The company was originally established in 1878 by Chandler Robbins and James Myers in Springfield, Ohio, near Dayton. The founders brought varied experiences to the business. Robbins had worked as an astronomer and surveyor, while Myers had been a teacher and grocer. Robbins had invested $500 in a gray-iron foundry in 1876, and was joined two years later by Myers. The new owners changed the company name from Lever Wringer Company to The Robbins & Myers Company. The company namesakes initially manufactured castings for agricultural tools and machines, then broadened into bicycle parts when that industry boomed at the turn of the century.

The late Nineteenth-century development of direct-current generators freed electric motors from the big, heavy batteries to which they had been bound and opened up a new universe of electric appliances. Robbins & Myers entered this burgeoning new market in 1897, when the company began manufacturing electric desk, ceiling, oscillating and ventilating fans. Over the course of its history, Robbins & Myers developed into a full-line producer of electric fans, and later acquired the well-known Hunter brand of overhead fans.

The company concurrently developed and began production of a series of small (under 15 horsepower) motors known in the industry as fractional motors. These motors were widely applied in household appliances like sewing machines, vacuums, washing machines, and refrigerators in the early Twentieth century.

Robbins & Myers quickly earned a reputation for precision engineering and manufacturing that won it contracts with several important inventors. For example, R&M’s motor generator sets helped Guglielmo Marconi take the wireless telegraph from concept to commercial feasibility. In 1910 Charles Kettering called on Robbins & Myers to help him design and manufacture a very efficient armature for his revolutionary DELCO (Dayton Engineering Laboratories Company) automobile starter motor. R&M went to produce starters for both General Motors and Ford Motor Company throughout the 1910s and 1920s.

In fact, Henry Ford’s development of mass production techniques indirectly influenced R&M’s expansion into a new market in the late 1920s. That’s when the company began manufacturing labor-saving electric hoists, winches and cranes that quickly and efficiently moved goods down the assembly line.

While Robbins & Myers had manufactured rotary and force pumps as well as air compressors since the 1910s, this business segment reached a critical turning point in the 1930s, when then-president Walter S. Quinlan met with Rene Joseph Louis Moineau. Moineau had devised and patented an innovative new concept in pumping technology called the “progressing cavity pump.” This versatile device could be slanted in any way and would pump in either direction. It was durable enough to withstand such exacting functions as waste water treatment, pulp and paper production, and food and beverage processing. According to a 1978 centennial history of Robbins & Myers, Moineau’s machine “revolutionized that portion of the pump industry wherever thick, viscous, abrasive and corrosive substances needed to be handled.” R&M became one of the first companies to license the design, and in 1936 began producing the “Moyno” brand pump that would later become the core of its business.

But throughout the late 1930s and early 1940s, Robbins & Myers was involved in a more pressing project. In 1938 Carl Norden, inventor of the “Norden bombsight,” asked R&M to build the motors used in these strategic devices. Since each sight required several motors, this sideline grew to consume 80 percent of R&M’s production capacity by the end of World War II.

At war’s end, Robbins & Myers resumed its traditionally diverse product line. With its standing in both motors and materials handling, R&M was well positioned to benefit from the postwar boom in consumer consumption. But in spite of continuously growing demand, the market for electric motors began to mature in the 1960s, plagued by the twin demons of intensifying competition and rapidly rising raw material costs. Imports from the United Kingdom and Japan exacerbated competitive pressures in the 1960s, during which time the unit rate of imports more than quintupled.

Inflation intensified the industry’s difficulties in the early 1970s, and the dollar volume of shipments in the electric motor industry actually declined during this period. R&M reacted by reorganizing its operations into four autonomous, product-oriented divisions: electric motors, material handling devices, comfort conditioners (i.e. fans), and fluids handlers (i.e. pumps). By the end of the decade, Robbins & Myers annual sales volume had grown to about $90 million in accord with double-digit increases in the electric motor market overall.