The Toolbox of America

NARRATOR: In the early 1800's, the United States was a very different place.

There were 15 stars on the American flag, and the average life expectancy was 37 years.

Across the country, communities were just beginning to grow and prosper.

But one community stands above the pack.

By 1900 it had created and patented more inventions per capita than any other small town in America.

It was once so small and seemingly unimportant that locals simply called it The Great Swamp.

The town is New Britain, Connecticut, and one local family, the Stanleys, helped that Great Swamp grow to become the hardware capitol of the world.

-Socket sets, wrenches, screwdrivers.

-You can't go out and clear the American West without a tool.

-Pliers, hacksaws -You can't build the cathedrals of Europe without a tool.

-Power tools, drills, hammer drills.

-The hardware that went into Rockefeller Center all came out of New Britain.

NEWSREEL ANNOUNCER: Build for your future with Stanley, the largest manufacturer of hardware in the world.

KAREN HUDKINS: Because of the things that are made in New Britain, Connecticut, the hardware city of the world, Stanley Works, in a very real way, helped people improve their lives.

We believe that everybody in America for most of the 20th century came into contact with at least one New Britain product.

And because of Stanley Tools, I mean because everybody has got at least one Stanley tape rule in their basement, there is still a little bit of New Britain, Connecticut in every house in the country.

In this vision that Frederick T. Stanley had of hinges and hardware and the things that are integral to making people's lives better, that vision is still alive in a very real way.

Frederick T. Stanley is born into New Britain, Connecticut in 1802, so just as the beginning of the new century dawns.

If you think about it, it's 26 years after the American Revolution.

He's born into an area of New Britain called Stanley Quarter, because that's where all the Stanleys settled as they started to wander into New Britain from the Farmington colony.

And New Britain is unique at this point because manufacturing is not really established, it's only just getting started.

They've just started to manufacture things out of brass.

It's agricultural, it's, there's farms everywhere.

There's no railroad here.

And the thing that's amazing about New Britain in light of what it became is that there's no wealth in this community, there are no natural resources, and there's no water power.

And this is the world into which Frederick T. Stanley is born.

So as Frederick T. Stanley gets older, he decides at some point that he doesn't want to be a Stanley from New Britain and he wants to go out into the world and make his own way.

So when he's about 16 he goes to New Haven and works in a store for like five years.

And then he comes back to New Britain.

He works on a steam ship for his uncle.

He's exposed to everybody.

If you were a legislator or a merchant and you had to get from Hartford to New York or Philadelphia, you had to take one of these steamboats.

And then he goes to Fayetteville, North Carolina.

And so he was there for a number of years selling whatever, and he comes back to New Britain.

He's got a packet of money, and he decides to focus on being here and going into business.

NARRATOR: As cities and towns grew along Connecticut's waterways, developments in New Britain went largely unnoticed.

With a population of less than 1,000, this agricultural community began to expand and form small manufacturing businesses.

KAREN: There was nobody here to tell us we couldn't do stuff.

You know, it wasn't like Frederick T. Stanley's living in a community where there's not like four generations of established businessmen who are all going to stand around and tell him, "no, you can't do that-that's ridiculous."

You know, "Don't be a fool."

So he is going to go into business with his brother, who's like a machinist, and Frederick T. Stanley is credited with making the first plate lock in America.

NARRATOR: Their early success: the establishment of the first factory in America for the manufacturing of locks.

It's a plate of iron inside a block of wood that you've seen in every colonial building you've ever gone in in your life.

It's screwed on the inside of the front door, and those were the locks in those days.

NARRATOR: But the Stanley brothers had a much larger contribution to the advancement of their community.

KAREN: They realized that New Britain, no significant source of water power, if you wanted to make anything, it's men's feet on lathes, like an old Singer sewing machine, or they're putting animals on treadmills, you know, to generate power.

So Stanley, and how he discovers this is lost to time, but somehow he knows, and I have to assume it's because of the traveling he's done and the people's he's spoken to, he goes to Brooklyn, New York, and buys a steam engine to power other machinery.

And he gets it to New Britain.

They have to put it on a boat, up the Connecticut River, they've got to drag it here from Hartford.

Roads were not great in those days.

It took all day to go ten miles by horse.

But somehow he did it.

And he set it up, and it's either the first in Connecticut or one of the first in Connecticut.

It is definitely the first one in the city of New Britain.

NARRATOR: But Frederick doesn't have an opportunity to fully employ his new steam engine.

KAREN: Crash comes in 1837, basically wipes out half the businesses in New Britain.

Frederick goes down South to Mississippi and is selling hardware, we're assuming, and then he comes back up to New Britain in the early 1840s, and then he starts his bolt shop with his brother William in an old armory that was in New Britain, and they employ the steam engine.

So this is before the Civil War.

