| Nye Lubricants, Inc. | |
| Products: | Synthetic Lubricants |
|---|---|
| Established: | 1844 |
| Number of Employees: | About 130 |
| Official Website: | Official Website |
Nye Lubricants, Inc. traces its origins back to 1844 in New Bedford, Massachusetts.[1] As the whaling industry’s epicenter, New Bedford proved a hot spot to start an oil and lubricant company.
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In 1840, William Foster Nye, barely 16 years old, left his family’s Cape Cod farm to carve his niche in the world of commerce. Before his death 70 years later, he would create a line of lubricating oils sought around the globe – and a company that still bears his name today. Apprentice to a master carpenter, Nye began his long career in New Bedford, Massachusetts. But he had a wanderlust to quench before settling into what would eventually become a lifelong pursuit. He left New Bedford to build organs in Boston, took to sea as a ship’s carpenter, worked at an ice house in Calcutta and went to California for the Gold Rush, where he built a profitable business as a stair builder after the San Francisco fire. He returned to New Bedford to start an oil and kerosene business, and then left to serve in the Union Army as a sutler, a traveling merchant – the first to set up shop in Richmond after the defeat of the Confederate Army.
In 1865, he returned again to New Bedford and the oil business, first out of the kitchen of his Fairhaven[2] home, then from a small store front in New Bedford. He sold a wide assortment of oils: burning oils, lubricating oils, even castor oil and salad oil. But the market niche he set out to capture was lubricating oils for delicate machinery: watches, clocks, chronometers, and later, sewing machines, typewriters, bicycles and electrical instruments. He capitalized on the work of New Bedford watch maker Ezra Kelley. Kelley discovered that oil from the jaw and head of the porpoise[3] and blackfish proved superior to any other known lubricant for delicate mechanisms, and his oil, which he began selling in 1844, had become a benchmark industry.
Nye became Kelley's chief competitor. He developed his own brand of “fish jaw oil,” but had to overcome strong market resistance to a new brand name. He started at the top. With the help of a trade journal publisher, he persuaded Cross and Beguelin, a leading manufacturer of watch and clock components in New York, to try his new formulation. Impressed with its quality, they adopted it as their own, and word about Nye's oil quickly spread throughout the industry. Within ten years, Nye had acquired Ezra Kelley's company and moved from his small, rented storefront to his own stone factory on Fish Island in New Bedford. Now he was well on his way to building a solid reputation for having “the best watch oil in the world.” In fact, you can even find samples of some of these oil bottles today, at the New Bedford Whaling Museum.[4]
William Foster Nye's company[5] is still in business today. Nye Lubricants, Inc is now owned by its third set of owners and can be found in William Nye's hometown of Fairhaven, Massachusetts.[6] They had originally bought the business only for the real estate, but then decided to rejuvenate the company after seeing its client list which included GE and IBM. They continued to obtain raw blackfish head oil from Newfoundland. Later, they formed new supply agreements with a fishing cooperative in the British West Indies, where natives still hunted blackfish for food.
They also saw the writing on the wall; the harvesting of ocean mammals was threatening their extinction. They also understood the technical advantages of the emerging synthetic oils and highly-refined mineral oils. In the early 1960s, more than a decade before the Marine Mammal Protection Act outlawed the importing of the company's traditional raw material, the new owners began the transition from porpoise oil to synthetic functional fluids.
Today, synthetic hydrocarbons, esters, polyglycols, silicones. polyphenyl and fluorinated ethers are the "raw materials" for Nye lubricants. But the tradition that began more than 150 years ago continues.
Nye's products are based on a range of synthetic chemistries, including polyalphaolefins, esters, glycols, polyphenylethers, silicones, alkylated naphthalenes, and all commercially-available perfluoropolyethers(PFPE). Nye is also the exclusive global reseller of Pennzane multiplyalkylated cyclopentane fluids, oils and greases.[7]
Nye Lubricants, Inc. formulates, manufactures, and sells synthetic lubricants, thermal coupling compounds, index-matching optical gels and fluids. Its headquarters are in Fairhaven, MA. Nye supplies different industries, including automotive, computer printer, disc drive, mobile appliance, aerospace, defense and HB-LED OEM markets. The company also manufactures industrial maintenance lubricants for incidental food contact, high temperature and other extreme environments.[8] Nye is a corporate member of the National Lubricating Grease Institute(NLGI), the Society of Tribologists and Lubrication Engineers (STLE) and the European Lubricating Grease Institute (ELGI).[9]