In September 1901, Daniel Taft retired from Taft-Peirce and Herman Hollerith purchased the company for a syndicate of Boston and New York capitalists. The syndicate retained the name of the company and Edwin Peirce remained in charge.
Prior to 1914, Taft-Peirce produced sewing machines and did special order machine work for third parties. However, at the outbreak of the First World War, the company was one of the few in the country that could produce the tooling and gauges necessary for the increased wartime manufacturing that would soon come. Between 1914 and 1918, the company organized a special War Production Department to produce Type IV Shrapnel time fuses for the British and Russian governments, and also manufactured many aircraft parts for Gnome, Rolls Royce, and Liberty Motors.
The company would again turn its attention to the war effort during the Second World War. The company established a special division to manufacture the breech casing and hand grip for the Oerlikon 20mm antiaircraft gun through a contract with the British government and American Oerlikon Gazda Corporation. In addition to manufacturing these parts, Taft-Peirce designed and built all of the tooling to produce the parts and trained 500 workers to carry out the production. Among the many other pieces of war materiel that Taft-Peirce produced were precision valves for the Army Air Corps and radar equipment and torpedo parts for the Navy.
In April of 1943, Taft-Peirce’s efforts were recognized with the first of what would eventually number five Army-Navy Awards for excellence in war production.
<i>Images courtesy of the Woonsocket Historical Society</i>