NARRATOR: As the economy recovers, New Britain gains a reputation for manufacturing products made from raw iron.

He wrote a paper in the 1870s where he talks about how there are now 30 steam engines employed in New Britain.

In 30 years.

That's a pretty significant accomplishment.

There are other businesses going on in New Britain.

Corbin's getting started, Landers, Frary & Clark is getting started.

Stanley Rule and Level, the foundation company for that is getting started.

You realize when you start reading about this stuff that so much of this is just a perfect storm.

Frederick T. Stanley could have stayed in the South, not come back home.

You know, he could have been like everybody else and not introduced the steam engine, you know, too much money, too much work, too much effort, what's it going to do?

You know, every other manufacturing community in the world is built on a river and is getting their power for free.

He's got to buy coal that he has to cart in from Middletown to run this newfangled thing and then he's got to figure out how it's going to work.

But it's up and running by the 1840s, and everybody else wanted to adopt them.

And that is really the first thing that catapulted New Britain, Connecticut ahead of everybody else.

CECILIA BUCKI: The real definition of machinery is taking a tool out of a person's hand, the craftsman's hand, and placing it in a contraption.

That's what creates a machine.

And then you're mimicking hand movements.

Two of the big industries in the early phases was the clock making industry and the gun industry, and both of them fed into the third one, which was a machine tool industry.

Those machines are created by the craftsmen, who know the hand movements and know the tools that need to be used.

Combine that with capital and yes, suddenly you have machine tools.

You'll have bicycles-Pope Brothers is a big bicycle company.

You'll have hardware-brass in the Naugatuck Valley.

So you have both entrepreneurs, who don't have much sense of the business they're in but are hiring people, and you also have those craftsmen who can gain enough capital to put themselves in business in a larger mass production stage.

DAVID: England prevented America from having factories because they wanted to sell us finished goods.

So as soon as we became independent we really went out of our way to try and support industry.

From 1790 to 1930, Connecticut led the entire country in the number of patents per capita.

We developed the vertical milling machine, the drop hammer, the commutator, which is important for the electrification of the country.

The Europeans began to take a look at us and really see that the Americans' commitment to the use of machinery was almost obsessional.

Connecticut is the birthplace of the excellence of American manufacturing system.

This is where we learned how to dominate the world.

Other people around the world may have come up with the ideas but they weren't able to implement them successfully.

And once we were able to do that, to produce a large number of objects for a low cost, that changed the entire planet.

There was something about what was going on here.

They're trying out new processes.

They've got this machinery.

And so other people are coming into New Britain for one reason or another.

They come in with a couple of dollars in their pocket.

They see that there are these things going on and they can get jobs, and there's an opportunity here to make something of themselves, and so they stay.

The availability of factory jobs is one of the things that becomes a sort of pull factor for people moving from rural areas into urban areas.

We had run out of really good farmland and the sons, and in some cases the daughters, said "I've got to find an alternative way of "making a living for myself."

KAREN: You know, life is hard, it's really hard, and farming is hard.

And we like to believe, you know, where would you rather be-working on a farm or working in a factory?

We think, with our sensibilities, "oh, I'd much rather be on a farm and walking to the fields".

But you know what?

You never get a day off, and you've got to get up a 4 a.m. to milk the cows.

So if you're living in America in the 19th century and you're stuck on a farm, well yeah, I want to go to the city.

It's this idea that talented people attract talented people, which is exactly how Silicon Valley got started.

You could come in here, you could not have any skills, and if you wanted to develop your skills or learn new skills this was the place to do it.

It was extraordinary.

Stanley has the steam engine and now he can make a bazillion widgets and it doesn't matter if the rivers are frozen or if the rivers are running low because of the summer.

But now there aren't enough people in this community to do this work.

So in 1850, when New Britain becomes a town and a borough in its own right, there are 3,000 people living in New Britain.

Well, round about that time, once again it's like the perfect storm, people are coming into America to change their destiny.

So the Irish start to show up in New Britain in the late 1840s because of the Potato Famine and they're followed by Germans and Lithuanians and people from Eastern Europe and Italians and the French.

The Polish come, you know, in the late 1800s.

These people are all here for one reason, they want to change their destiny, much like the guys who started these factories.

The population in 1850 is 3,000, and 20 years later in 1870, it's 10,000.

So in 20 years, it's tripled.

People who are from different parts of the world, don't share the same language you do, and with them come churches and different cultures and different viewpoints.

I'm not saying there wasn't prejudice, I'm not saying there wasn't distrust, I'm not saying that there weren't problems.

But what I do know is that the work united everybody, and if you're standing next to somebody whose last name you can't spell and you're not really sure what they're eating in their lunchbox, and you really don't know what they're doing in their church, which to your Congregational mind looks funny.

After a while you realize they can run their machine as well as you can or better, and your differences are not as important as the things that unite you.

