If you’ve pulled a starter rope on a lawn mower in Wisconsin, there’s a decent chance a Briggs & Stratton engine coughed to life on the other end.
The company goes back to 1908 in Milwaukee. It started as a partnership between an inventor, Stephen F. Briggs, and an investor, Harold M. Stratton, according to the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee.
Car parts first
Engines came later. Briggs & Stratton first made automobile parts: locks, igniters and starter switches. The starter switches carried the business as cars caught on in the early 1900s.
The turn toward engines came in 1919, when the company bought the A.O. Smith Motor Wheel, a small engine that pushed its research toward the four-cycle gasoline engine. Those engines went into washing machines, garden tractors, cultivators and generators.
During World War II, the military used Briggs & Stratton engines to power generators at the front and put the company’s ignition systems in its planes.
The aluminum engine and the suburbs
Charles Coughlin ran the company as president from 1935 to 1972. On his watch, Briggs & Stratton built the first lightweight aluminum engine, and that changed the lawn and garden business.
The timing was perfect. Veterans came home, the suburbs grew and everybody needed to cut grass. By 1957, the aluminum engine made up nearly 80% of the company’s orders. In 1981, Briggs & Stratton was No. 382 on the Fortune 500.
The late 1970s were harder. The oil crisis, environmental rules and Japanese competition pushed the company to spend more on research. It launched the Vanguard line of commercial engines and partnered with Daihatsu and Mitsubishi Heavy Industries to sell overseas. As of 2011, it had more than 3,000 U.S. employees and turned out more than nine million small engines a year.
Bankruptcy and a new owner
The century-old company hit the wall in 2020. On July 20, Briggs & Stratton filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and agreed to sell substantially all of its assets to an affiliate of New York private equity firm KPS Capital Partners for $550 million, according to its Sept. 21, 2020, filing with the SEC. The sale closed that day. The company said its shareholders should not expect any of the proceeds.
The business kept its name and its headquarters in the Milwaukee area. The company says it is still the world’s largest producer of gasoline engines for outdoor power equipment, selling under brands like Vanguard, Simplicity, Snapper, Ferris and Billy Goat in more than 100 countries.
Not bad for a starter-switch shop.
Editor’s note: This article was published by Dairyland Sentinel. It is not a paid advertisement or an endorsement. We celebrate Wisconsin’s heritage, including the companies, organizations and people who make it great.
