he would visit each of the shops and he would demonstrate the one set of tools and leave behind a brochure for the mechanic. He collected over 500 COD orders and took these back to Johnson and Seidemann who were hard at work making a second set of tools.
Mechanics clearly saw how the tools would save them time and money, and wanted to add it to their tool chest. This was confirmed when they sent out another salesman with the second set and his results were the same as the first one. Johnson and Seidemann had proven there was a demand for their invention, but at this point they were out of money and had no official business. They also had a huge number of mechanics who wanted their tools, as represented by the COD orders, so they must have known that they had a sure success on their hands.
They contacted an attorney who in turn found some local businessmen willing to invest in the new company. The Snap-On Wrench Company was incorporated on April 10, 1920. Johnson and Seidemann had to borrow $500 each so they could purchase stock in their own business. They rented a 2,500 square-foot shop, leased machinery and began production. The tools they created and which sold for only a few dollars back then are now considered to be vintage Snap-on Tools and are highly prized as collectibles.
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