NARRATOR: By the mid-1800's, Frederick T. Stanley decides to diversify by opening a second business manufacturing hinges.

He calls it the Stanley Works.

But Frederick is also spending more and more time focusing on building the community of New Britain.

So he decides it's time to bring new talent into the company.

In 1854, William Hart, then a 19 year old assistant station master, is asked to come work at the fledgling company.

And he loves the hardware business.

So within the year, when he is still 19 years old, they make young William Hart, an outsider, Secretary/Treasurer of the Stanley Works.

So William would spend time doing bookkeeping, his corporate responsibilities, and then he was down on the factory floor.

You know, and he's helping make boxes and he's helping pack stuff, and he's in the forges, and he's looking at all this stuff.

He realized that his company and his business was only going to be as good as the skill and the talent and the commitment of the people working for him.

So none of this, "we're going to start this process and "even though it's harder for you, or you don't like it, "you've got to do it anyway because this is "what we want because this is how we're going to make money."

He wanted to make things easier because he knew that the workmen would realize if it was easier for them to make something, they could make more of it.

So they could individually make more money and the company would make more money.

And because of that, because he had this hands-on knowledge and understanding of the business, it led to a lot of process improvements, packaging improvements, because he realized early on that it's not enough to make a good product, you have to be able to sell it.

NARRATOR: William Hart was a hard negotiator who loved the chase, and the strategies he put into place influenced the business for the next 100 years.

One of his big ideas, the cardboard box.

KAREN: He popularized the use of cardboard boxes.

I guess when you went to buy a hinge, they were all packed in grease paper.

The screws were a separate transaction, and I guess the shopkeepers liked that, they thought they were making more money.

Well, William Hart would go around with his family and visit general stores and he would time how long it took to buy a hinge.

His big idea was, "you know what?

"We're going to take the screws "and package them with the hardware, "and we're going to put this in a box so it "can be stacked on a shelf so the salesman or the "clerk or whatever just has to walk over, "pull the box off the shelf, and boom, you're done."

So there was a little resistance on the part of the shopkeepers, you know, why fix this if it isn't broken?

Hart did his own time study, you know, and said, "well, if I came in here to buy a hinge, "it took the guy ten minutes, "and to get the screws and everything.

"But if, with the little box it's going "to take him five minutes, so now what are you going "to do with those extra five minutes?"

And that's how he won the shopkeepers over.

DAVID: First half of the 19th century, particularly for some of these factories, it was extremely difficult to get capital.

You were either looking at merchants, friends, relatives to finance your beginning growth.

NARRATOR: So business owners were not only responsible for people who worked for them, they were responsible for the widow who sat next to them in church, who had given them their last 50 dollars.

KAREN: So when they decided to incorporate the Stanley Works in the 1850s, they raised $30,000 from five different people, you know.

And that's what kicks the company off.

And before the stock market existed, that's how you raised your capital.

You went around and you asked people if they wanted to invest in your company.

So when William gets started and there's a business panic in the 1870s which was pretty significant, Stanley Works needs money.

He goes out into the community, knocks on people's doors and the doors of businesses and asks them, "Do you want to lend money to the Stanley Works?"

And they did.

Not, "Do you want to buy stock?"

but, "Do you want to lend money?"

NARRATOR: While Frederick T. and William Hart are growing their business in New Britain, another Stanley started a business across town.

KAREN: So Frederick T. is on one end of town making hardware.

You know, Stanley Works is establishing itself with William Hart and they're making builder's hardware and door bolts and all sorts of other stuff, and across town another member of the Stanley family is starting a company that makes rulers and levels, that's it, measuring devices.

NARRATOR: In the economic panic prior to the Civil War, Stanley Rule and Level started making a variety of goods just to survive, like toys, jewelry, and roller skating wheels.

But after the Civil War in 1869, Henry Stanley learns about a man named Leonard Bailey.

Bailey, from Boston, Massachusetts, has innovated a wood plane.

The Bailey plane was the first successful iron plane, which made it less cumbersome and less easily damaged than the old fashioned wood planes.

But the real ingenuity lay in its design.

The Bailey plane could use a thin blade instead of the heavy wedge-shaped blades of older styles.

So Henry Stanley pays him $12,500 for his patent rights- in 1869 that was a lot of money- and moves him, literally lock, stock, barrel, and equipment, to New Britain, and they set Bailey up as the head of the plane factory.

NARRATOR: The first year, Stanley Rule and Level sold 6,500 Bailey planes.

Within five years, they were selling over 100,000 a year.

KAREN: And this is how Stanley Rule and Level gets into the hand tool business.

NARRATOR: While the Stanley Works continues to grow through innovation and improvements in their process, Stanley Rule and Level grows through acquisitions.

