Victaulic marks ‘Innoversary,’ 100 years since first patent

It all started with a flamethrower.

It was 1916, and Lt. Ernest Tribe of the Royal Engineers’ Trench Warfare Division saw that a semiportable flamethrower deployed by the British War Department had a flaw. Tribe noticed that the weapon had unrestrained pipe connectors, which could separate when pressurized and spray a soldier with oil.

When World War I ended, Tribe used that experience and sought to develop a bolted mechanical coupling to join grooved pipe ends. So on April 4, 1919, Tribe filed the first patent for The Victory Joint, now known as the Victaulic coupling.

Exactly a century later, Victaulic is still innovating and has a portfolio of more than 2,000 patents commonly used in the building and industrial construction industries. The company, headquartered in Forks Township, on Thursday announced the milestone, dubbing the occasion its Centennial “Innoversary.”

“For 100 years, Victaulic’s reputation has been built on customer collaboration, delivering new technologies that enable productivity, and reducing risk across the construction life cycle,” Victaulic Chairman, President and CEO John F. Malloy said in a news release. “Our Centennial ‘Innoversary’ is not only an opportunity to look back on our achievements, it’s also great motivation to make our next century even more valuable for our customers and rewarding for our employees.”

While the company’s first innovation was devised for military use — saving time in the pipe-installation process to move gases and chemicals — Victaulic’s pipe joints quickly gained traction for projects for municipalities, contracting firms, railroad companies, steamship companies and manufacturers, according to a book titled, “Victaulic: A History of Innovation.”

Fast-forward to today and 1 billion Victaulic solutions have been installed across the globe on several noteworthy projects, including the Hoover Dam, Beijing Olympic Stadium and the massive Hudson Yards development in New York.

Worldwide, the company has 55 facilities and over 4,000 employees, more than 1,100 of whom work across five Lehigh Valley facilities. Victaulic expects to boost its local payroll by more than 100 employees over the next one to two years, with the bulk of those new positions anticipated at the company’s Forks and Alburtis manufacturing sites.

But Victaulic wasn’t always a Lehigh Valley company.

In 1967, when Victaulic was based in New Jersey, the company bought Lehigh Inc. in Easton, which was its largest malleable iron casting supplier. Then, in 1977, Victaulic opened a foundry in Forks Township to manufacture ductile iron castings for outside customers and for its own needs. Two years later, the company doubled its foundry capacity in Forks.

Then, in 1982, Victaulic moved to its new world headquarters, next to its Forks foundry, in a move that brought several corporate functions under one roof, “spurring the company’s growth in markets, systems and applications,” according to the Victaulic book.

Today, the company continues to grow.

Victaulic’s “Innoversary” comes at a time when the company is adding nearly 1 million square feet to its manufacturing operations worldwide. As part of that, the company is pumping tens of millions of dollars into the Lehigh Valley to build a 400,000-square-foot manufacturing center in Lower Nazareth Township.

That expansion, just off of the Route 33 interchange in the Hecktown Road Business Park, is expected to open in 2020. The new facility will house the company’s light assembly operation and include several millions of dollars in new equipment.

The company also is expanding facilities in Dalian, China; Drezdenko, Poland; and Ontario, Canada.

In his statement, Malloy said the company’s next 100 years “will include more customer-centric innovation as technology grows more rapidly than ever before and we continue to make strategic R&D investments.”

As for what will influence Victaulic’s next patent, that’s for the next chapter in the company’s history.

Jon Harris can be reached at 610-820-6779 or at [email protected]

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