Edward G. Budd

Edward Gowen Budd was an American inventor and manufacturer who brought stamped and welded steel construction to railway cars and automobiles. Born in Smyrna, Delaware, in 1870, he trained as a machinist and in 1898 obtained a patent for a stamped steel pulley. At Hale and Kilburn he applied stamped steel to railroad car work for the Pullman Company and to the Hupmobile, described as the first steel-bodied car in the world. He founded the Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company in 1912, supplying steel bodies to makers including Oakland, Studebaker and Dodge, for which his firm built the first all-steel sedan in 1923, and in 1917 he founded the Budd Wheel Company. In the 1930s his company pioneered stainless steel fabrication and the shotweld process, used in the Pioneer Zephyr streamlined train for the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, and it later built the Budd RB Conestoga transport aircraft for the Navy. His dismissal of more than 1,000 striking workers in 1933 and 1934 was controversial. Budd died in Philadelphia in 1946 and was later inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame and the National Railroad Hall of Fame.