The pace of change we have seen in our lifetimes has been nothing short of astounding.
It was less than 130 years ago that the Wright Brothers flew their plane at Kitty Hawk. Now we’ve landed on the moon (allegedly) and catch rockets out of the air.
The painting industry has also gone through great change. Consider this: The original paint brush was created 2.5 million years ago, back in the Paleolithic Era. The paint roller was invented much more recently, in 1940 by multiple people in the U.S. and Canada.
Painting with a spray gun has a surprisingly long history. Although it feels like one of the most modern ways to apply paint, its inception actually dates back to 1887 (well before the roller!).
A painter named Joseph Binks, a maintenance worker at Marshall Field’s (now Macy’s), was tasked with whitewashing walls in the aftermath of the Great Chicago Fire, which took 300 lives and a huge swath of the Windy City.
To tackle the Herculean task, Binks decided to work smarter, not harder. He created a hand-pumped, cold-water paint spraying machine to apply a mix of oil and white lead. The remarkable paint job made the buildings sparkly white and earned the exhibition the nickname, “The White City.”
Paint spraying technology took a significant leap forward in 1948, when a painter named Edward Seymour invented aerosol paint.
Seymour, of Sycamore, Illinois, wanted a way to show off his aluminum paint for radiators. His wife, Bonnie, thought of how her deodorizers emitted a mist, and suggested Seymour try something similar for his radiator paint.
With that spark of an idea, Seymour mixed aerosol with paint in a can and added a spray head. In 1951, he was awarded a patent for his paint spraying technology.
I was reminded of the pace of innovation recently when I visited Graco’s facility in Rogers, Minnesota.
In 1958 Graco – then known as the Gray Company – introduced the first airless paint sprayer. The ‘70s brought a timely acquisition that added the electrostatic paint spray gun to Graco’s arsenal.
Touring Graco’s factory, I saw just how far the company has come. 3D printing now allows engineers to innovate at the speed of thought, holding a prototype within hours of conceiving it. In the factory where the sprayers are manufactured, massive robot arms move at lightning speed to assemble tiny components too small for human hands.
If you visit Graco’s campus in Rogers – which you can do by signing up for Graco’s excellent product training – you can literally walk through history, seeing each form the paint sprayer took through eight decades of evolution.
It’s a reminder that painting may be an old trade, but it has hardly stood still.