Part IThe Story
Page Seventy-Four
The notice ran on Wednesday, November 18, 1970, on page 74 of The New York Times, in a column called "Executive Changes." It sat beneath three new vice presidents at Macy's New York, among them a divisional display director, and above a paragraph about the chairman of U.S. Natural Resources, Inc., joining the board of the Equity Corporation. It was two sentences long:
— The New York Times, “Executive Changes,” November 18, 1970, page 74Charles L. Coughlin has been named chairman and chief executive officer at the Briggs & Stratton Corporation. Vincent R. Shiely was appointed to replace Mr. Coughlin as president.
There is no photograph. There is no age, no hometown, no quote, no line about what the company made or how large it had become under him, and nothing about how long he had been president. The paper of record treated the elevation of the man who had run one of the most consequential small-engine manufacturers in the world for thirty-five years with roughly the same column inches it gave to a new vice president at the Kroebler Manufacturing Company. Then it moved on, to Louis B. Lundborg of the Bank of America joining the board of MCA.
It is tempting to read the item as a slight. It reads better as a portrait. Here is a career rendered in its own idiom: functional, uninflected, accurate, and, for anyone who knows what to look for, astonishing. By the time those two sentences were typeset, the engines built under Coughlin's presidency were bolted to rotary mowers on lawns that had not existed when he took the job, and had powered generators on the front lines of a world war, and washing machines in houses that had no electricity, and tillers and cultivators and garden tractors whose owners, if asked, could have told you the name on the shroud — Briggs & Stratton — but not the name of the man who had decided, year after year, what went underneath it.
That was not an accident of publicity. It was, in a sense, the product.
The record this profile can stand on is thin, and it seems more honest to say so at the start than to dress the thinness in invented color. What survives of Charles L. Coughlin is mostly structure: a tenure, a set of engineering decisions, a run of model numbers, a company's shape. He left almost no words. The other Charles Coughlin — the one most Americans of a certain age will think of first, and the one the search engines still serve up — left millions of them.
The Other Charles Coughlin
On Sunday, November 11, 1934 — Armistice Day — a Catholic priest from an industrial suburb near Detroit announced the formation of something called the National Union of Social Justice. His name was Charles E. Coughlin. One letter separated him from the engine man in Milwaukee, and the whole width of American temperament.
The radio priest, broadcasting from the parish the historian Alan Brinkley describes as rising out of "modest origins," was by then a national phenomenon. Contemporary estimates put his audience at 30 million listeners. He claimed to receive 400,000 letters a week. His journal, Social Justice, reached a circulation of one million copies. Some observers called him the second most important political figure in the United States. In Voices of Protest, the book that won Brinkley the National Book Award for history, he is paired with Huey Long as one of "the two most successful leaders of national political dissidence of their era."
Father Coughlin's platform, as he laid it out in the Union's principles, began with theology and ended with the Federal Reserve. Wealth, he argued, "originates from the natural resources and from the labor which the sons of God expend upon these resources," and everything had been fine until "the harsh, cruel and grasping ways of wicked men who first concentrated wealth into the hands of a few." He wanted a "just and living annual wage" for every citizen willing to work. He wanted a government-owned central bank. And he wanted to nationalize "those public necessities which by their very nature are too important to be held in the control of private individuals" — banking, credit and currency, oil and natural gas, and, in a phrase that would have landed oddly in Milwaukee, power and light.
In May 1935 he was in talks with Long, Francis Townsend, Gerald L. K. Smith, Milo Reno, and Floyd B. Olson about a joint campaign against Franklin Roosevelt. Long was expected to be the candidate. On September 8, 1935, Long was assassinated. Joseph Kennedy tried that same month to reconcile the priest with the president, and failed. In 1936 the coalition put up William Lemke of North Dakota, who drew 882,479 votes against Roosevelt's 27,751,597 and Alf Landon's 16,679,583. Lemke took 13 percent in North Dakota and less than 6.5 percent in the industrial states — Michigan, Ohio, Wisconsin, Illinois, Pennsylvania — where the voice had been supposed to carry the most weight.
Thirty million listeners. Eight hundred eighty-two thousand votes.
That same year of 1935, the year of the talks and the assassination, a different Charles Coughlin became president of the Briggs & Stratton Corporation in Milwaukee, about ninety miles of lake from where the radio voice was loudest. He would hold some version of the top job for the next thirty-seven years. He did not, so far as any record shows, ever address a crowd of thirty million. He did spend the Depression building small gasoline engines that let farm families and machine shops and, eventually, suburban homeowners generate their own power, privately, one cylinder at a time.
It is not quite right to set the two men against each other — they were never in conversation, and there is no evidence either knew the other existed, beyond what anyone would have known of the priest. But the coincidence of the name is a useful instrument. It lets you hear what one kind of American ambition sounds like at full volume, and then listen, in the silence after, for the other kind.
By the Numbers
The Coughlin Era at Briggs & Stratton
1935–1972Coughlin's span at the top of the company, per the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee
1953Year Briggs & Stratton introduced its lightweight aluminum engine
~80%Share of all company product orders accounted for by the aluminum engine in 1957
33 yearsProduction run of the 60100 horizontal-shaft engine, 1958–1991
No. 382Briggs & Stratton's rank on the 1981 Fortune 500 list
9 million+Small engines produced annually in the U.S. as of 2011
2 sentencesLength of the Times notice announcing his elevation to chairman and CEO
What Brookings Sent East
To understand the company Coughlin inherited, start not in Milwaukee but on the prairie, on a March day in 1883, when a group of pioneers from across Dakota Territory gathered on a patch of ground in Brookings to break ground for a college. The territorial legislature had appropriated $20,000. The speakers, in what a 1955 departmental history fondly calls "the best oratorical style of seventy years ago," predicted a campus of several buildings and "possibly 500 students." Old Central opened to its first classes on September 24, 1884. By 1947 enrollment was 2,300.
