The need to develop a better product has been at the core of Formica since its inception in 1912.

At that time, powerful, new electrical equipment of the Industrial Age demanded tougher, lighter, less costly insulators.

A young engineer had an idea that was pretty straightforward: take fabric, coat it with resin while it winds on a spindle into the shape of a tube, slit the tube lengthwise, unroll it, press it flat and then cure it. The result was a laminated plastic material that was tough, light and an excellent electrical insulator. It was easy to see the commercial potential of this new material.

That engineer’s name was Dan J. O'Conor. He was just 31 years old, and he worked for Westinghouse in Pittsburgh as head of the process section of the research engineering department. One of O'Conor's friends at Westinghouse was Herbert A. Faber, 30, the manager of insulating-material sales. Faber's engineering training at the University of Cincinnati gave him a technical appreciation of O'Conor's new insulating material.

O'Conor filed for a patent in February of 1913. His immediate reward was one dollar – the price Westinghouse paid for rights to employees' inventions. Faber knew of customers eager to buy such material, but Westinghouse wouldn't let him sell it except to licensed Westinghouse distributors.

Within weeks, O'Conor and Faber quit Westinghouse to start their own insulator business. O'Conor sought investors. They found what they needed in Walton, Ky., where a lawyer-banker named John G. Tomlin agreed to put up $7,500. He became a silent partner. O'Conor and Faber ran the business.

The material commonly used in those days for electrical insulation was mica. The new product was a substitute “for mica,” so that's what Faber named their new company. (He had no idea that 75 years later, applied to an altogether different product, Formica would be one of the world's 10 best-known brand names.)

They began operating on May 2, 1913, filling an order for V-rings for electric motors from Chalmers Motor Company. By September, Formica had 18 employees making parts for Bell Electric Motor, Ideal Electric and Northwest Electric, the predecessor to Delco. And in that first year, their problem wasn't a lack of business; it was keeping up with demand.

That same year, they renamed themselves The Formica Insulation Company. As president and treasurer, Faber ran the business side. O'Conor, as vice president and secretary, handled the technical and manufacturing end as well as sales. This successful arrangement would endure to 1935.

But their success drew the attention of giants. Before the end of 1913, Westinghouse was also making plastic laminates. Both companies bought their resin from the Bakelite Company, which soon licensed only its big, new customer, Westinghouse, to make profitable sheet laminate. Little Formica would be limited to tubes and rings. Faber and O'Conor had to find a new resin process. They settled on one using "Redmanol," a resin developed in Chicago by a Canadian chemist named L. V. Redman, with backing from two brothers named Sam and Adolph Karpen.

Free to produce sheet laminate, Formica rented a plant at Spring Grove Avenue and Alabama Street, not far from the Cincinnati stockyard, and installed a new $6,000 press. Redman himself came from Chicago to help them learn to work with his resin. The first Formica-brand sheet laminate came off the press on July 4, 1914, a little more than a year after the company started in business. Formica turned a profit for the first time in 1916, then boomed with defense orders in 1917 when the United States entered the war in Europe. The Navy and Signal Corps needed insulators for their new radios. Formica made them. Aircraft makers needed lightweight pulleys for control cables. Formica made them. Sales went from $75,000 in 1917 to $145,000 in 1918.

After the war, growth continued unabated. Sales hit $175,000 in 1919. These strong sales, combined with growth potential, meant another new plant, farther out along Cincinnati's Spring Grove Avenue, in Winton Place. The site included a two-story office building and space for expansion. It doubled capacity. Formica moved there in 1921, and it would become the headquarters until well after World War II.

In the meantime, five years of lawsuits began in 1919 over patent infringement and other issues stemming from confusion and disagreement about who had invented and patented what, and when. Formica found itself pitted against big Westinghouse and General Electric, and the cases also involved the leading resin makers – Bakelite, Redman/Karpen and Condensite.

Formica lost some skirmishes, but won the war. In the end, having repeatedly won decisions in court or on appeal, Formica benefited tremendously from an agreement between Bakelite and the Karpens. The resulting merger combined the major resin makers into a new Bakelite Corporation, ready to provide material and technical assistance to all, including Formica.

In 1923, Formica built a new, two-story building on the Winton Place site, complete with new presses and treating machines. The expansion was crucial to an important new market: automotive timing gears.

Quickly, Formica sold one Chicago parts maker on trying gears cut from phenolic resin blanks. The new gears were tough and quiet. Once again, Formica had engineered a better product and by 1932, Formica would be producing 6,000 gear blanks a day for such giants as Chevrolet, Studebaker, Buick, Maxwell, Auburn, Pontiac, Willys-Overland and Graham-Paige.

It was only a short leap from gears for autos to gears for the fast-growing appliance industry, and another to making parts for textile machines for making the new synthetic fabrics. Sales quadrupled from $360,000 in 1921 to $1.9 million in 1923, then doubled again in a year, to $3 million in 1924.

In 1927, Formica patented a new and more efficient rotogravure printing process for making decorative, wood-grained or marble-surfaced laminate. Developed during months of trials by Formica's George H. Clark and Jack D. Cochrane, it was the first of many products that have made the name "Formica" virtually synonymous in the public mind with the stuff of which restaurant tables and kitchen countertops are made.

Just as Faber and O'Conor had known a good idea in 1913, Formica realized in 1927 that it had yet another gold mine underfoot. The next step was to develop continuous designs on rotogravure printing cylinders and phenolic printing inks that could withstand the laminating process.

Steadily, through the late 1920s and into the 1930s, Formica improved the new product, testing different inks and resins, cores and surfaces, processes and methods. A key change was the adoption of the urea resins, permitting laminates that were less expensive to make, more resistant to light, heat and humidity, and capable of being manufactured in a wide range of colors and designs. In 1931, by putting an aluminum-foil layer between the core and surface, Formica engineers even developed a "cigarette-proof" surface that was widely used in New York's world famous Radio City Music Hall.

In 1937, despite the great Ohio River flood that devastated every industry in the low-lying Mill Creek Valley in Cincinnati, sales reached $3.5 million. And in Scotland, the Formica name got a tremendous publicity boost. A shipyard there was building a luxurious new ocean liner for Britain's Cunard Line. The designers had specified Formica laminates for decorative wall surfaces throughout the great vessel. The ship’s name –The Queen Mary.

The following year, another new resin appeared: melamine. Developed by American Cyanamid Company, it resisted heat, abrasion and moisture better than phenolic or urea resins and could be used to make laminates in more colors than older resins. It also could be molded. Formica's experts began adapting it to the production of decorative laminates. By year's end, Formica was buying every ounce of melamine that American Cyanamid made, but it would be 10 years before melamine took hold.

It was 1938 and war again would soon grip the world. Like many companies, Formica benefited from defense work. The company developed a new glass-melamine laminate for electrical insulation, made parts for machine tools, and developed early silicone and epoxy laminates. Formica produced its plastic-impregnated "Pregwood" for use in airplane propellers instead of scarce aluminum. The company's biggest single order was for a bomb part called burster tubes. Sales virtually doubled the first year of WWII, from $4.2 million in 1940 to $8.3 million in 1941. At the war-production peak in 1943, sales reached $15.7 million.