KAREN: Because the ability and talent that makes it possible for you to make a rule is not the same skill set you need to make an auger.

KAREN: You can't go out and clear the American West without a tool.

You can't build the cathedrals of Europe without a tool.

You can't hang a picture in your house without a tool.

What is made in New Britain and was made by Stanley Works in a very real way helped people improve their lives.

KAREN: Because of the things that are made in New Britain, Connecticut, the Hardware City of the World.

There were ball bearings made here.

There are consumer goods, so coffee pots and fasteners for people's clothes.

Hand tools.

Big giant manufacturing machines that made stuff for other companies and then obviously builder's hardware.

The hardware that went into Rockefeller Center all came out of New Britain.

Because of these five major industries that were in New Britain, we believe that everybody in America for most of the 20th century came into contact with at least one New Britain product a day.

It was either made here, it had a part in it that was made here, or it was made on a New Britain machine.

And because of Stanley tools and because everybody has got at least one Stanley tape rule in their basement, or a Stanley hammer, or has inherited things that maybe they don't really know how they're supposed to use them anymore-there is still a little bit of New Britain, Connecticut in every house.

In this vision that Frederick T. Stanley had of hinges and hardware and the things that are integral to making people's lives better, that vision is still alive in a very real way cause it, and it exists in every house in America in one way or another.

NARRATOR: In 1920, the Stanley Works, the hardware company, and Stanley Rule and Level, the tool company, both founded by distant cousins of the same family, decided to merge.

KAREN: And now they can make things out of steel.

It wasn't enough of them to just make the steel, they came up with different ways to use steel.

They did steel metal stampings that went into all sorts of Stanley products that got developed.

You walk through your front door and you've probably got Stanley hinges on the door.

And there were curtain rods, there were mirrors-so you might have a mirror in your Stanley bathroom.

They started to make hardware for appliances.

So your refrigerator might say Whirlpool on it but it's going to have Stanley hinges and hardware on it.

You're going to go get your car out of your garage and actually Stanley Works, true to their visionary tradition, cars become common, everybody's got cars by 1919, so Stanley Works goes, "oh, well, cars need garages and garages need hardware".

So they develop and create catalogs, this whole new line - garage hardware.

AMRYS: I think one of the things that Connecticut and New England seems to have done well over the course of many centuries is be a little nimble.

It's not a revolution.

It's a shifting to recognize that things are changing.

You can see people kind of shifting to meet a different demand.

KAREN: 60 million pounds of Stanley steel was used in World War I.

Steel is huge for the war effort.

Certainly the World Wars have an impact on the U.S. economy in general, and World War II really transforms, the American economy in a lot of ways.

What we've heard from a lot of people is, you are far from home, you're from Connecticut (Indistinguishable voices) (Sounds of gunfire) You know, it's this thing about home, okay.

So Stanley Works, because of the way they developed their business, very early on they were into export.

They developed factories overseas so that they could be closer to their markets.

You grow up with certain products.

You know, Kleenex, Jell-O, whatever, and we hear these stories of guys who fought in Vietnam or who fought in World War II -you're away from home, you feel disconnected from the people you love, and the last thing you see is a product made, it's a Stanley product.

It always gets me.

It's not an important story just for New Britain, and I just think it's extraordinary that this meant something to these servicemen.

DAVID: Post World War II let's take a look at the reality of the entire world.

Our competitors were on their keisters.

They either had been bombed into oblivion or they were broke, as in the case of England.

You had the entire 1930s, suffering through a global depression.

The first half of the '40s was engaged in World War II.

NARRATOR: When World War II ended, the Stanley Works experienced a huge surge in sales and production.

Homes were being built in record numbers across the country and pent up demand for products that could not be had during wartime left the company scrambling to find workers just to keep up.

KAREN: In the 1950s, after World War II, when America is just booming and these businesses are booming, thousands of people being employed by Stanley Works, thousands of people being employed by other factories in New Britain.

35,000 people a day showed up for a job in a factory in New Britain, front office or factory floor.

NARRATOR: As the employment opportunities grew, it was common for relatives to work together and remain loyal to a specific company.

Middle class will now include blue collar workers for the first time because they have these union jobs.

This is the American Dream: a good job; it's where you can actually save enough money to buy yourself a little house.

The post-World War II period becomes so important for our understanding of what the American Dream and the middle class means.

DOCUMENTARY ANNOUNCER: Almost overnight suburbia was born.

A half million homes sprang up around the country in 1946, nearly a million in 1947, a million in 1948, still more in 1949.... CECILIA: You're getting good pay, you're getting a wealth of benefits that you never would have thought of before, whether it's vacation time or pension or even sick pay.

Insurance for healthcare is really new.

And of course you would want your son or your daughter to go into those.

ROBERT MAGUDA: I had to go to Stanley because that's where my dad and sisters worked so, just, I couldn't break the mold.

