The South Bend Washing Machine Empire that Never Was

Remembering the Whirlpool Corporation's surprising roots in a failed 1909 business venture

BY AARON HELMAN // POSTED OCTOBER 5, 2024

Armed with a war chest full of his dad's money and a handful of patents that he'd purchased from a friend, Eliot Churchill Williams boarded the eastbound train from Chicago. He passed by Gary, Michigan City, LaPorte, eventually stepping off the platform in South Bend, Indiana. This was his new home, and it was the place where he was planning to build an empire.

It was April 1909 when he arrived, and things moved in a flurry. He incorporated the E.C. Williams Manufacturing Company along with his dad, John, and his brother, David. The fourth man on the paperwork was William F. Blake, the inventor who'd secured the patents that seemed guaranteed to make the operation a success. E.C. Williams intended to create the first commercially viable electrically powered washing machine.

The four set up shop in the old Singer Factory on East Madison Street and filed incorporation documents in Indianapolis. They began with an initial capitalization of $65,000, equivalent to more than $2 million today. That's a lot of money, and it was mostly gone by the end of the first summer. E.C. Williams Manufacturing Company sold another $15,000 in stock that September and $15,000 more all over again on December 21.

It had been six months. E.C. Williams was yet to make a sale, and it was yet to build a functioning electric washing machine.

1910 was a do-or-die for the young company. It had received investments in the amount of $95,000 but was yet to make a dime in earnings. Investors weren't excited to pony up another round of capital, but Williams needed more money to keep his operation running. That's when the want ads started to run in the papers.

E.C. Williams ran ads soliciting machinists, foremen, and salesmen. There was a job waiting for them in South Bend, so long as they were sober and were good for an investment of anywhere from $500 - $2,000 depending on the position.

If that feels like a shady practice, it should. E.C. Williams Manufacturing Company created a pyramid scheme for itself, maybe without meaning to. Every month, it needed to hire more employee investors to pay for the ones they'd hired the month before. By October 1910, a year-and-a-half after its incorporation, the firm was sued by its landlord and placed into receivership. In November, after securing that massive capitalization and bringing in some unknown number of investment dollars from its employees, the E.C. Williams Manufacturing Company was declared to have a worth of $1,243.49.

In modern numbers, the company had turned $3.3 million into $43,000 in just 18 months.

It still didn't have a functioning washing machine, and now it was out of business.

The story wasn't quite over yet.

A young man named Louis Upton had begun his career as an insurance agent in 1903, but his love for all things electricity led him to a position at ComEd in Chicago. That's where he saw one of those want ads from E.C. Williams. Believing in the potential of the electric washing machine, Upton withdrew his $500 life savings and made the trip to South Bend. He became the head of sales for the E.C. Williams Manufacturing Company, an outfit that was hemorrhaging money and didn't even have a product to sell.

When the operation was shut down for good, Upton was out his $500. He never even received his last paycheck.

But maybe he got something better.

On Upton's way out the door and on his way out of South Bend forever, E.C. Williams and William Blake allowed him ownership of one of their failed patents as a parting gift. It was No. 784,541, a design for a specific type of wringer-washer.

Louis Upton trudged back home, unemployed and broke. He begged his way back into his old job at ComEd, then delivered the Blake patent to his uncle Emory, a mechanic in Benton Harbor, Michigan. Emory figured out the riddle in a few months. The Uptons patented a power-transmitting device in January 1911 and were shipping machines by the end of that year.

They'd done in 10 months what E.C. Williams hadn't done in two years, and they'd done it with an initial investment of just $5,000. The Uptons incorporated the Upton Machine Company, the first company to make the first commercially viable electric washing machine. Louis would become a millionaire several times over. Not bad for a former insurance agent.

You might not have heard of Upton Machine, but you've probably heard of what it became. Today's Whirlpool Corporation came directly from those roots, employs 59,000, and saw more than $19 billion in revenue last year.

As for E.C. Williams, he returned to Chicago in the wake of his company's failure. He became an insurance agent.