This year, 2002, Armstrong marks its 142nd anniversary. The Armstrong
experience stretches over more than half the life of the Republic; few American
business enterprises have endured as long, or with such continuing success.
When it all began in a tiny two-man cork-cutting shop in 1860 in Pittsburgh,
our national frontier barely reached beyond the western mountain ranges. Thomas
Armstrong's first deliveries of hand-carved corks were by wheelbarrow.
Today, five generations later, Armstrong is a worldwide family of 16,000
employees who manufacture and market hundreds
of branded products and services worldwide. Its
products include floor coverings and acoustical ceilings and grid systems.
Through its subsidiaries, Triangle Pacific Corp., the world's largest
manufacturer of hardwood flooring and a major producer of hardwood cabinets; and
DLW Aktiengesellschaft, the leading flooring manufacturer in Germany, Armstrong
now produces high-quality wood flooring and wooden kitchen and bath cabinets,
commercial carpet, and linoleum.
In the company's early days, Thomas Armstrong, the son of ordinary
Scotch-Irish immigrants from Londonderry, steered his struggling company through
the Civil War, financial panics, disastrous factory fires and a cutthroat
marketplace.
He succeeded because he relied upon a family credo of hard work and faith. He
attracted and held dedicated employees who shared the same values. He took pride
in the production and sale of quality products that bore his family name. And he
was determined that his company always act with fairness and in the
"balanced best interests (of) customers, stockholders, employees,
suppliers, community neighbors, government and the general public."
Armstrong was among the first American entrepreneurs to discard the old
business maxim of Caveat emptor-"Let the buyer beware"-and replace
it by practicing the principle of "Let the buyer have faith."
He was a brand-name pioneer, too, stamping "Armstrong" on each cork
as early as 1864. And soon he was tucking a written guarantee into the burlap
sacks of cork shipped from a big new factory on a Pittsburgh riverbank.
As buyer confidence in the Armstrong brand of product and service grew, so
did national sales. In the mid-1890s Armstrong emerged as the world's largest
cork company.
But at the turn of the century-the company already was 40 years old-cork
was being popped out of its old markets, and Armstrong added to the formula for
success the capacity to adapt to changing conditions while at the same time
sticking to the business it knew best.
The company found new uses for cork, first with insulating corkboard and
brick. Then, in 1906, it foresaw that the avenue to the future was laid with
linoleum. A new factory rose from a cornfield on the edge of Lancaster,
Pennsylvania, and in 1909, a year after Thomas Armstrong died, Armstrong
linoleum was first offered to the trade.
From that point, the company let one product use logically lead to another.
Corkboard led to fiberboard, fiberboard led to ceiling board, cork tile and
linoleum led to vinyl floors. Ceramic tile would be added later.
This natural progression of product development brought the company to its
position of leadership in its industry. Armstrong learned, through the traumas
of the 20th Century, to build on its traditional strengths, to diversify and
innovate, while following a market-minded, customer-oriented path.
Through it all, the company's leadership adhered to Thomas Armstrong's
central belief that his company's greatest asset was the people associated with
the business-its employees, its customers, its neighbors.
By devotion to the balanced best interest of all, Armstrong endured. Today
it's dynamically growing well into its second century of progress.
