16 | The Fisher Story
1940s
1939 Wizard ® I
Series 4100 and
4300 field
mounted
controllers
introduced.
Addition to the south portion of the plant is
completed (building 10).
1940 New power plant opens next to the plant.
Employees launch the “Valves for Victory” campaign
and produce valves for use in the production of ships
and planes.
Sales representatives are established in Minneapolis,
Minnesota; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Dallas, Texas;
Tulsa, Oklahoma; Seattle, Washington; Louisville,
Kentucky; and Calgary, Alberta, Canada.
The Manhattan Project
One of the famous dress-up parties occurs
before Christmas 1939 at the
Marshalltown Coliseum. A total of 668
Marshalltown employees and guests
attend. Bonus checks are concealed in the
programs and Iowa’s Governor,
George A. Wilson, is the guest speaker.
I
n 1943, the Fisher Governor
Company received a
high-priority, top-secret project
from the U.S. Government that
was reportedly vital to the
successful conclusion of the war.
The Marshalltown employees
involved had to sign secrecy
agreements and be willing to
work serious overtime.
The Manhattan Project was
an attempt to duplicate, on a
massive scale, what had only
been done on a laboratory
table—to build the world’s first
full-scale nuclear reactor and a
massive chemical complex to
extract plutonium. A frantic
pace of production was driven
by fears that the Nazis were
working on the same thing.
For Fisher-Marshalltown
employees, it meant working
quickly, secretly, on new
designs, with new materials, for
an application never tried nor
fully understood. Ray Engel
provided technical leadership.
Verle Hunt designed the first
Fisher butterfly valve for the
project. And, Tom Montieth
served as foreman of a special
production crew.
It took the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers and the DuPont
Corporation a little less than two
years to build the plutoniumproducing complex. From there,
the first shipment of plutonium
went to New Mexico where
scientists assembled and tested
the world’s first atomic bomb.