The place was a land-grant college, a creature of the act Lincoln signed in 1862, and its founding premise was a democratic one: college education "for the agricultural and the industrial groups previously neglected." At the time, the same history notes, both agriculture and industry ran "primarily on rule of thumb methods." The land-grant colleges were meant to replace thumbs with science — to take the sons of farmers and teach them to calculate the stress in a beam, the efficiency of a cycle, the fuel consumption of a motor.
— Division of Engineering, South Dakota State College, *70 Years of Engineering 1884–1951* (1955)But they did see the need of their day, they did have dreams for meeting that need, and they did take action to bring those dreams into reality. This is a continuous process and must be continuous if progress is to result.
Stephen Foster Briggs was one of those sons. Born in Watertown, South Dakota, on December 4, 1885, he went through Watertown High School and on to South Dakota State College, where an upper-level engineering class project turned into his first product: a six-cylinder, two-cycle engine. There is a photograph of him with it from 1906 — a young man and a machine he had designed for a grade. He was, by every account the record offers, eager: eager to build, eager to get into the automobile business, which in those years was expanding the way the internet would expand ninety years later, swallowing capital and talent and producing more failures than successes.
What Briggs lacked was money, and what connected him to money was a football coach. Bill Juneau, who coached at South Dakota State, owned a farm next to one belonging to a Wisconsin grain merchant named Harold Meade Stratton. Juneau knew Briggs's ambition and Stratton's appetite for ventures, and he introduced them. In 1908, in Milwaukee, the two began an informal partnership. Briggs was twenty-two. Stratton was twenty-eight.
The story of American industry is full of such introductions — accidents of adjacency that later get retold as destiny. The particular texture of this one is worth sitting with. A land-grant engineer from the Dakota plains; a grain dealer from a Wisconsin crossroads; a coach whose farm happened to share a fence line. Nobody in the arrangement was from money in the Eastern sense. Everyone in it was from the soil, and from the specific conviction of the Upper Midwest that the soil could be made to yield more if you applied a machine to it.
South Dakota State, more than a century later, lists a Charles L. Coughlin among its Distinguished Engineer honorees. The SDSU Foundation's annual review maintains a page for a donor circle called the Charles L. Coughlin Society. Beyond those two facts — a name on an honor roll, a name on a giving society — the sources at hand say very little about how the Brookings campus figured in his life. But the shape is suggestive: the company's founding engineer came out of that college, and the man who ran the company for most of the twentieth century is claimed by it. The pipeline from the prairie to Milwaukee appears to have carried more than one engineer.
The 1955 history, describing the territorial pioneers, could just as well have been describing the type: "they did see the need of their day." It is a sentence about action, not about fame. It does not say they were remembered.
A Company Named for Two Men Who Were Elsewhere
The name on the engines was a promise that, for most of the company's life, its namesakes did not personally keep.
Harold Stratton, born November 12, 1879, in Troy Center, Wisconsin, a graduate of the Milwaukee Business College, had made his money in grain in the last years of the nineteenth century, and grain remained, in the words of the encyclopedia entry on him, "his main enterprise." He was president of the Stratton Grain Company. He served as chairman of Briggs & Stratton until his death in Milwaukee on March 14, 1962, but he "spent most of his time" at the grain business. The investor, in other words, remained an investor — a man whose attention lived in the elevators and the commodity pits while his name rode on the cylinder shrouds.
Stephen Briggs, for his part, went on to buy Evinrude and Johnson Outboards and to found the Outboard Marine Corporation. The engineer who had started with a class project ended up building a second empire on the water. He died on October 16, 1976.
So the company that called itself Briggs & Stratton was, for decades, led day to day by someone whose name was neither. This is not unusual — Ford was run for long stretches by men not named Ford, and Procter & Gamble's founders are mostly a trademark now — but it is unusual in its silence. The successor managers of famous companies tend to become famous themselves, or at least notorious. Coughlin did not.
Even the chain of command around him is hard to fix. The encyclopedias cannot agree on who sat in the chairman's seat. One entry says Frederick P. Stratton Sr., Harold's son, was chairman until his death in 1962 — the same year Harold died. Another says Harold himself held the chair until 1962. A third, on Stephen Briggs's page, says Frederick Sr. was chairman until his death in 1976. All of them agree that Frederick P. Stratton Jr. served as chairman until his retirement in 2001. And The New York Times says that in November 1970, Charles L. Coughlin was named chairman. These accounts cannot all be true at once. Somewhere in the tangle is the real succession, and the fact that it is tangled at all tells you something: the people writing the history were looking at the families on the masthead, not at the man in the president's office.
The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, citing the company's authorized history — Jeffrey L. Rodengen's The Legend of Briggs & Stratton, pages 99 and 100 — puts it plainly: "The company thrived under the leadership of Charles Coughlin, who served as its president from 1935 until 1972." That date, too, rubs against the Times, which had Vincent Shiely replacing him as president in 1970. The likeliest reconciliation is that Coughlin moved up to chairman and chief executive in late 1970 and remained the senior figure until 1972, and that the Milwaukee encyclopedia folded the titles together. But it is a reconciliation, not a fact. The man left so light a footprint that even his job title wobbles in the record.
What does not wobble is what he did with the job.
Starter Switches, Washing Machines, and the Power Charger
The company Coughlin took over in 1935 had already reinvented itself at least twice.
