Content area
Full text
Amtrol's Founder And An Industry Pioneer
Chester Kirk (Chet to all who knew him) had a saying: "Just being different isn't innovative. Being right is." In an industry that traces its history back to innovators such as Samuel Gold, John Mills, Joseph Nason and James Walworth, Chet Kirk made his mark by living by that one simple rule. The inventor of the pre-pressurized diaphragm expansion tank and founder of Amtrol, today a $175 million company, always searched for a way to be right.
An engineer by training and temperament, Chet started with little more than the knowledge gained during his college years at the University of Rhode Island. After a brief career with a hydronics manufacturer, Kirk set out to realize his own dream. In 1946 in a shed in his own backyard in Cranston, IR.I., Kirk founded American Tube Products.
His first products were tankless water heaters, fittings for plumbing systems and antennas for a new contraption called television. Success was swift, and soon Kirk moved from his backyard shed to fancier digs - a manufacturing plant that shared a building with a second-floor roller-skating rink.
Despite - or maybe because of - the constant din from the skaters overhead,...