May 12, 2021 – What do the Cleveland Browns football team, The Estée Lauder Companies, Goodyear and CM Furnaces all have in common? This year each celebrates its 75th anniversary. Below, Vice President Jim Neill outlines the start of CM Furnaces—which has kept all its design and manufacturing in the U.S.—its evolution, its market broadening and where it is now. This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it., www.cmfurnaces.com

CM Furnaces was started in January 1946 by Seth Combs and James Murphy. The primary business was making coils and filaments for the electronics industry and lighting. Coils were made out of molybdenum and tungsten wire.

Both Combs and Murphy came out of the refractory metal industry and were very knowledgeable on moly and tungsten. Coils needed to be hydrogen-fired to shape, set and clean them. CM started to build its own hydrogen furnaces to support the coil business. We had some very interesting designs that attracted the attention of the three major lighting companies, GE, Sylvania and Westinghouse. At that time, CM started to build furnaces for all of them.

Word soon spread to other industries. Furnaces became a larger portion of the business. Technology was changing and the need for electronic filaments decreased slowly over time, while the furnace business continued to grow and expand.

Because we were so used to working with refractory metal wire, early on we moved into the wire industry. At first, it was moly and tungsten, then copper, stainless steel, nickel-based alloys, and titanium. These furnaces led to other uses in tubing, rod and small width sheet.

Continuous wire annealing furnaces are a very important part of CM’s business. The furnace business has grown into laboratory furnaces for all types of high-temperature research applications in a variety of atmospheres.
After 75 years, we are now in 12 major industries building both standard and custom units for a huge variety of applications. This base is a perfect platform for our continued growth into the future.

The future looks bright. The design of the furnaces continues to improve. The days of building your own are behind us. Most companies do not have the manpower or knowledge to do this. They would also be building a brand-new, 30-year-old piece of equipment, whereas we are building furnaces every day. The more furnaces we build, the more that we learn. This constantly helps us improve the product. We are looking forward to our 100th anniversary.”