It began, in the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee's account, making automobile parts — locks, igniters, starter switches — and the starter switches, as cars multiplied, "accounted for most of the company's business." The company's own centennial history lists a wilder early catalog of experiments: engine-powered bicycles, electric refrigerators, coin-operated paper towel dispensing machines, fuses, auto igniters, locks, keys. This is what a young industrial company looks like before it finds its center of gravity — a machine shop with ambition and no thesis.
The thesis arrived in 1919, when Briggs & Stratton bought the manufacturing rights to the Smith Flyer from Milwaukee's A.O. Smith Company. The Flyer was barely a car: a small two-seat buckboard pushed along by a gasoline engine mounted on a fifth wheel, a "motor wheel." Briggs & Stratton raised the horsepower and renamed it the Briggs & Stratton Flyer, nicknamed the Red Bud, and sold it for between $125 and $150 — a price that would later earn it a listing in the Guinness Book of Records as the cheapest car of all time.
The Flyer was not the point. In 1925 the company sold the rights to the Automotive Electric Services Corporation and kept the one thing that mattered: the motor that had been the heart of the motor wheel. Then it started attaching that motor to everything — bicycles, reel lawn mowers, washing machines. The Model Q, introduced in 1925 and built until 1933, was the company's first flathead. The L and LA, built from 1930 to 1932, were used on washing machines. In 1928, a year before the crash, the company listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
The decision embedded in that 1925 sale is the decision that would define Coughlin's tenure: do not build the vehicle; build the heart, and sell it to whoever builds vehicles. Do not compete with your customers. Be the component nobody sees and everybody needs.
By the time Coughlin took the presidency, the country was in the sixth year of the Depression and rural America was, in many places, still unwired. The Briggs & Stratton engine lineup of the late 1930s reads like a census of what people needed to do without the grid. The WM and WMI — the letters literally stood for "Washing Machine" — ran from 1936 to 1941, cast iron, suction carburetor. The WMG, built 1937 to 1941, was the WM with a generator attached. And there was a product line with a wonderfully earnest name: the Power Charger. The PC-200, built from 1936 to 1938 around the company's Y engine, was sold as a generator set. The PC-WM came the same years.
Consider what that means. In 1936, while the radio priest was urging the nationalization of "power" and "light" as public necessities too important for private hands, a company in Milwaukee under a man with nearly the same name was selling Americans small, private, gasoline-fueled machines to make their own. One Coughlin wanted power taken into the commonwealth. The other was shipping it out the factory door in crates, to be bolted down in barns and basements.
Neither approach was the whole answer. Rural electrification would come, eventually, through public action. But the private engine got there first for a great many households, and it asked nothing of them but gasoline and a pull on a cord. In 1934 the company had begun offering gear reduction — gears bolted to the back of the engine to slow the power takeoff shaft — on its A, B, K, and Z models, then on the I, U, N, and WI. Lightweight models, designated with an "L," used some aluminum parts to save weight. High-speed models carried an "H." Inboard marine versions carried an "M," some with forward, neutral, and reverse transmissions. The letter suffixes multiplied like the branches of a family tree: one basic heart, adapted for every body that might need it.
It is the least romantic way imaginable to survive a depression. It worked.
The War Taught Aluminum
There is an engine in the company's catalog called the FJ-1, built from 1929 to 1937, that tells you where the next twenty years were going before anybody knew. It had aluminum parts, and it was "used exclusively on military generators." Its civilian twin, the FJ-2, built 1930 to 1932, was cast iron.
The pattern — light metal for the government, heavy metal for the public — would hold until the war broke it open.
When the United States entered the Second World War, Briggs & Stratton went to work for it. The company built generators for the war effort. The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee, citing John Gurda's history of the city, notes that the military used Briggs & Stratton engines to power generators on the front lines and integrated the company's ignition systems into aircraft. The model list is more granular, and more chilling, than any summary. The PC-300, built from 1938 to 1944 around the I engine, served as a generator for the M33 multiple gun mount. The PC-304, built in 1943, powered the M45 multiple gun mount. The cheerful old "Power Charger" designation, the one that had been lighting farmhouses, was now charging the electrical systems of anti-aircraft weapons.
What the war gave the company, in the dry phrasing of its own history, was expertise: "Some pre-war engines were made with aluminum, which helped the company develop its expertise in using this material." That sentence is doing a lot of quiet work. Aluminum in the 1930s and 1940s was a strategic metal — the stuff of airframes — and learning to cast and machine it reliably at volume was not a trivial skill. A company that knew how to do it in 1945 had something most small-engine makers did not.
Coughlin was president throughout. The record gives us no memo, no speech, no account of a decision made in a particular room on a particular day. What it gives us is the sequence: aluminum learned in military contracts, aluminum held in reserve through the war, aluminum deployed in the civilian market at exactly the moment the civilian market could use it.
The masthead logo the company used in those years tells the same story in miniature. The pre-war logos, used from 1931 to 1943, read "4 CYCLE" on the top and "GASOLINE MOTOR" and "MADE IN U.S.A." on the bottom, with the company's home city printed beneath: MILWAUKEE, WIS., U.S.A. When the company redrew it after the war, in 1948, the gold logo kept almost everything — the 4 CYCLE, the MADE IN U.S.A., the city line — and changed one word. Motor became engine. It is a small edit, the kind a careful man makes.
Eighty Percent of the Orders
The postwar American suburb was, among other things, a vast new acreage of grass.
Millions of returning servicemen and their families moved into tract houses whose builders had planted lawns as a matter of course, and every one of those lawns needed cutting every week from April to October. The reel mower, pushed by hand, worked; it was also exhausting, and it did not handle long or wet grass well. The rotary mower — a blade spinning horizontally under a deck — could cut anything, but it needed an engine, and a cast-iron engine on a push mower was a heavy thing to shove up a slope.
