History of Brush Wellman Inc.

Brush Wellman was co-founded as Brush Laboratories by Charles Brush Jr. and Charles Baldwin Sawyer in 1921 with the financial assistance of Charles F. Brush Sr. By 1926, Charles Brush Jr. was developing industrial uses for beryllium.

In 1931, Brush Laboratories became the Brush Beryllium Co. and was actually founded by Charles Baldwin Sawyer. Brush Beryllium, in its early years, contributed to the development of atomic energy for wartime and later peacetime uses. The company’s sales of beryllium metal, alloys, oxides and ceramics steadily increased through 1955, then quadrupled by 1960 due to its involvement in the space program. Brush Beryllium product, the perfect “Space Age” metal, was used to form the heat shield for the re-entry vehicle in the Project Mercury manned space flights. Though the aerospace program began to wind down, Brush Beryllium still prospered because of an increasing demand for its materials in the aircraft and electronics industries.

When beryl ore, a source of beryllium, was found in the Topaz Mountains of Utah, Brush established Beryllium Resources, which bought the rights to explore and later mine in the Utah area. In 1971, Brush Beryllium acquired the S.K. Wellman Corp., a manufacturer of metallic friction material used in brakes and clutches for heavy duty off-road equipment, and changed its name to Brush Wellman Inc.

The inital buildings of Alloy Operations at the Elmore facility. The plant's small stack is shown in this 1954 photo.

Brush Wellman’s Ohio operations include:
   A manufacturing facility in Cleveland since 1960,
      and now its Corporate offices
    A manufacturing facility in Lorain from 1935 to1948
    A manufacturing facility in Luckey from 1948 to 1960
    A manufacturing facility in Elmore since 1953
    A non-beryllium manufacturing facility in Lorain
      since 1997

Today, Brush Wellman Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Brush Engineered Materials, Inc. with its headquarters in Cleveland, Ohio, is the only fully-integrated beryllium producer in the world taking beryllium from the mine through the mill. Brush Wellman has manufacturing and distribution centers in eleven states, as well as several international service/distribution centers overseas.

The Elmore, Ohio manufacturing plant, located on a 480-acre site in Harris Township, Ottawa County, is Brush Wellman’s flagship facility. Presently, the plant employs about 600 employees and has 865,000 square feet under roof.

Timeline: 1880 - 2008

1880 Brush Electric Company founded. 1889 Brush Electric Co. is purchased by Thomson Houston Elec. Co. 1891 Brush Electric, Thomson Houston, and Edison merge to form General Electric Company. 1921 Brush Laboratories founded by Charles Brush Jr. and Charles Baldwin Sawyer. 1926 C. Brush Jr. begins developing industrial uses for Be. 1931 C.B. Sawyer and Bengyt Kjellgreen develop process for extracting Be from ore. 1931 Brush Laboratories becomes Brush Beryllium Company. 1933 First electrically heated Beryl furnace is built. 1936 60 grams of Be Metal produced this year! 1942 Production surpasses 1,000 lbs. Be Metal per year. 1943 U.S. Navy dedicates Destroyer: Charles Francis Brush. 1943 Sales exceed $1,000,000 /yr. 1945 First Hot Pressing experiments start. 1948 Lorain facility burns to the ground. 1948 Operations move to Luckey, Ohio. 1952 109 acres of land are purchased in Elmore, OH for $330/acre. 1953 Alloy Division is started at Elmore site. 1956 Expansion project at Elmore starts. The 299ft stack is built. 1957 Average hourly wage at Elmore, OH $1.60/hr. 1960 All operations move to Elmore facility. 1984 Rod, Bar and Tube expansion project at Elmore completed. 1985 Awarded contract to upgrade United States beryllium metals stockpile. 1997 New alloy operations expansion project at Elmore completed. 2003 The Elmore plant celebrates its 50th year of operations. 2003 Brush Wellman beryllium chosen for the James Webb Space Telescope mirror. 2005 Awarded $9 million contract from the Department of Defense for the engineering and design of a new beryllium production facility. 2006 Brush Engineered Materials marks its 75th Anniversary 2008 New Beryllium Production Plant groundbreaking at Elmore.