The AirBoss Rubber Compounding / Former Dominion Tire (Uniroyal Goodrich) Plant
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| AirBoss Rubber Compounding - a Doors Open tour group; photo by Stefan A. Rose |
During Doors Open Waterloo Region 2011, Saturday, September 17, Plant Manager Steve Barefoot led ten guided tours through the historic plant of AirBoss Kitchener. The tours were popular and fully registered, and visitors seemed very interested to see inside this enormous manufacturing facility where public access usually is, for practical reasons, tightly restricted.
Visitors were not permitted to take interior photos, but AirBoss allowed Stefan Rose, our Doors Open Waterloo Region 2011 volunteer photographer, to photograph certain areas within the plant. The manufacturing equipment, however, was off limits.
Established in 1996, AirBoss Kitchener is the largest independent rubber-mixing facility in North America. The plant operates around the clock and has a work area of one million square feet.
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| AirBoss Rubber Compounding - 1914 facade; photo by Stefan A. Rose |
The approximately 260 employees at AirBoss Kitchener operate four mixer lines to make 180 million pounds of rubber per year for manufacturers of automotive, transportation, military, appliance and recreational products, chemical/biological and nuclear protective gear, pneumatic tires, solid tires, off-road tire re-treading products, hose, rollers, seals, a variety of molded products, and conveyor belting for mining applications. The company also engineers and molds products in-house for various markets, as well as for its own protective-wear designs.
AirBoss Kitchener makes both natural and synthetic rubber compounds to suit manufacturer requirements, and maintains a product development and testing laboratory on site. Stringent control systems test and verify processes and materials throughout the manufacturing cycle.
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| AirBoss Rubber Compounding - tonnes of finished rubber; photo by Stefan A. Rose |
Doors Open visitors were able to see the manufacturing process up close, from the rubber mixing machines to the quality control and R&D lab, and Steve Barefoot, along with other AirBoss employees, provided a detailed summary of the business, showing everything from “bricks” of raw rubber to stacks upon stacks of finished rubber to a sampling of manufactured products made from AirBoss rubber.
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| AirBoss Rubber Compounding; photo by Stefan A. Rose |
At AirBoss there are two master-batch mixer lines and two finishing mixer lines. Mixing begins with raw materials such as carbon black, and solid natural or synthetic rubber. Before loading into a master-batch mixer, the carbon black, chemicals and oils are precisely weighed, and the base polymers are screened for metals and other impurities. After mixing, the batch is milled and passed through a soap bath and an automated cooling process. The rubber comes off the equipment as a continuous strip, and is piled and further processed in one of the finishing mixers.
Doors Open visitors had a look at Mixer 1, the largest mixing line in the plant. Its six silos can each store up to 100,000 pounds of carbon black. This makes possible very large batch sizes, long production runs and a high consistency of product from one batch to the next.
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| AirBoss Rubber Compounding - walking alongside mixing line #1; photo by Stefan A. Rose |
The AirBoss Kitchener plant meets or exceeds all federal, provincial and municipal emissions guidelines, and equipment added in 2007 improved emissions even further. The company is also committed to minimizing the waste it sends to landfill, and achieved a 95% recycling rate in 2010. Scrap rubber, the main waste material, is sent overseas where it is re-purposed for footwear and other items. Wood, metal and glass are recycled, and all packaging is compacted and recycled.
The large central section of the AirBoss Kitchener plant was completed in 1914 as the Canadian Consolidated Rubber Company’s Dominion Tire plant.
A Local Industry Since 1900
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| Talmon Rieder; photo from Waterloo Historical Society/ Kitchener Public Library |
Leather, furniture, felt, button and clothing manufacturers accounted for much of the growing industrial economy in Berlin (renamed Kitchener in 1916) when the Berlin Rubber Company began making boots in its factory – the first rubber factory in town – in 1900.
The new industry grew quickly; by 1904 one of Berlin Rubber’s principals, Jacob Kaufman, together with Talmon Rieder (its bookkeeper), established a second business, the Merchant’s Rubber Company, at Breithaupt and King Streets.
Kaufman soon founded the town’s third rubber footwear company, at King and Victoria Streets, in 1907, the same year Montreal’s Canadian Consolidated Rubber (CCR) bought Berlin Rubber and Merchant’s.
Talmon Rieder stayed on with CCR, and while climbing the company ladder in Montreal he remained a Berlin booster. In fact, when CCR began plans to build a factory to satisfy a growing market for automobile tires, Rieder lobbied hard to have it built in Berlin.
The Dominion Tire (Uniroyal Goodrich) Plant
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| The original Kaufman Rubber Co. factory, designed by Albert Kahn; from Berlin, Canada: A Self-portrait of Kitchener, Ontario before World War One |
Talmon Rieder stayed on with CCR, and while climbing the company ladder in Montreal he remained a Berlin booster. In fact, when CCR began plans to build a factory to satisfy a growing market for automobile tires, Rieder lobbied hard to have it built in Berlin.
The Dominion Tire (Uniroyal Goodrich) Plant
Spirits ran high in Berlin in 1912. That year the town officially became a city, and public celebrations marked the occasion. Two years earlier, a proud Berlin had become the first Ontario municipality to receive publicly owned hydroelectricity generated at Niagara Falls. Thousands of citizens packed the local auditorium to see the ceremonial switching-on of thousands of incandescent bulbs draped along King Street. And so when CCR chose Berlin over Montreal, Hamilton, Guelph, London and Windsor (all were under consideration) as the site of its new tire factory, perhaps it seemed fitting to Berliners.