In 1953, Briggs & Stratton introduced the aluminum engine, explicitly "as a means of having a lighter-weight engine for applications such as rotary lawn mowers." The 6BH and 8BH, vertical-shaft models, went into production that year. The horizontal-shaft 6B and 8B followed in 1955. The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee calls it "the first lightweight aluminum engine," and says flatly that Briggs & Stratton "revolutionized the lawn and garden industry" by producing it.
The numbers bear the adjective out. By 1957, four years after introduction, the aluminum engine accounted for nearly 80 percent of all Briggs & Stratton product orders. A company that had built its business on cast iron reconfigured its entire output around a lighter metal in less than half a decade, and its customers — the mower makers, who bought engines by the boxcar — followed it there almost unanimously.
It is worth pausing on how unglamorous the triumph was. Briggs & Stratton did not make the mowers. Its name was on the engine shroud, not the deck. The company that captured four-fifths of its own order book with a new product did so by selling that product to other companies, who sold it to hardware stores, who sold it to homeowners, who mostly thought of it as "the mower." Coughlin's great commercial victory happened one layer beneath the consumer's attention, which is exactly where he seems to have preferred to work.
In 1958 the company refined the design into two versions. The Kool-Bore was all aluminum. The Sleeve-Bore was aluminum with a cast-iron cylinder liner — a light body with an iron sleeve exactly where the piston rubs, where the friction lives, where things wear out. The engineering logic is impeccable: put the heavy, durable material only where heavy and durable is required, and make everything else light. It is also, if you are inclined to read machines as portraits of the people who commission them, a fair description of a certain kind of executive.
That same year the model numbering changed. The old letter series — A, B, K, Z, the alphabetical family tree of the 1930s — gave way to six-digit numbers that encoded displacement and configuration. The 60100 horizontal-shaft engine went into production in 1958. It would remain in production until 1991. The 80100 ran from 1958 to 1977. The 80200, introduced in 1960, ran until 1991.
Thirty-three years for a single engine design. Most of the people who bought the last 60100s had not been born when the first ones came off the line.
An Extra Hump on the Intake Lobe
The innovations of Coughlin's later tenure share a quality: they are almost all invisible, and they are almost all about making the machine easier to live with.
In 1961 the company introduced Easy-Spin starting. The problem it solved was one every owner of a small engine knows in the shoulder: the resistance of compression when you yank the starter rope. The solution was a compression release, "implemented as an extra hump on the intake lobe of the camshaft." As the engine turned over slowly during a pull, that small additional bump held the intake valve open a fraction longer, bleeding off some of the compression, so the rope came easier. Once the engine fired and spun up to speed, the hump stopped mattering. Nobody who used it ever saw it. It lived inside the crankcase, cast into a shaft, doing its small mercy on every pull.
In 1963 the gold logo was redrawn. The new version added the horsepower rating in the white field and, notably, eliminated the patent numbers from the bottom of the mast. Some engines kept the old logo until 1977. The company no longer felt the need to advertise, on the decal itself, the legal proofs of its ingenuity.
In 1966 came the Synchro-Balanced engine, designed to attenuate the vibration caused by the reciprocating mass of a single cylinder. A single-cylinder engine shakes; it is in its nature, a piston slamming up and down with nothing to oppose it. The Synchro-Balanced design added a series of counterweights opposing the crankpin, so that the shake was cancelled from within. Again: a fix to a problem the user felt in the hands and the forearms, accomplished in a place the user would never look.
And the long runs continued. The 233400 and 243400 cast-iron engines both went into production in 1965 and stayed there until 1991. The 326430 ran from 1972 to 1991. These were not products in the modern sense, with model years and planned obsolescence and a launch event. They were fixtures. A dealer in 1985 could still stock parts for an engine design from 1965, because the design was still being built.
None of this was the work of a revolutionary, and the record is honest enough to show where the company lagged. Its competitor Tecumseh had a capacitor discharge ignition on cast-iron engine models from 1968 and had made it standard on vertical-shaft mower engines by late 1976. A since-defunct competitor, Clinton Engines, commercialized a piezoelectric "Spark Pump" ignition with no breaker points in the early 1960s — Popular Science covered it in July 1961 under the headline "No coil, no points, no condenser." Briggs & Stratton's own solid-state Magnetron ignition did not arrive until 1982, a decade after Coughlin's departure and some five years after Tecumseh had made electronic ignition standard on mower engines.
So the house style was not to be first. It was to be right, at volume, for a long time. Clinton was first with breakerless ignition, and Clinton is the competitor the encyclopedia describes as "defunct."
There is a cost to that style, and it was about to come due.
Thirty Million Listeners
Before it did, it is worth returning, for a moment, to the priest.
Father Coughlin's career after 1936 is a story of a voice turning sour and then being shut off. The sources assembled here do not follow it in detail, and it would be wrong to reach past them. What they do record is the arc of 1934 to 1936: from a radio audience estimated at 30 million and a journal with a million subscribers to a presidential candidate who could not crack 6.5 percent in the states where the audience was supposed to live. The voice had been everywhere. The votes were nowhere.
The engine man's arc ran the opposite way. In 1935 he was a name on an organizational chart at a company that had just been through six years of depression. By 1957 his company owned the lawn of the American suburb. By 1970 he was its chairman. In 1981, nine years after he left, Fortune ranked Briggs & Stratton No. 382 on its list of America's 500 largest companies. The Encyclopedia of Milwaukee calls the company, by the 1970s, "one of the country's leading producers of small engines." He had almost no audience at all, and he won nearly everything he contested.