In New Britain there was so much manufacturing, everyone had someone working somewhere, whether it was Fafnir's or Tuttle & Bailey, North & Judd, it was the hardware capitol of the world.

It was almost expected that family members that worked in one of these facilities could get a job in one of these factories.

My two daughters worked for the company and my son-in-law.

And it goes back to my grandfather and my cousin.

I was with my first husband, working with him, his brother.

His mother worked in another building.

My children worked during the summer.

I started in 1950 and I retired in 1999-49 years.

We would alternate our hours for lunch and also when we would get out in the evening so that we wouldn't be jammed up in traffic, you know.

I started in the Cost Department with the big books.

We had tables, not desks.

We did all our journal entries manually.

We wrote them out in ink.

Some of them had real good penmanship.

We tried to compare to some of the old timers.

They were excellent writers, you know.

After a while the computers came out.

Eventually we would have to put all our journal entries and all our worksheets and everything that we did manually, on the computer, and if you don't think that was sweating time, I tell you, it was.

Many of us, we never thought we'd be able to do it.

KAREN: In the '50s, they were one of the first if not the first to actually shrink wrap hardware so it could go on a peg in a hardware store.

We take that for granted, okay.

But you know, that's not the way they sold hardware for a very long time.

People were used to going into their local hardware store and opening a bin and digging through the bin.

Well, Stanley Works decided, "you know what?

"This is much easier.

"It takes less space, people can walk in, "see what they want, pull it off the peg, "and go up and pay for it".

They came up with this great thing, this bus that would drive around and have these hardware displays on the inside.

So you could go in and take a look at it and see how it was supposed to be set up and try it out.

FILM ANNOUNCER: From Maine to Texas, from Oregon to Florida, hardware retailers will have an opportunity to examine firsthand, discuss, and have demonstrated, this interesting cross-section of the Stanley line.

NARRATOR: In the early 1950s, a new phenomenon swept the country, do it yourself.

I remember that Do It Yourself program.

We're going back quite a ways.

Everybody is like getting on the bandwagon.

It was a new way of life.

We had plan sets that we gave away for free.

KAREN: You could go buy a tool and you could buy plans how to make a swing set for your kids, they called it an Exercise Center.

How to reorganize your garage, how to build little cubes, you know, that you could have around your house for storage.

FILM ANNOUNCER: Hey, beautiful table Ken and ... KAREN: How to make furniture, how to hang curtain rods.

FILM ANNOUNCER: ... beautiful window... KAREN: All this stuff, Stanley Works, true to the very beginning with William Hart.

It wasn't enough to just sell you the stuff, they wanted to show you how to use it.

-Happy birthday!

-Wow!

-Mommy and I made this.

-It's beautiful.

-Stanley, the do it yourself company.

And then they came out with books and videotapes came out.

WOMAN: We've chosen a decorative but simple design for the leg trim.

RAY: On VCRs, and they showed you how to put a walkway in or how to build a deck.

ROBERT: As a Baby Boomer I really got involved with that.

It happened right around the time that my wife and I got married and bought a house.

Putting in such love and care, cutting out a teddy bear.

Stanley came up with a slogan, I forget exactly what it was, but it was something like Stanley helps you do things right.

Stanley, we want to help you do things right.

Stanley, Stanley, we want to help you do things right.

We want to help you do things right.

Whoa!

Haha!

Wow, I remember those commercials.

Stanley helps you do things right - that was, that was on our own trailer trucks we had there.

We were a pioneer.

-We can do it, Ralph.

-But it's plumbing.

-We put up the Stanley garage door openers.

-There were no Home Depots at that time or Lowes, and we didn't have the internet.

-Are you sure you don't need any help?

SCOTT: And it was an evolving market.

The most famous TV commercial, a man and his son standing on the deck of a log cabin, and he walks out and he says, "I helped...I helped my dad build this place.

"I was so small I could barely swing a hammer.

MAN: But he taught me a lot about tools.

He used to say, "You can buy cheap tools every couple of years, "or you can buy Stanley once."

ANNOUNCER: Since 1843, a company from New Britain, Connecticut has been helping people do things right.

Stanley.

MAN: I even take my tape rule fishing.

That way I'll know how big a story to tell.

SCOTT: Don Davis, a great visionary, he was the one that really put Stanley brand on the map.

He would look at our brand awareness- and we were one of maybe 30 or 40 brands in a hardware store in the tool department, all of which were not very well known.

COMMERCIAL ANNOUNCER ...home of Stanley.

WOMAN: But I got him a Stanley handsaw last year for his birthday.

Equally unknown, he had the vision to say, "I want to make Stanley a household name."

MAN: Hey, fellas, look at this!

-Whoa!

ANNOUNCER: It's only because we make tools worth talking about.

