Impact Stories

Fifty Years of Winning Right

For five decades, Pentair has provided customers with quality products and solutions, striving to improve the quality of people’s lives around the world.

On July 6, 1966, five men intent on manufacturing high-altitude balloons founded a company in suburban St. Paul, Minnesota, that they called Pentair, the Greek “penta” for the five founders, and “air” for the products they planned to produce.

Pentair diversified quickly, venturing into industries ranging from plastic canoe manufacturing to computer software, from leather footwear to meat rendering, before acquiring a series of paper mills that would serve as the company’s core for nearly two decades.

Known for a willingness to enter new industries and an ability to find operating efficiencies, Pentair for a time also made woodworking machinery, ammunition and power tools.

Today, five decades later, our 30,000 employees design, manufacture and market industrial products sold on six continents. Driven by a dedication to improving people’s lives around the world, our products help customers produce more food, energy and efficiencies from each drop of water, while protecting people and the environment.

Our people, our processes, and our Win Right values have been at the core of our growth, serving as the thread that links our past with our future. So as we mark our 50th anniversary, and look to the future and our vision of becoming the next great industrial company, we stand ready to honor the past, embrace change, and seize opportunities. We are confident that in our second half century, we will continue to thrive. It’s our legacy.

Video: Pentair’s Four CEOs reflect on our Win Right Values

50 Years of Winning Right

Murray Harpole, one of the five founders of Pentair and the company’s first CEO. An electrical engineer, Murray was 44 when he helped found Pentair after more than 20 years of engineering research and development work, including instrumentation and measurement equipment for research balloons.

Pentair’s first products were high-altitude research balloons, inflatable devices and associated instrumentation. From that point on, the company grew by acquiring, improving and expanding underperforming businesses, which for the first 25 years included mostly paper mills and industrial product manufacturers.

Detroit Tigers baseball pitcher Joe Sparma demonstrates the durability of the Penta Craft canoe, part of a diverse range of products that included air conditioner enclosures and self-propelled surf boards. These products were produced by Pentair in the late 1960s after it acquired equipment for vacuum-forming large pieces of plastic.

From 1968-1995 Pentair focuses on paper mills in locations from Niagara, Wisconsin, to Trinidad that made paper for catalogs, magazines and even absorbent tissue wadding for Procter & Gamble’s Pampers-brand disposable diapers. Our mill in Miami, Ohio, was a pioneer in recycling wastepaper.

Making a transformative move, Pentair exits the power tools business in 2004 and dives into the water industry with the purchase of Wicor Industries, which manufactured water systems, filtration and pool equipment products under the Sta-Rite, SHURflo and Hypro brands.

LEAN Enterprise is one of the three pillars of Pentair’s Integrated Management System (PIMS), our proven operating processes. While our Win Right Values are the heartbeat that drives our company, PIMS is the standard work that delivers sustained excellence.

Pentair’s massive pumps are installed at the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway in New Orleans, Louisiana in 2009 following the devastating flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina. Today, the pumps protect the city’s 1.2 million residents by pumping overflow canal water back into the Gulf of Mexico at the maximum rate of over eight million gallons of water per minute.

Employees around the world, including sites in France and Taiwan shown here, celebrate Pentair’s largest transformation with the merger of Tyco’s Flow Control business in 2012, nearly doubling the company’s size in both revenue and employees, and expanding our global presence.

Urban Farmer Dave Haider tends to a crop of kale, part of a state-of-the-art aquaponics system that grows fish and produce in a former brewery. Pentair is seeding a new industry by bringing healthy food to developing countries, arid climates and space-challenged urban centers.

These Philippine children received clean safe drinking water in the wake of Typhoon Haiyan in 2013 as Pentair quickly mobilized support to help provide resources for clean water and other critical needs – including a dollar-for-dollar match of employee donations by The Pentair Foundation. Pentair’s Project Safewater provides sustainable safe water to more than one million people through initiatives such as the 100-plus iJal water stations in India.