The comparison is unfair to both of them, which is part of its usefulness. Father Coughlin was not trying to build engines, and Charles L. Coughlin was not trying to remake the American monetary system. But both lived in the same Great Lakes industrial country in the same Depression, both were asked by the same moment what the ordinary working family needed, and both answered with the same word. Power. One meant it as politics. One meant it as horsepower. The radio priest's National Union declared that power and light were too important to be left to private individuals. The engine company's own branding, decades later, would settle on a phrase that sounds, in this light, almost like a reply: The Power Within.
The centennial history that introduced the slogan defined its audience as "people who have a can-do spirit, get satisfaction from a job well done, and pass their knowledge to the next generation." It does not mention Coughlin. It does not mention anyone after the founders, at least not in the portions that survive. But it describes him about as well as anything in the record.
What Happened After the Notice
The company that Coughlin handed off in the early 1970s had an identity so clear that its later failures can be measured against it. The Wikipedia entry on the company, describing a 1979 acquisition, uses a phrase that sounds like it was lifted from an internal memo: Briggs & Stratton's "acknowledged expertise in high volume, low cost production." That was the inheritance. Every deviation from it in the decades that followed tells you something about what it had been.
The first threat came from Japan. In 1977 the company introduced a twin-cylinder engine "as a means of competing with Briggs & Stratton's rivals, particularly Japanese firms like Honda who were cutting into traditional Briggs & Stratton markets by producing lawn mower engines (and later, complete lawn mowers)." The response was characteristic and, on its own terms, clever: the 16-horsepower twin sold for $228, which was $70 less than the company's own single-cylinder cast-iron engine of the same rating. Fight the newcomer on price and volume. Do what you know.
Then, in 1979, the company did something it did not know. On May 29, 1979, it completed the acquisition of Farymann Diesel GmbH of Lampertheim, near Mannheim in Germany — the first foreign acquisition in the company's history. It was, in the encyclopedia's words, "a poor fit." The air-cooled diesel market was low-volume and highly customized, and Briggs & Stratton "never understood" it. It considered buying Italy's Lombardini to deepen the bet, tried and failed to develop its own designs, and finally "accepted defeat," selling the company in 1984 to a private investor "for a minimal amount to avoid further liabilities." The energy crisis that had made diesel look like the future never changed American buyers' preference for gasoline.
That same year, at the tail end of the energy crisis, the company built a concept car. "The Hybrid," designed by the industrial designer Brooks Stevens, was a six-wheeled gasoline-electric automobile powered by the company's 16-horsepower twin and a large bank of 6-volt lead-acid batteries, with an extra rear axle added just to carry their weight. It was, by the encyclopedia's account, the first gasoline-electric hybrid concept car. It went nowhere commercially. It is a lovely object, and a strange echo of 1919: a company whose genius was the heart of the vehicle, once again building the whole vehicle, once again not keeping it.
The Japanese answer came next, and it was alliance. In December 1986 construction began on a 57,000-square-foot plant in Shiga Prefecture, about fifty miles from Osaka, for Daihatsu Briggs & Stratton, a 50/50 joint venture with the Toyota subsidiary. It was finished in April 1987 and built Vanguard-brand V-twin engines. The Vanguard single-cylinders, built first at Menomonee Falls, Wisconsin, sold poorly; the company moved them to Mitsubishi Heavy Industries in Tokyo under an arrangement that split marketing rights by region and set the two partners competing head to head under different brand names everywhere else. The friction, plus escalating production costs in Japan, killed it. In May 1987 the company signed a ten-year contract with Komatsu Zenoah of Tachikawa to supply a 2-cycle, 4-horsepower engine for resale. Fred Stratton — Frederick Jr., grandson of the founder, chairman until 2001 — later summarized that one in a sentence of perfect Midwestern economy:
— Frederick P. Stratton Jr., quoted in Jeffrey L. Rodengen, *The Legend of Briggs & Stratton* (1995)This venture was not successful, because the rising price of the yen made the engine too expensive in the U.S.
And then the final inversion. In 1995 the company sold its automotive component business, which became Strattec Security Corporation — the starter switches and locks that had once been most of the company, gone. In 2000 it bought a consumer generator business and formed Briggs & Stratton Power Products. In 2004 Murray, Inc., one of its largest customers, collapsed owing the company $40 million; to minimize the loss, Briggs & Stratton bought Murray's name, marketing rights, and product designs. In 2004 and 2005 it added Simplicity Manufacturing and Snapper. In 2008 it agreed to buy Australia's Victa lawn care business for A$23 million.
The centennial history celebrated this as reinvention: "Now, instead of solely manufacturing air-cooled gasoline engines for the outdoor power equipment industry, Briggs & Stratton produces generators, pressure washers, pumps, walk-behind and riding lawn mowers, trimmers, hedgers, and more." The company that had won the twentieth century by being the heart inside other companies' machines was now building the machines — the mowers — itself, which meant competing with the very manufacturers who bought its engines.
One can debate how much any of this caused what followed; the sources do not settle it, and it would be glib to pretend they do. The facts are these. In 2019 the company announced it would close its engine factory in Murray, Kentucky, consolidating production in Poplar Bluff, Missouri. On July 20, 2020, Briggs & Stratton filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. KPS Capital Partners bought a majority stake for $550 million. When the sale closed in September, the $900 million the company owed going into bankruptcy was waived.
The company still exists, privately owned, headquartered in Wauwatosa. It still builds millions of engines. Its logo still carries the old masthead shape — the diamond split by a banner that first appeared around 1934, a year before Coughlin took over.
Made in U.S.A.
