Clipper Manufacturing Company: A Tale of Invention and Innovation

It all began with a chipped tile.

My grandfather, William Coates, was in the business of selling building materials as a manufacturer's agent. His primary products were brick, concrete block and a new product called structural glazed tile. Structural glazed tile was a clay product the size of a concrete block. It was intended to be used in the walls of public bathrooms, gymnasiums and other places where sanitation and cleanliness were important. Instead of building the wall with concrete block and then facing the wall with ceramic tile, a structural tile wall would provide the structural support and, at the same time, present a smooth, colorful surface that was simple to maintain and clean.

The problem was that any interruption in the wall or irregular dimension meant that the final tile to be set, had to be cut to fit and, when the tile was cut, the glaze would frequently chip and the tile would have to be discarded. This waste made architects reluctant to specify glazed tile. At that time there were machines that would cut the tile cleanly, but they were large industrial machines unsuited for construction jobs.

My father and his two brothers, Gordon and Bill, went to work for my grandfather selling building materials and the most profitable product they could sell was structural glazed tile. The product had to be sold by convincing architects to specify it on projects they were designing, and the chipping problem was making this difficult. Dad, who was an inventor all his life, came up with the idea of a portable machine that would use a 1/8-inch-wide silken carbide blade to cut the tile. His machine would work because, instead of forcing the cutting blade through the material to be cut like you would a wood saw, he used a cart to hold the material so it could be moved back-and-forth under the blade making small cuts on each pass until the material was severed. He called this the multiple-cutting principle and patented the idea. 

When Dad decided to form a company to sell his invention his father insisted that, in the spirit of family, he make his two brothers partners. Many years later, when the company had been successful and was paying nice dividends, a dispute arose with his brothers who wanted to continue large dividends while my father wanted to invest most of the profits back into the business. A nasty lawsuit ensued but my father finally prevailed because he had foreseen problems and put his brothers’ stock in a voting trust that he controlled. Thus, he was able to buy his brothers out and maintain complete control. Interestingly this lawsuit went all the way to the Supreme Court before being decided in my father's favor. 

Dad called the company the Clipper Manufacturing Company because the men who cut the tile by hand were called clippers. Originally the saws were made of wood and produced in my parents’ garage by my father and an assistant with my mother doing the mailings, bookkeeping, etc. My mother and father were a team at this as they were in everything in their lives. Usually, this type of product would have been sold by equipment dealers selling wheelbarrows, trowels and other construction equipment. Dad decided to take a different route and sell Clipper Saws by direct mail, offering something completely unique – a five-day free trial. The company struggled at first, however my parents persevered, and the business grew. They knew the product was unique and they worked with a patent attorney and patented the multiple-cutting principle. Good idea except they later found that there always seems to be a way around a patent and eventually they had competition producing essentially the same product. 

Later, Dad became aware of a segment of the market that wanted to buy through equipment dealers, consequently he started a second company to sell an almost identical product, painted a different color, through the dealer network. He named the new company Eveready Brick Saw. 

Hindsight is always 20/20 and in retrospect one of the biggest mistakes that Dad made was to promote people into executive positions without getting them to sign a noncompete agreement. One of these individuals was Bob Evans, who was his sales manager. When Bob saw what a good business Clipper was, he left and started a competitive company called Target. Evans sold through dealers.

My father always equated the masonry saw business to the razor blade business. As he explained, Gillette could afford to give away the razors as the real money was in the blades that continually had to be replaced. He bought his blades from the Norton Company, a large New York Stock Exchange company, whose principal business was making grinding wheels for the automotive and other manufacturing companies. The original blades were made of silken carbide and were 1/8-inch wide. The cutting process created a great deal of dust which was objectionable and today would probably be considered toxic and prohibited. He overcame this by converting the base of his saw to a water reservoir and installing a circulating pump that introduced water to the cutting blade, thus eliminating the dust.

Clipper introduced a diamond blade that was a metal disk with a rim impregnated with tiny industrial diamonds. This not only eliminated the dust but maintained a constant diameter whereas the silken carbide blades wore down with each cut and eventually were too small to cut all the way through the material. Diamond blades became extremely popular and eventually Clipper was one of the world’s largest consumers of industrial diamonds. Dad became friends with the Oppenheimer's who, at that time, had a virtual monopoly on diamond mining as they controlled the mines in South Africa. 

Dad later recognized the potential of the concrete saw that was originally used to create a smooth cutting-edge when breaking into concrete highways or concrete plant floors. A new use had developed for cutting contraction joints in concrete highway and airport construction. The process was to continually pour the slab and then as the concrete hardened, go back and cut the contraction joints because they were narrow and that eliminated the driving thump, thump of the wider hand tooled joints. Later Clipper came out with a large machine for melting and installing the tar that was used to seal joints in concrete pavement.

Dad later recognized the potential of the concrete saw that was originally used to create a smooth cutting-edge when breaking into concrete highways or concrete plant floors. A new use had developed for cutting contraction joints in concrete highway and airport construction. The process was to continually pour the slab and then as the concrete hardened, go back and cut the contraction joints because they were narrow and that eliminated the driving thump, thump of the wider hand tooled joints. Later Clipper came out with a large machine for melting and installing the tar that was used to seal joints in concrete pavement.

As the business grew, Dad opened sales offices in principal cities throughout the U. S. to promote and sell the products. A Clipper Manufacturing salesforce worked out of each office calling on construction jobs and industrial plants. He also appreciated that there was a large foreign market and began opening Clipper offices in major foreign countries. Because of Clipper's close relationship with the Norton Company he usually solicited the manager of the local Norton plant as a partner. The first foreign plant was in Leicester, England, followed by offices in six other foreign countries. 

The foreign operations required frequent overseas travel at a time when that type of travel was a real adventure. The airplanes did not have the range for long flights so a flight from Kansas City to England would require stops in Chicago, New York and Gander, Newfoundland. Originally the flights were made in DC3’s but later we flew on Constellations where beds were provided. Slow but quite luxurious. 

Dad quickly saw that wooden machines should be replaced by metal and subcontracted their manufacture to a local metalworking plant while he concentrated on the sales aspect of the business. This went on successfully for a number of years but eventually he decided to take over this aspect of the business, too. Clipper was very profitable and with the introduction of concrete saws and later core drilling machines Dad made what was, in my opinion, his first serious error. He went from modest offices and a rather simple manufacturing operation to new and very grand offices and factory which he built in Grandview, Missouri, a suburb of Kansas City. The offices would have been a credit to a large New York Stock Exchange company or a major Wall Street brokerage house. My father took great pride in the fact that he had built this amazing business without ever having to borrow money, but the new Grandview operation changed that, and he was uncomfortable with the change. He decided it was time to sell the company and retire. The most logical buyer was the Norton Company because, by now, Clipper was their largest customer. Dad made the sale and retired. 

In 1954, when I graduated from Northwestern, I went to work for Clipper as a salesman in the Chicago area. Like all Clipper salesmen I was provided with a Plymouth automobile with a masonry saw mounted in the huge trunk. I worked hard and did a good job but obviously got my promotion to general sales manager on my lineage rather than my sales results.

There I was only a few years out of university, running a nationwide sales force, but I don't think I did a bad job of it. When Dad sold the company to Norton and retired, they brought in Jacque Martinoni, the French manager, as general manager. Norton did not really understand our business and I think Jaquez resented me and it was not surprising that I was fired. As it turned out it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I became a developer in Aspen and made enough money that, just a few years after being fired, I was making more than the president of Norton Company. But that's another essay.