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T.S. Eliot said, "...history is a pattern of timeless moments." Like most histories, the story of Bowser-Morner is punctuated with measures of time. The company you know today as Bowser-Morner began in 1911-the year before New Mexico and Arizona became states. Nine years later, as Kurz Chemical Laboratories, the business was focused on analyzing some of the important materials of that decade: iron, steel, coal, cement, and oil. In 1925, as the Roaring 20s began to gather steam, Raymond R. Bowser and Arnold L. Morner bought the business and changed the name to Bowser-Morner Testing Laboratory. Two years later, Bowser-Morner made history conducting chemical testing on metal used in the Spirit of St. Louis, the plane Charles Lindbergh piloted on his solo flight across the Atlantic to Paris.
As WWII loomed, Bowser-Morner added new services to meet our clients' expanding needs, first offering metallurgical testing in 1937, and venturing into subsurface exploration in 1941. Physical testing of such materials as aircraft parts and steel created much work through the war years and into 1945, when we began offering simulated-environment testing of the effects of humidity, altitude, and vibration.
The construction boom of the 1950s created a similar boom for our Construction Services Department, and marked the creation of our Subsurface Exploration Services Department. Today, Bowser-Morner operates one of the largest fleets of subsurface exploration equipment in the Midwest, including four Sonic Rigs.
In 1974, Bowser-Morner expanded operations by acquiring Interstate Drilling and Testing and opening our Toledo regional office. Shortly thereafter, we opened a second regional office, in Maysville, Kentucky. Eight years later, our Kentucky office was moved to Lexington to better serve our bluegrass-state clients. Also in 1982, our name became the one you know us by today: Bowser-Morner, Inc. The company continued to grow and change: in 1985, our Engineering Group was incorporated as Bowser-Morner Associates, Inc.
The year the Berlin Wall came down, 1989, was also historic for us, as we moved to our present corporate headquarters in Dayton, Ohio. This 70,000-square-foot complex houses our administration and engineering offices, laboratories including extensive testing equipment and maintenance and storage facilities for our subsurface exploration operations. In 1999, we were on the move again when our Toledo offices and laboratory moved to a brand-new, 14,000-square-foot building on an environmentally remediated site in the River East Industrial Corridor. In June 2003, we opened a Construction Materials Testing Laboratory in Springfield, Illinois to better serve our clients throughout the Midwest.
In 1995, Bowser-Morner became a fully accredited laboratory by AASHTO through the AMRL program, and in 2000, we became the first U.S. geotechnical and construction materials testing laboratory accredited by AASHTO to the international quality system standard ISO/IEC 17025.
From 1911 through today, we've always been committed to the timeless pattern of safety, hard work, innovative solutions, and providing value to our clients.
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