There is a Marquette University building in Milwaukee called Coughlin Hall. The campus map lists it without saying which Coughlin, and the record at hand cannot settle the question. It would be a satisfying detail if it were his. It would be a satisfying irony if it were somebody else's. It is, for now, neither — just a name on a building in the city where he worked, which is roughly the condition of his whole reputation.
What can be settled is what he left inside the machines.
Find, in a barn or a garage or a used-equipment lot anywhere in the country, a Briggs & Stratton engine built between 1961 and the early 1980s. The gold or the red-white-and-blue decal on the shroud will say BRIGGS & STRATTON, and below it, the city: MILWAUKEE, WIS., U.S.A. It will not say Coughlin. Nothing on it will.
Wrap the starter rope around your hand and pull. Somewhere inside the crankcase, out of sight, on the intake lobe of the camshaft, an extra hump of cast metal will lift the valve for a fraction of a revolution, and the compression will bleed away, and the rope will come easier than it has any right to.
Part IIThe Playbook
What follows is an attempt to extract usable principles from a career that left almost no instructions. Coughlin wrote no memoir that the sources record, gave no quotable speeches, and appears in the national press, so far as the record shows, as a two-sentence personnel notice. The lessons have to be read off the artifacts — the model numbers, the production runs, the timing of material choices, the shape of the company he built and the shape of what happened when his successors departed from it. That is, in its way, the most Coughlin-like method available.
The principles
- 1.Be the heart, not the body.
- 2.Sell the private alternative while others argue about the public one.
- 3.Let the hardest customer teach you the material.
- 4.Hold the capability until the market arrives at it.
- 5.Move the whole company when the signal is clear.
- 6.Spend your engineering where the user feels it and never sees it.
- 7.Put iron only where the friction lives.
- 8.Build designs meant to outlive their designers.
- 9.Choose to be late — and know exactly what it costs.
- 10.Name your genius narrowly, and refuse the adjacent markets that flatter you.
- 11.Run a company that carries other people's names.
- 12.Prefer customers to audiences.
Principle 1
Be the heart, not the body
The decisive move in the company's prehistory came in 1925, when Briggs & Stratton sold the rights to the Flyer — a car that had earned a place in the record books as the cheapest ever sold — and kept the motor wheel's engine. It is a decision that runs against every instinct of an ambitious manufacturer. The vehicle is the visible thing, the thing with a name and a price tag and a picture in the newspaper. The engine is a component.
But a component sold into many bodies is a different business from a body sold to one buyer at a time. The engine could go into bicycles, reel mowers, washing machines, generators, tillers, garden tractors, gun-mount power units, and, later, nearly every rotary mower in the postwar suburb. Every new application was a new customer who did the work of designing, marketing, and distributing the end product. Coughlin's thirty-five years were an extended exercise in staying in that position — deepening the engine, widening its uses, and leaving the bodies to others.
The evidence for the principle's power is the 80 percent of orders the aluminum engine captured by 1957 without the company owning a single mower brand. The evidence for its fragility is what came after: the 2004 purchase of Murray's brands after the customer collapsed owing $40 million, the move into complete mowers through Simplicity and Snapper, and a company that ended up competing with the manufacturers it supplied.
Tactic: Before building the end product, ask whether you would own more of the market by becoming the indispensable part inside everyone else's version of it.
Principle 2
Sell the private alternative while others argue about the public one
In 1936, the year a famous radio priest with nearly the same name was campaigning to nationalize power and light as public necessities, Coughlin's company was selling the PC-200 Power Charger — a gasoline engine and generator set a household could own outright. The Washing Machine engines, the WM and WMI, sold through 1941 to families who could not wait for a power line.
This is not a political argument; public electrification eventually reached the countryside, and should have. It is a commercial observation about timing. When a large population is waiting for an institution to solve its problem, there is a window — sometimes years long — in which a small, private, immediately available solution is worth a great deal. The public argument generates the demand. The private product captures it.
The Depression catalog reads like a list of everything a household might do without the grid. That is a product strategy, not an accident.
Tactic: When a debate about a big public fix is raging, look for the people who need the problem solved this year and sell them something they can own.
Principle 3
Let the hardest customer teach you the material
The FJ-1, built from 1929 to 1937, used aluminum parts and was sold exclusively for military generators. The civilian version was cast iron. During the Second World War the company powered front-line generators and the M33 and M45 multiple gun mounts, and its ignition systems went into aircraft. The company's own history is explicit that pre-war aluminum engines "helped the company develop its expertise in using this material."
Military customers will pay for things civilian markets will not — lighter, more reliable, more precisely made — and they demand capabilities that would be uneconomical to develop on spec. A company that treats those contracts only as revenue misses their real value. Coughlin's company came out of the war knowing how to cast and machine a strategic metal at scale, a skill it would turn on the American lawn within eight years.
⚙
The Aluminum Arc
How a military material became a civilian monopoly in the order book.
1929
FJ-1 introduced with aluminum parts, sold exclusively for military generators.
1935
Coughlin becomes president, per the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee.
1938–44
PC-300 power chargers serve as generators for the M33 multiple gun mount.
1943
PC-304 powers the M45 multiple gun mount.
1953
Lightweight aluminum engine introduced for rotary lawn mowers.
1957
Aluminum engine accounts for nearly 80% of all product orders.
1958
Kool-Bore (all aluminum) and Sleeve-Bore (iron-lined) versions introduced.
Tactic: Take the demanding contract not for its margin but for the capability it forces you to build — then ask where that capability will be worth ten times as much.
Principle 4
Hold the capability until the market arrives at it
The company knew aluminum by the 1930s. It did not launch a lightweight consumer engine until 1953. The gap is the lesson.