MAN: Stanley's twelve foot power-lock tape rule, huh?

First of all, everything in the house is probably built with a Stanley Black & Decker product.

But if you walked in the front door of a home you're going to see our hardware.

You walk in, you're going to see flooring that was put in with our nailers.

You're going to see in the kitchen the coffee pot, toaster, and home appliances.

When you go into the garage, everywhere in the garage you're going to see lawn and garden products and toolboxes and tape measures and ROBERT: socket sets, wrenches, screwdrivers, pliers, hacksaws, wood saws, power tools, drills, hammer drills.

SCOTT: You go outside and all the lawn and garden work is maintained by Stanley Black & Decker products.

RAY: Power Tools made a weed whacker before anyone else ever made a weed whacker, like in the '60s.

We made hinges for just about anything, whether it was cabinet hinges, cabinet hardware, wired goods, residential hinges, architectural hinges for large buildings.

ANNOUNCER: The door opens wide.

RAY: Hinges that would go on churches.

You could get it in bronze, brass, antique brass, plain steel, prime coated, white, color, reds, you want me to keep going?

Remember the chain locks on doors?

You used to put that little, that slide chain on the door?

Wow.

NARRATOR: Ray Muenchow started at the Stanley Works when he was just 17 years old.

And I had my 18th birthday, There was a group of people that I worked with had a birthday party for me right there.

And all the years passed and last year I had my 60th birthday and I had it only 30 feet from where I had my 18th birthday.

There were so many people with so much experience when I came there, when Power Tools was there and Hand Tools, the steel mill, Hardware Division, the Steel Strapping Division, Engineered Components Division.

If you had a problem there, there was always someone that had experience in that area.

So for me it was, I could learn anything I wanted; anything I wanted to work on or build or and be creative with trying to fix stuff and it was, the place was like a library.

I always thought when I was inside the plant that people on the outside of the plant never realized how much is here.

Really.

I mean whether it was about the technology, the friendships, what we, what we were capable of the place was like, really was like a fine watch.

Like I can remember when the trailer trucks were outside lined up, ready to unload every morning.

Bird Street was full of trucks from New Haven unloading steel.

They'd be waiting for the plant to open at 7:00 or 6:00 or 5:00, or they, they actually, I think they were open all three shifts.

It was just, there was so many, so much coming in.

And we had Waterbury Brass come in every day.

All those brass mills used to make materials for us.

The food truck would be out front.

And it just, it was just a way of life.

ROBERT: We had softball teams, we had golf leagues, we had bowling leagues, and you really got to know people inside and outside of work.

There was no voice mail back then, there was no emails, there was no cell phones, there was no taking a picture and sending it to someone of a problem.

Technology advances have just made everything so quick and so real-time.

RAY: One of the things that I notice, the biggest difference from the '70s till now, the corporate headquarters was very close to the plant.

You would see the corporate people in the plant quite often because that was their biggest plant.

New Britain was the, the plant, and the mindset was whether you were talking to the CEO or you were talking to somebody in the floor, we all made it about the plant.

The plant was everything.

It was like that was the heart.

It was all about the people.

It was all about the city.

ANNOUNCER: For a long time Stanley Works has been the worlds largest manufacturers of fine hand tools.

KAREN: You can solve all your own problems, you can make everything.

You stop thinking that you can learn from outsiders.

You start to breathe your own air.

And I think one of the things that really set William Hart and Frederick T. Stanley and Henry Stanley at Stanley Rule and Level and the men who came up under them, what really set them apart was is that they knew they didn't know everything.

At some point we forgot that, not just Stanley as a company but New Britain as a city and actually America as a country.

DAN HAAR: Donald Davis makes the Stanley brand what it is in the modern era - a real sort of people person and he's out there, you know, he knows everybody and everybody knows him and he comes up through the company.

And his successor is Richard Ayers, who's more or less in that same mold.

Richard Ayers is a little quieter, but he's of the company, he comes up through Stanley.

And in the early '90s, mid '90s really, I guess it was '95, things start to turn down for the company.

Margins are down.

Sales are not necessarily down but they're not rising the way they need to be.

Profits - you can see the future.

KAREN: We started to believe we knew everything and no one could teach us anything.

So this vision that existed in New Britain and in America in the late 19th and early 20th century kind of started to, I don't know, dissipate in the mid 20th century and we stopped, and we stopped seeing what was going on beyond the city walls.

I think that started to hold us back.

DAN: Manufacturing employment in the '80s in Connecticut was down from its peak in the '60s but the really sharp declines had yet to happen.

So we were still hovering around 400; 375,000 manufacturing workers in Connecticut, most of whom were hourly.

Today, by contrast, with the big declines in the '90s and 2000s, we have about 155,000 manufacturing employees.

And so that's still a substantial part of the workforce and it still matters a huge amount.

