Ray W. Herrick

Ray W. Herrick did not invent the refrigerator, the air conditioner, or the hermetically sealed compressor that made both possible. What he did was take the assembly-line discipline he had absorbed in the Michigan auto industry and bend it around a single unglamorous part, the small motor-and-pump unit sealed inside every cooling machine, until Tecumseh Products of Tecumseh, Michigan, became the largest independent producer of refrigeration compressors on earth ^[1][2]. He built it not in Detroit but in a farm town sixty miles southwest, out of a company that had been four years from bankruptcy when he took control of it ^[1][5].

The firm began in 1930 as the Hillsdale Machine & Tool Company, a partnership Herrick formed with the local toolmaker C.F. "Bill" Sage to stamp out parts for Ford Motor Company; at the start Sage and his wife held two-thirds of the stock and Herrick one-third ^[1][2]. Revenue climbed astonishingly for a Depression start-up, from $26,000 in the first year to $284,000 by 1933, and by then Herrick had bought out most of the Sages and seized control ^[1]. Yet the firm was still teetering toward insolvency in 1934 ^[1][2].

What saved it was a relationship Herrick had cultivated for years. A master toolmaker who had come up through Michigan's auto economy, he had made himself a friend and adviser to Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison ^[1][3], and had absorbed the auto industry's assembly-line methods well enough to carry them into an entirely different product ^[11]. In 1934 Ford intervened personally, by one account summoning Herrick to Dearborn and steering him toward an empty plant in Tecumseh, then helping him secure a line of credit with a Detroit bank ^[1][6]. Through a coordinated push by Herrick, Ford, private investors, and the city of Tecumseh, the company scraped together a little more than $12,000, took over an abandoned 30,000-square-foot building, and was reborn as Tecumseh Products ^[1][2].

The pivot that built the fortune came in 1936, when Herrick committed the plant to hermetically sealed refrigeration compressors, drawing on designs from engineers (Frank Smith, later joined by Curtis Brown and Jens Touborg in the firm Tresco) who could deliver inexpensive, reliable units to rival the big appliance makers' own ^[1]. By the end of the 1930s Tecumseh was turning out more than 100,000 compressors a year ^[1][2]. World War II turned the plant to defense work, 40-millimeter shell casings for the Navy and precision aircraft-engine parts, earning the company a Navy "E" award for excellence in April 1942 ^[2][4]. Then came the postwar boom in refrigerators and the new market for room air conditioners, and Tecumseh rode both: by 1950 sales had reached roughly $72 million and annual output topped two million compressors, with customers as large as General Electric ^[1]. By the late 1950s sales exceeded $160 million, and Herrick later bought the Tresco design firm outright for nearly $5 million ^[1][6].

Herrick ran the company as a near-autocrat with a theatrical, intensely religious streak, and the credo he stamped on it, "We believe in God, we mind our business and we work like hell", outlasted him by generations, still being quoted by his grandson decades later ^[1]. He installed a professional president, Joseph E. Layton, in 1955 while keeping the chairmanship, and at seventy-six in 1966 handed the presidency to his son Kenneth and took the vice-chairmanship ^[1]. When he died in 1973, Tecumseh had made well over 100 million compressors and 25 million small engines, and Herrick had become one of Michigan's great industrial philanthropists ^[1][3].

Raymond Wesley Herrick was born in 1890 and raised in rural Michigan, a toolmaker's son of the kind the state's exploding auto industry was built on ^[1][3]. He was, by his own record, restless: between 1911 and 1931 he worked for some ten different companies before he ever ran one of his own, accumulating the shop-floor command of tools, dies, and production flow that would define everything he later built ^[6]. He was a master toolmaker, not an engineer or a financier, a man whose authority came from knowing how a part was actually made.

In 1928 he joined the struggling Alamo Engine Company in Hillsdale, Michigan, rising to factory manager and then director of sales and production, a post he held until 1933 ^[1]. It was in Hillsdale, in 1930, that he and Bill Sage launched the machine-and-tool partnership that became the seed of Tecumseh, reputedly starting in a livery stable on Railroad Street before the work outgrew it ^[1][2]. The Hillsdale shop made parts for Ford, and it was through the Detroit auto world that Herrick built the friendships, with Ford above all, that would rescue him when the Depression nearly closed him down ^[1][3].

Those relationships were the hidden capital of his career. By the time Herrick was struggling in the early 1930s, he was on terms with Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, and Thomas Edison, and it was Ford's personal intervention in 1934 that turned a failing tool shop into the company that would carry the town's name across the world ^[1][3][6].

Ray Herrick's name survives in three places that have little to do with each other on the surface: a compressor industry he helped standardize, a hospital and library in southern Michigan, and a research laboratory at Purdue. Tecumseh Products outlived him by decades as a global supplier of compressors and small engines, and at his death the company had built well over 100 million of the units that quietly cool the modern world ^[1][3]. The Ray W. Herrick Laboratories he endowed at Purdue in 1958 remain among the foremost centers for research into heating, ventilation, air-conditioning, and refrigeration ^[7].

His larger inheritance was philanthropic. With his wife Hazel he created the Herrick Foundation in 1949, capitalizing it with Tecumseh stock; over the following decades it gave away hundreds of millions of dollars, favoring challenge grants and a deliberate institutional anonymity so that the communities it helped would own their own initiatives ^[5]. The hospital and library that carry the Herrick name in Michigan towns are its visible markers ^[5].

Herrick's story is also a cautionary one about family enterprise. The closely held company he passed to his son Kenneth and then to his grandson Todd eventually descended into a bitter boardroom feud in the 2000s, with ousters, competing director slates, and millions spent on litigation, the long tail of a firm built and controlled by one strong-willed founder and kept tightly within his bloodline ^[8]. The credo endured even as the family fractured: God, business, and hard work, in that order ^[1][9].