A lightweight engine in 1938 would have been a solution looking for a problem — rural customers bolting engines to stationary washing machines and generators did not much care about a few pounds. The problem arrived with the postwar suburb: millions of small lawns, rotary mowers that had to be pushed by hand, homeowners who were not farmhands. Only then did weight become the decisive variable, and only then did the company deploy what it had been sitting on.
Much of the art of executive judgment is not invention but release timing. The capability was ready long before the market was. Coughlin's company waited, and when it moved, it moved with a product so precisely fitted to the moment that it took most of the order book within four years.
Tactic: Keep an inventory of capabilities you have that the market does not yet value, and watch for the demographic or technological shift that will suddenly make one of them essential.
Principle 5
Move the whole company when the signal is clear
Nearly 80 percent of orders, four years after launch. That number is a measure of customer enthusiasm, but it is also a measure of internal will: a cast-iron engine company had to retool, retrain, and resupply itself fast enough to fill those orders. By 1958 it had refined the product into two variants and overhauled the model numbering to match. The letter series of the 1930s and 1940s — the alphabetical family of A's and B's and K's — gave way to the six-digit system that would carry the company for decades.
Incumbents usually fail at transitions not because they miss the signal but because they hedge it — keeping the old line at full strength while dabbling in the new. The aluminum shift suggests a management that, once convinced, let the new product take over the company.
Tactic: When the evidence that a new product is the business becomes overwhelming, stop protecting the old one and reorganize around the new one within a single planning cycle.
Principle 6
Spend your engineering where the user feels it and never sees it
Easy-Spin, 1961: an extra hump on the intake lobe of the camshaft that made the starter rope easier to pull. Synchro-Balanced, 1966: counterweights opposing the crankpin to cancel the shake of a single cylinder. Neither could be seen. Both could be felt in the shoulder and the forearm by every person who used the engine.
These are the innovations of a company that understood its real product was the experience of the end user, even though it never sold to that user directly. The mower maker's customer did not know what a camshaft was. She knew that this mower started on the second pull. That knowledge accrued, invisibly, to the engine's reputation — which is why the engine's name, not the mower maker's, ended up as the brand people asked for.
There is a coda that sharpens the point. When a 1982 federal safety rule forced mower makers to add flywheel brakes, the Easy-Spin design made braked engines unacceptably hard to restart, and engineers had to move the hump to the exhaust valve at a cost in performance. Invisible engineering is still engineering; it has to be maintained against every new constraint.
Tactic: Find the moment of friction your end user experiences most often — even if they are not your customer — and eliminate it inside the product rather than explaining it in the manual.
Principle 7
Put iron only where the friction lives
The 1958 Sleeve-Bore engine was aluminum everywhere except the cylinder, which got a cast-iron liner. Light where lightness mattered; durable precisely where the piston wore against the wall. The all-aluminum Kool-Bore existed alongside it for applications that could tolerate it.
It is a design principle that generalizes cleanly to organizations. Most of an operation should be light, cheap, and flexible. A few points — the places where wear concentrates, where failure is expensive, where the customer's trust is actually decided — deserve heavy, expensive, durable investment. Companies that make everything heavy become slow and costly. Companies that make everything light fail at the points of friction.
◎
Kool-Bore vs. Sleeve-Bore
Two answers to the same design question, introduced side by side in 1958.
| Design | Construction | Underlying logic |
|---|---|---|
| Kool-Bore | All aluminum | Light Maximum weight savings where duty is modest. |
| Sleeve-Bore | Aluminum with cast-iron cylinder liner | Hybrid Durable material only at the wear surface. |
| Organizational analogue | Lean structure, concentrated investment | Apply Spend heavily only where friction and failure concentrate. |
Tactic: Map the three or four places in your operation where wear and failure concentrate, invest heavily there, and keep everything else ruthlessly light.
Principle 8
Build designs meant to outlive their designers
The 60100 engine was built from 1958 to 1991. The 233400 and 243400 from 1965 to 1991. The 326430 from 1972 to 1991. These are production runs measured in generations. A dealer could stock parts for decades; a repairman could learn one engine and fix it for a career. Long after the company stopped printing "4 CYCLE ENGINE" on its masthead, it kept separate red and black panels reading "ORIGINAL" and "SERVICE PARTS" until 1989 — the parts business made visible on the logo.
Durability of design creates a second economy around the product: service, parts, repair knowledge, used-equipment value. It also builds a kind of trust that model-year churn cannot. The owner of a Briggs & Stratton engine in 1980 knew that the company would still make the parts in 1990, because it was still making the engine.
Tactic: For your core product, resist the temptation to redesign on a fixed calendar; instead, design once for decades and build a service and parts business around that stability.
Principle 9
Choose to be late — and know exactly what it costs
The record is clear that the company was not first on electronic ignition. Clinton Engines had a breakerless piezo ignition in the early 1960s. Tecumseh had capacitor discharge ignition from 1968 and made it standard on mower engines in late 1976. Briggs & Stratton's Magnetron came in 1982.
Being second can be a strategy: let others debug the technology, then arrive with a version that works at volume and price. Clinton was first, and Clinton is defunct. But the same conservatism that served the company against domestic rivals left it exposed to a different kind of competitor. By 1977 Honda was cutting into traditional markets, first with engines and then with complete mowers. A company built to be the reliable, unhurried incumbent found itself answering a faster challenger, and spent the following decade in joint ventures with Daihatsu, Mitsubishi, and Komatsu Zenoah trying to borrow speed it had not built.