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| Niagara Hydroelectricity comes to Berlin (Kitchener), October 1910; photo from Waterloo Historical Society/Kitchener Public Library |
But the fledgling city had even more going for it: Berlin proposed a bylaw that offered CCR a generous tax incentive and cash bonus package if the company would build its Dominion Tire plant there.
The most energetic supporters of the deal, among them the Berlin Board of Trade and Talmon Rieder, waged a public campaign in the summer of 1912 to sway popular opinion in favour of the bylaw. Meanwhile, some other things that made Berlin attractive to CCR included a ready industrial workforce, a geographic location close to customers and suppliers, and a growing hydroelectric infrastructure. Local newspapers soon threw their support behind the proposal, and the bylaw was put to a public vote.
July 10, 1912, the day before the vote, the front page of the Berlin News Record showed a rendering of the proposed factory under the headlines, “The Prize Berlin Can Win”, and “All Together! Yo! Heave!”. The newspaper listed polling stations and called on Berliners to do their duty (“A Vote for the By-law To-morrow Means Making Berlin the Center of the Rubber Industry of Canada”).
It worked – the “bonus bylaw” was approved. CCR bought fifty acres on Strange Street and built its $1 million Dominion Tire factory (which stands today at the center of the AirBoss complex). And although many such arrangements had been worked out between the city and its industrial firms in previous decades, the Dominion plan would prove to be the last.
The Dominion Tire factory opened in 1914 with about 300 workers, and the public was invited to inspect the new plant during an open house on February 16. The next day the Berlin News Record estimated more than 6,000 visitors and described the factory in detail, stating that it was “the largest building in Canada devoted to the manufacture of rubber tires for automobiles and bicycles.” By 1918, the number of employees had more than doubled at Dominion, and increased even further following building expansions in the 1920s.
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| The Berlin Daily Telegraph of January 13, 1913, ran yet another story predicting great things for the city, thanks to the Dominion Tire deal; microfilm from Kitchener Public Library |
The Dominion Tire factory opened in 1914 with about 300 workers, and the public was invited to inspect the new plant during an open house on February 16. The next day the Berlin News Record estimated more than 6,000 visitors and described the factory in detail, stating that it was “the largest building in Canada devoted to the manufacture of rubber tires for automobiles and bicycles.” By 1918, the number of employees had more than doubled at Dominion, and increased even further following building expansions in the 1920s.
See a terrific slide show of many more early images of the Dominion plant at Doors Open through the Photographer's Lens, the UW Library’s Doors Open Waterloo Region 2011 blog.
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The Dominion Tire factory, 1914. The location of the original photograph is
the Uniroyal Archives; from Elizabeth Bloomfield’s “Berlin’s Last Bonus: How Kitchener Became the Rubber Capital of Canada.”, Waterloo Historical Society 74 (1986). |
By the ‘30s, nearly one in three local industrial workers were employed in the rubber industry.
Tires were manufactured at the plant until the 1990s. At that time it was operated by Uniroyal Goodrich.
The Architect - Only the Best for Berlin
The Architect - Only the Best for Berlin
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| Ford plant, Highland Park, Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn |
In the first two decades of the twentieth century reinforced concrete construction was replacing earlier industrial building methods and materials, and transforming factory working conditions and production capabilities. As with other Kahn factories, the reinforced concrete design allowed the Dominion Tire plant to have an increased load-bearing capacity, improved fireproofing and waterproofing, a spacious, open floor plan, and very large window openings that allowed ample natural light to flood the interior. Light penetration was further aided by the narrow, long footprint. Today, much of the AirBoss plant interior remains roomy and open, punctuated by the enormous, original structural columns.
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| Albert Kahn |
Kahn designed everything from private homes to civic buildings, factories to skyscrapers, in North America and abroad, and he expressed a wide range of architectural styles expertly through his body of work. He designed relatively few buildings in Canada, but Berlin/Kitchener was fortunate to have two Kahn buildings built there, the other being the former Kaufman Rubber Co. complex (now Kaufman Lofts) at King and Victoria Streets.
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| The Fisher Building, Detroit, designed by Albert Kahn |
Kahn built many plants for the Ford Motor Co., including their big Highland Park plant in Detroit (photo above; where the moving assembly line made its debut in 1913, and to which the AirBoss/Dominion plant bears a resemblance). He is responsible for numerous iconic landmarks, especially in Michigan.
The Albert Kahn Family of Companies continues today as an architecture, engineering, design and planning firm.
Thanks to Susan Mavor at the Doris Lewis Rare Book Room, University of Waterloo Library, for her help and interest. For more historical information on local industrial firms, visit the excellent website created by Rare Book Room staff to coincide with their participation in Doors Open 2010: Doors Closed…Opened through Archives!
Much of the historical information in this article was found in:
Bloomfield, Elizabeth. “Berlin’s Last Bonus: How Kitchener Became the Rubber Capital of Canada.” Waterloo Historical Society 74 (1986): 6-22
Bloomfield, Gerald. “Albert Kahn and Canadian Industrial Architecture.” Society for the Study of Architecture in Canada (SSAC) Bulletin 4:35 (Dec. 1985): 4-10
by Karl Kessler, Doors Open Waterloo Region 2011
