History
A History of Excellence
The Dynatrol was born in a bathtub. Sort of.
When Bill Banks began working as an engineer the West Texas oil fields in the early 1950s, he soon saw the need for a failsafe liquid level switch. He started pondering a design: “I was in the bathtub wondering how I would tell the difference between the air and the water. I was waving my hand back and forth in the air and then down in the water. I thought, ‘Oh yeah, there would be more restriction in the water and so it would take more power to move a paddle. Eureka. Measure the power.’”
Bill struck up a business partnership with Quin Baker, another engineer toiling in the oil fields and, in 1953, they formed Southwest Control Company. They began producing the original Dynatrol product line, some of the first sonic devices of their kind. Three years later, they renamed the fledgling company Automation Products, Inc. and moved it across the state into a former mattress factory in Houston. This unassuming brick building under big live oaks has remained the home of the Dynatrol and all its incarnations these many decades since.
Proudly innovating quality measurement products since 1956.
While Bill continued to refine and expand his invention, he also traveled the country introducing the remarkable Dynatrol level sensors to potential customers outside the oil and gas industry. One of his favorite places to call on was a well-established brewery in Saint Louis. “There was a tap at the coffee bar and it could be nine in the morning and they’d ask, ‘Would you like a beer?’”
Meanwhile, Quin was discovering his genius lay not only in engineering but also in marketing. His astounding success with bingo cards, those once ubiquitous reader survey cards inserted into trade magazines, was legendary. An entire room at the factory was dedicated solely to their storage as they poured in. A former employee of one of Dynatrol’s major competitors stopped by the factory one day and, when he poked his head into that room, he confessed his company had been so awed by Quin’s marketing strategy they had no choice but to copy it.
Although the Dynatrol evolved over the years into specialized density measurement systems and solid level sensors for hundreds of differing applications, the quality never wavered. Once, a customer from a large chemical company checked in to make certain the Dynatrol level sensors being made for them were tough enough. He took one look and said, “Wow, it’s built like a battleship! Ship ‘em.” (It’s a battleship, sure, but a darling battleship. Another chemical engineer once confessed that he couldn’t stop buying Dynatrol level sensors because they were so “cute.”)
Today, Dynatrol products span the globe from Brazil to India and measure products from chocolate to tire rubber, from asphalt to potato chips. Every Dynatrol is still built like a battleship and made by hand in Houston, Texas, USA.