⏱
First, Second, and Late
Ignition technology timeline across competitors, as recorded.
| Company | Breakerless ignition | Outcome |
|---|---|---|
| Clinton Engines | Piezo "Spark Pump," early 1960s | Defunct |
| Tecumseh | CD ignition from 1968; standard on mower engines late 1976 | Early mover |
| Briggs & Stratton | Magnetron, 1982; retrofittable to engines back to 1963 | Late, at scale |
Note the detail in the last row: Magnetron was made available as a retrofit for engines built since 1963. Late, but backward-compatible across two decades of installed base. That is the incumbent's version of innovation, and it has real value.
Tactic: If you choose to follow rather than lead on a technology, make your late version retrofit to your entire installed base — and set a hard trigger for when a faster competitor's progress forces you to stop waiting.
Principle 10
Name your genius narrowly, and refuse the adjacent markets that flatter you
When Briggs & Stratton bought Farymann Diesel in 1979 — its first foreign acquisition — the encyclopedia's verdict was that it was "a poor fit with the company's acknowledged expertise in high volume, low cost production." The diesel market was low-volume and customized. The company never understood it, considered doubling down with Lombardini, failed to develop its own designs, and sold out in 1984 "for a minimal amount to avoid further liabilities."
The phrase "high volume, low cost production" is the clearest surviving statement of what the company had become under Coughlin. It is also a boundary. Diesel engines are engines; they look like an adjacent market. But adjacency of product is not adjacency of capability. A company that excels at making millions of identical units cheaply has almost nothing to teach it about making a few thousand customized ones, and almost everything to unlearn.
Tactic: Write down, in one phrase, the operating capability that actually makes you win — not the product category — and reject any expansion that requires a different capability, however similar the product looks.
Principle 11
Run a company that carries other people's names
The name on the engine belonged to a grain merchant who spent most of his time at the Stratton Grain Company and an engineer who left to build Outboard Marine. The man who ran the company for three and a half decades never put his name on anything the customer touched. Even his title is hard to pin down in the record; the encyclopedias disagree about who held the chairman's seat, and the dates of his presidency differ by two years depending on the source.
This is a career model worth taking seriously. The professional manager who runs a founder-named company without trying to rename it — without the memoir, the cover story, the personal brand — gives up a great deal of public credit. What he gains is the ability to make long-horizon decisions without performing them, and an organization whose identity does not depend on his presence. The company that Coughlin ran did not need him to be famous. It needed the camshaft to have the extra hump on it.
C
Two Charles Coughlins, Two Kinds of Power
The radio priest and the engine executive, set side by side.
| Dimension | Fr. Charles E. Coughlin | Charles L. Coughlin |
|---|---|---|
| Base | Industrial suburb near Detroit | Milwaukee, Wisconsin |
| Pivotal year | 1934–35: National Union of Social Justice; talks with Long | 1935: becomes president of Briggs & Stratton |
| Reach | Estimated 30 million listeners; 1 million journal circulation | A two-sentence notice in the Times, page 74 |
| Idea of "power" | Nationalize power and light | Sell private power chargers and generator sets |
| Measured result | 882,479 votes for his coalition's candidate, 1936 | ~80% of orders from one product, 1957 |
Tactic: If you inherit an institution named for someone else, resist the urge to make it yours in public; make it yours in the decisions no one outside will ever notice.
Principle 12
Prefer customers to audiences
The contrast between the two Coughlins is, at bottom, the contrast between an audience and a customer base. Thirty million people listened to the priest; fewer than nine hundred thousand voted for his candidate. An audience is attention without commitment. A customer — especially an industrial customer buying engines by the thousands for its own products — is commitment with very little attention. Mower makers did not tune in to hear Briggs & Stratton. They placed orders.
The modern operator is surrounded by incentives to build an audience: followers, subscribers, impressions. Coughlin's career is a reminder that the measure of a business is what people pay for repeatedly, not what they listen to occasionally. The engine company never had a broadcast. It had a parts catalog that ran for decades.
Tactic: When forced to choose between growing attention and deepening commitment from paying customers, choose commitment — and measure yourself by repeat orders, not reach.
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Part IIIQuotes and Maxims
In their words
Charles L. Coughlin left no quotations in the record available for this profile. What survives instead are the words of the institutions and people around him — the college that trained the company's founding engineer, the newspaper that noted his promotion, the family whose name he ran, the company that outlived him — and, for contrast, the man who shared his name.
— Division of Engineering, South Dakota State College, *70 Years of Engineering 1884–1951* (1955)They did see the need of their day, they did have dreams for meeting that need, and they did take action to bring those dreams into reality.
— Briggs & Stratton, centennial history, describing its customersPeople who have a can-do spirit, get satisfaction from a job well done, and pass their knowledge to the next generation.
— Fr. Charles E. Coughlin, principles of the National Union of Social Justice (1934) — the other Charles CoughlinI believe that every citizen willing to work and capable of working shall receive a just and living annual wage which will enable him to maintain and educate his family according to the standards of American decency.
Maxims
- Build the heart. The component that goes into everyone's machine outlasts any single machine it goes into.
- Sell what can be owned now. While others argue about who should provide power, ship a crate that provides it this afternoon.
- Learn from the hardest buyer. Demanding customers teach you materials and methods you can later sell to everyone.
- Release on the market's clock. A capability held for fifteen years can capture four-fifths of the business in four.
- Hide the mercy inside. The best improvements are felt in the user's arm and never seen by the user's eye.
- Iron only where it wears. Make everything light except the surfaces where friction actually lives.
- Design for decades. An engine built for thirty-three years builds a parts economy and a reputation no model year can.
- Be late on purpose, not by habit. Following is a strategy only if you know the trigger that ends it.
- Know your one phrase. "High volume, low cost production" was a capability and a boundary; crossing it cost the company its first foreign acquisition.
- Prefer orders to applause. Thirty million listeners produced 882,479 votes; a quiet catalog produced the American lawn.