It's still, for example, twice as many people as we have in insurance.

JAMES LOREE: Actually, from the mid '70s to the mid '80s, Stanley Works at the time underwent a tremendous growth spurt.

It was about 400 million in sales in 1976, and by ten years later, 1986, it was well over a billion, close to a billion and a half in sales.

And then in the '90s what happened was you started to see the rise of the home centers.

DAN: By 2001 or 2002, Home Depot alone accounts for 22% of Stanley Works entire corporate sales, just the one outlet, and Home Depot is exerting a greater and greater influence over price.

JAMES: And as they became more powerful, it became very difficult for Stanley to weather the pressure that they were putting on pricing.

These powerful customers had become, by that year, had become 43% of our total revenue.

And I got a call one day from our sales rep, and he said-we had a doors business, a steel residential door business - and he said, "I'm at a line review.

"They want, they just told me, "it's 5:00 in the afternoon.

"They just told me by 8:00 in the morning "I have to cut 20% of the price "of these products or we're going to lose "all of the business", and we're talking hundreds of millions of dollars of business.

That's just one example.

So the brand power only worked for certain products.

For tape measures, for, you know, traditional, you know, Stanley type knives and those types of tools, the brand power was there, the end users wanted it.

But there were plenty of other things like some of the hardware products, like the entry door products, that the brand really didn't matter to people.

DAN: Ayers and the board execute the first huge restructuring plan, where they close a couple of dozen factories and there's massive layoffs.

New Britain comes out well, with I believe 200 or 250 lost jobs, which compared to the rest of the company was not nearly as much, and no factory was closed in New Britain.

But overall they're starting to see that we've got to flatten this company and we've got to get some of these unwieldy divisions under control into a more streamlined management.

Richard Ayers-he's the last Stanley CEO that's groomed and comes up through the ranks at Stanley.

But he's also a guy who uses Stanley tools in his hobby, which is to make things.

When I talked to him about what he was going to do, he retires to go build things in some place in Northern New Hampshire or Vermont.

That stops happening with the successor CEOs that we've had since then.

NARRATOR: In 1997, John Trani is recruited from outside the Stanley Works to lead the company in a new direction.

Trani was one of those golden boys from GE, steeped in the GE method of Six Sigma and all the ways that you get rid of layers of management and you streamline it, and if it doesn't work you change it and get rid of it right away-you don't wait and let things fester in the GE method under Jack Welch.

John Trani is a charismatic, football playing son of a Brooklyn longshoreman who rises up through the ranks at GE and other companies and loves his job, and talks in, you know, hale and hearty terms, "We're gonna win."

And in fact, the 1997 annual report had the yellow Stanley color on the cover and one word, WIN.

By mid-1997, he's been in office for six months, he's gotten to know the company, and now we see the really serious restructuring going on, where the program has to be much deeper and much broader than what Ayers did starting in '94 or '95.

He's inherited a system with 22 business units and something like 41 purchasing systems and 71 data systems, and 45 different computer systems all over the world, and he flattens that out.

I said to a manager, "What was it like working for John Trani?"

And he said, "You would get a call at 7:30 and you had to move right away."

And I said, "a.m. or p.m.?"

And he said, "Yes."

He does all this without attempting to be the face of the company in the community, certainly not in New Britain.

He said to me and others, "That's not my job here.

"My job is not to come and be Mr. Community New Britain."

JAMES: From 1997 to about 2002, there were approximately 40 plants that were closed in the developed parts of the world, including the U.S., and about 40 distribution centers.

It was a very, very traumatic period for the company.

The, when we all went out it was heartbreaking, devastating.

People were nervous, people were angry, people were sad, some people were devastated, myself included cause like, I grew up there.

I learned so much there.

ROBERT: Manufacturing for everyone was going global, so if you didn't compete at the consumer level, with the advents of the Depots and Lowe's of the world, the Walmarts, you would be out of the market.

Part of that had to be done.

No one argued that some of these consumer products shouldn't be moved to Asia or other low-cost countries.

But you had 3 or 4,000 people working in the New Britain hardware facility that lost their jobs.

A lot of them were friends.

It was very difficult to work alongside someone that you knew in a year or two might not be there.

The hardest days was, that's easy, was closing the hardware division in 2000, and there wasn't enough jobs for everybody, so.. And then the auctioneer came in and auctioned off all the equipment.

And, you know, I'd already worked there like 30 years and I put a lot into the plant - fixing windows, fixing doors, fixing overhead things, fixing, building and fixing everything most of my life, and then you know, they just yank the plug out of the wall.

It's, yeah, it was, that was a hard time.

I think it was a hard time for everyone.

That night when I left I just said, I'm not going to say goodbye to anybody.

I turned around, I walked to the parking lot in tears, and when they said, you know, "Tina, where are you going?

