The Interchangeable Socket: How Kenosha Gave the World Snap-on Tools

In May 1919, Blackhawk Manufacturing introduced the first production-scale line of heavy-wall machined sockets with a standardized half-inch square drive. Joseph Johnson ran that introduction. Twelve months later, he resigned and built a company to compete with them.

Johnson was not working outside the industry when this happened. He was the manager who had just supervised the introduction of the product he was now going to compete with. Snap-on is still headquartered in Kenosha today, at 2801 80th Street, and reported $4.71 billion in net sales in fiscal 2024.

Before 1920: one wrench per bolt size

A mechanic working on automobiles in 1919 owned a lot of wrench. Each socket head was permanently forged to its handle, one bolt size per tool. The International Directory of Company Histories describes the situation plainly: "the socket wrenches used by mechanics were one-piece units." A full working set might cover 20 or 30 bolt sizes. That means 20 or 30 complete tools, each with its own handle, stored and carried and paid for separately.

The concept of interchangeable sockets was not new. J.J. Richardson of Woodstock, Vermont, received U.S. Patent 38,914 for a ratcheting socket wrench with swappable sockets in 1863. Scientific American illustrated the design in April 1864. But Richardson's sockets, and those of every competitor that followed over the next six decades, were made from thin pressed steel: cheap to produce, too flimsy to hold up under real shop conditions. The concept had been around for nearly 60 years without anyone making it work well enough for daily shop use.

What Blackhawk changed in 1919 was material and process: heavy-wall machined steel, cold-broached to fit a standardized square drive. Johnson oversaw that introduction. He understood the manufacturing process well enough to know what it took to make a socket that would hold under torque. When he left Blackhawk in early 1920, he had a fairly good idea of what he wanted to build.

Five handles, ten sockets, fifty solutions

Johnson and William Seidemann, a colleague from Blackhawk described in co-founder Newton Tarble's memoir as having "a natural aptitude for things mechanical," spent weekends fabricating prototypes by hand using crude bending jigs. The goal was two complete demo sets: five interchangeable handles and ten sockets each. Fifteen pieces that could perform the work of fifty single-purpose wrenches.

The slogan that came from that arithmetic, "Five do the work of Fifty," is confirmed verbatim across multiple primary sources: Tarble's first-person account The Snap-On Story 1920-1960 (digitized on Internet Archive), Snap-on's centennial book It Started With a Spark (available on snapon.com), and CEO Nick Pinchuk's remarks at the 2014 annual shareholder meeting: "A brilliant flash in the mind of an engineer from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, named Joe Johnson and the flash was an idea. Five do the work of 50."

Armed with only the two demo sets and printed brochures, Johnson and Seidemann generated more than 500 C.O.D. orders before the company had a factory. The Snap-On Wrench Company was incorporated on April 21, 1920, capitalized at $25,000, and set up in a 2,500-square-foot facility in Milwaukee.

The first patent, U.S. Patent 1,443,413, was filed July 1, 1920, and granted January 30, 1923. It covered a specific ratchet design using a claw-clutch construction, preferred over conventional ratchet teeth for "greater strength and simplicity." It did not patent the interchangeable socket; that concept had existed since 1863. Snap-on's own materials use "pioneering" rather than "inventing" when describing the company's role in socket wrench history, which is probably the more defensible framing given what Richardson had already filed in 1863.

The distribution model that built the brand

Two more founders joined in fall 1920. Stanton Palmer, a hardware industry sales veteran formerly at Shapleigh Hardware Company of St. Louis, became president in February 1921. Newton Tarble, a Chicago salesman recently out of military service, met Palmer at the Automotive Accessory Association show at Chicago's Coliseum on October 26, 1920, and became vice president and general sales manager. All four founders held equal shares.

Palmer and Tarble brought an innovation that mattered as much as the product: they took the selling directly to where mechanics worked. A Snap-on salesman showed up at the shop, laid the tools on a green felt display cloth (designed to make the tools gleam under shop lighting), demonstrated them on the spot, and took the order there. They introduced an installment payment plan, recorded in company history as the "Time Payment" plan, so mechanics could buy tools with shop earnings rather than waiting to save a lump sum.

By 1925, Snap-on had 17 branch offices and 165 salesmen covering the country. The first product catalog appeared in 1923. Annual sales reached $1 million by 1935, during the Depression. Custom tool kits built around specific automobile models, including a dedicated Model T kit, helped push the company from auto shops into industrial and heavy-duty markets.

During World War II, Snap-on was designated a preferred supplier to the U.S. government. A wartime tool shortage forced salesmen to carry inventory in their personal cars for immediate delivery. That improvisation became the mobile tool van. In 1990, Snap-on formalized the concept as a franchise operation. The company now operates through 4,700 mobile stores, including more than 3,400 franchise vans in the United States.

Why the Chamber recruited them to Kenosha

In 1929, the Kenosha Chamber of Commerce and Greater Kenosha Land Company recruited Snap-on to relocate from Milwaukee, apparently as part of an effort to diversify the local economy. They offered an 11-acre site on the outer edge of the city. Snap-on purchased it that year and completed the move of its manufacturing and corporate headquarters to Kenosha in 1930.

That address, 2801 80th Street, Kenosha, Wisconsin, 53143, has been the global headquarters ever since. In August 2021, the company broke ground on a 90,000-square-foot expansion of the same campus. CEO Pinchuk made the commitment to Kenosha explicit at the ceremony.

Since 1939, Snap-on has paid a quarterly cash dividend to shareholders without interruption, one of the longest such streaks in American industry. The company is now an S&P 500 component with approximately 13,000 employees worldwide, 36 manufacturing facilities across 16 countries, operations in more than 130 countries, and a catalog of over 85,000 SKUs backed by more than 4,500 active or pending patents. The global headquarters is still in Kenosha County.

The revenue figures, sourced from SEC filings and the Tarble memoir, give some sense of how the growth accumulated over the century: