This blog records the story of an iconic engineering company that originated from two young men in Rhode Island, USA in the mid 19th Century. There names were Stephen Wilcox and George Babcock. The name of their partnership ‘Babcock & Wilcox’ was to become one of the greatest names in the world of engineering through the second half of the 19th Century and the entire 20th Century.
Even in his mid teens Stephen Wilcox was troubled by the increasing number of tragic accidents that were occurring in the operation of steam boiler plant. At his young age he gathered a remarkable personal archive of information from which data he developed his firm belief that, in his words, “There must be a better way” and embarked on a personal campaign to find it. In 1856 he applied for a US Patent on his first ‘Safety Boiler’ .
The Babcock & Wilcox name became the core of the lives of hundreds of thousands of people in every continent.
A Boilermakers Story 