What's the matter?"

"Excuse me", and I just never turned around.

"You okay?"

There isn't any of that around anymore.

It's, you know, so a lot of us were saying, "Where am I going to go now?"

"What am I going to do now?"

cause Fafnir's had already left.

Stanley was the only big one left and, you know, so when they went it was like the end.

RAY: The hardest part is, is like the guy took his gloves off, put them on the machine, he went back ten years later, the gloves were still sitting on the machine.

It was like, you know, like a Twilight Zone thing.

I could see all the people standing there and the people working there, and then it was just empty.

ROBERT: Yeah, I was the last person in the Hardware Division along with one of my buyer-planners, and to walk through that facility that was bustling with thousands of people just the year before and then see it empty, not hearing any noises, no presses going up and down, no leaks of the air lines, no tow motors moving, it's a ghost town.

And it's very spooky to walk through a facility like that and not see the faces that you saw just a few years before.

NARRATOR: What happened at Stanley in the 1990s happened across America throughout the manufacturing industry.

JAMES: Stanley had been a very paternalistic company for a long time - very quiet, cared a lot about the community, cared a lot about the employees, provided tremendous pension benefits.

During that timeframe, a lot of that had to be curtailed, and it was very, very traumatic on the communities that we had these plants in.

But there really was no other choice.

In the end, you know, the U.S. model at the time was cut the prices for the consumer, everybody gets a lot more consumption, and jobs go away.

(Music note slowly fades out) NARRATOR: As the company transitioned over the next two decades, they began to focus on products that consumers chose because they were made by Stanley, and to diversify into businesses that weren't related to tools.

JAMES: And it just so happened we have this automatic door business, which is a, you know, primarily U.S. business, but it, in the post 9-11 period-right around that timeframe, it turned out that those automatic doors, the customers were requesting the automatic doors to be hooked up to some sort of digital system.

And so we were looking at that and we said, you know, this might be the time to get into security.

And so we made up to 50 acquisitions in that business over the ensuing years, and today that business in total is about one and a half billion dollars.

But the key to this was by the time we entered the '08, '09 Great Recession that the operating margin from the security business was about half the company's operating margin.

So when, you know, the economic collapse occurred, people still buy security when the economy - in fact they might even buy a little bit more when the economy gets bad.

Our balance sheet was strong.

Black & Decker on the other hand had some issues with concentration and also they had ridden the housing boom and when the bust occurred, their balance sheet was very stressed, and we decided to have a conversation with them about putting the companies together.

DAN: And this becomes the ultimate put together of the company and it gets the company back more into tools but bigger and stronger.

And coming out of the recession with the housing market growing, it becomes a virtuous cycle where everything is going right.

Stanley, which had been an acquisition target at least three prior times by Nolan Archibald at Black & Decker, now becomes the acquirer solely and exclusively because they had gotten into security.

Stanley makes all these acquisitions, and it's not easy to make the acquisitions work.

There's less than a 50% merger success rate in these companies.

Most of the time they fail.

(final music note plays then slowly fades out) NARRATOR: But as the world continues to change, new factors have arisen.

One of the things that is really important to me and to, I think the company, America, society in general, is this technological revolution that's occurring is going to shatter institutions.

It's all underpinned by this connected world transformation that's going on, where you have a concentration of power in, you know, the networking kind of companies like the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks and so on, and at the same time you have this distributed liberation of people at the connected level, on social media and so forth.

You have this ability to communicate, you know, rapid fire and to go back and forth anywhere in the world to access talent across borders with information, and it creates a massive chaos and power imbalance where many institutions are under siege and many people are being left behind.

There is a growing difference between the haves and the have nots, and not just in America but all around the world, and that creates social unrest.

What's essentially happening is governments are unable to keep up with the changes that are occurring, and it's almost all driven by technology.

Governments can't move fast enough.

And so I think businesses have a responsibility to try to do what they can do to provide some leadership so that we can fill in some of the gaps while the governments try to catch up.

I think businesses have the opportunity to be great actors, maybe good actors, or really bad actors in this equation, and all I'm really saying is I'm trying to set the example for this company to be a great actor.

KAREN: Did Frederick T. Stanley anticipate this?

No.

I don't think he started out thinking, "I'm going to build one of the "largest hardware companies in the world".

I think that he was driven to create like people at Silicon Valley.

He had these ideas, he wanted to put them into practice.

When Gates and Jobs are creating computers or things that nobody else had ever envisioned, in their garages, did they know that they were going to end up taking over the world?

No.

Because that wasn't the point.

The point was you envision something and you turn it into something, and then you see what happens.

Now I think what's happened is that everybody gets into something because they want to make a bazillion dollars, that's the motivation.

And what has defined us as a country, and definitely defined New Britain and Stanley Works was, no we really wanted to build a better mousetrap.