Ingersoll Rand

Ingersoll-Sergeant steam drill used in mining in the late 1800s

Ingersoll Rand air compressor

Simon Ingersoll founded Ingersoll Rock Drill Company in 1871 in New York, and in 1888, it combined with Sergeant Drill to form Ingersoll Sergeant Drill Company.

Also in 1871, brothers Addison Rand and Jasper Rand, Jr. established Rand Drill Company with its main manufacturing plant in Tarrytown, New York. Rand drills cleared New York's treacherous Hell Gate channel and were used in the construction of water aqueducts for New York City and Washington, D.C., and tunnels in Haverstraw and West Point, New York, and in Weehawken, New Jersey.

In 1905, Ingersoll-Sergeant Drill Company merged with the Rand Drill Company to form Ingersoll Rand.

In the 1920s, Ingersoll Rand supplied diesel engines for locomotives built by both General Electric and ALCO.[3]

Robert Gardner founded the Gardner Governor Company in 1859 in Quincy, Illinois and introduced the first effective speed controls for steam engines.[4] This innovation, known as the flyball governor, helped pave the way to later production of other industrial products such as air compressors. By the turn of the century, the company sold more than 150,000 governors across the United States and Canada.

The Gardner Governor Company merged with the Denver Rock Drill Company in1927 to form Gardner-Denver.

Gardner Denver grew during the early decades of the 1900s and transformed through acquisitions. In 1943, Gardner Denver was listed on the New York Stock Exchange for the first time.

In the late 1950s, merger negotiations with Dresser Industries yielded no agreement, and the same pattern then also occurred with Cooper-Bessemer. In 1979, Gardner Denver was acquired by C-B's successor, Cooper Industries Inc. In 1994, Cooper spun off the Gardner Denver Industrial Machinery Division as an independent company. Gardner Denver Inc traded on the New York Stock Exchange until it was acquired by private equity firm Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. L.P. in 2013. Gardner Denver returned to public ownership in 2017 through an initial public offering.

In April 2019, Ingersoll-Rand Plc and Gardner Denver Holdings, Inc. jointly announced an agreement through which Ingersoll Rand's Industrial segment would be spun-off and merged with Gardner Denver in a Reverse Morris Trust transaction. The merger transaction was completed on February 29, 2020.

When Gardner Denver completed its initial public offering in May 2017, it granted deferred stock units to substantially all permanent employees. The grant had a value of approximately $100 million.

Following the merger in 2020, the company granted stock units worth approximately $150 million to substantially of its 16,000 global employees that had not already received equity-based incentive awards. The amount of the equity grant, equal to approximately 20% of its employee's pay, was one of the largest equity grants ever given to employees in an industrial company.[5]