Kidde Brand Guidelines: Walter Kidde’s Carbon Dioxide Extinguishers and a Century of Owners

A construction firm that turned to fire.

Kidde began as a construction business. Walter Kidde, a graduate of the Stevens Institute of Technology, set up his company in New York in 1900, according to the International Directory of Company Histories. English Wikipedia’s article on the company gives 1917 as its founding year, and the company today says it has been in the business for more than 100 years.

The turn to fire came by sea. In 1918, the Directory says, Walter Kidde & Company bought the rights to the “Rich” system for detecting fires aboard ships. That system put fires out with steam, which damaged cargo; Kidde used carbon dioxide instead. To release the gas quickly enough, the company bought the patent rights to a siphon device in 1923. The Directory credits it with producing the first portable carbon dioxide extinguisher in 1924 and installing the first built-in industrial system in 1925, and says it worked with the US Navy in 1926 on a system for aircraft engines. Kidde then separated the fire business from construction, keeping the original name.

The company grew abroad in the 1930s. By 1940, the Directory says, it had about 200 sales agencies in the United States and in cities in Europe, South America, Africa and Asia, subsidiary sales companies in Canada, Germany and Italy, and two factories in England. English Wikipedia dates its first overseas operation, at Northolt in west London, to 1935.

The Second World War changed its scale. The Directory records a workforce of about 450 in 1938 and about 5,000 by 1943, making fire detection and extinguishing equipment for tanks, aircraft and ships, as well as inflation devices for life rafts and life belts. In 1943 control passed to his son, John Kidde.

Conglomerate, then a run of owners.

After the war the company diversified into machinery and tools, siphon devices for consumer and medical uses, and aircraft accessories, the Directory says. From 1964, under president Fred Sullivan, who came from Litton Industries, it grew into an acquisitive conglomerate; it was incorporated as Kidde & Company in 1968 and took the name Kidde, Inc. in 1980.

Then came a series of owners. In August 1987 Hanson Industries, the American arm of Britain’s Hanson Trust, bought Kidde, and in August 1988 it sold most of the fire-protection business — including Walter Kidde North America, Fenwal and the European fire group — to Pilgrim House Group, which was itself bought by Williams Holdings during the deal. English Wikipedia says Fenwal had been founded in 1935, and that in 1989 the business merged with Graviner, another Williams company, to form Kidde Graviner. Williams bought Chubb Security in 1997; when Williams broke up in 2000, the fire business took the name Kidde plc and listed in London that November, the Directory says. In 2005 United Technologies bought Kidde and placed it in UTC Fire & Security, alongside Chubb, according to English Wikipedia.

United Technologies spun off Carrier in 2020, and Kidde businesses went with it. One of them, Kidde-Fenwal, which had made and sold firefighting foam, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in May 2023 in the face of claims over PFAS contamination, Manufacturing Dive reported in October 2024; its business was sold to Pacific Avenue Capital Partners in July 2024, the company was renamed KFI Wind-Down, and Carrier proposed a settlement of the claims that October.

Kidde’s consumer products have also been recalled. In November 2017 the US Consumer Product Safety Commission announced a recall of about 37.8 million Kidde fire extinguishers with plastic handles or push buttons in the United States, covering 134 models made between 1973 and 2017. English Wikipedia lists other recalls of Kidde alarms and extinguishers from 1999 onward.

How fire protection makers present themselves.

Fire protection makers sell to engineers, contractors, insurers and building owners rather than to shoppers, and their pictures tend to show the product at work in a building. A common image is the sprinkler head in close-up: a small brass or chrome fitting, often with a coloured glass bulb, photographed against a ceiling. Another is the pipework itself, grooved or threaded, running in red-painted lines above warehouse racking or through a plant room.

Suppression systems are shown in the rooms they are designed for. Catalogues and project pages picture rows of gas or water-mist cylinders standing in a side room next to a server hall, a control room or an archive, with pipes leading off to nozzles in the ceiling. Detectors and alarm panels appear in the same matter-of-fact way: a round detector head on a plain ceiling, a call point on a corridor wall, a panel with its status lights in a plant room.

Testing and training make up much of the rest of the imagery. Makers and their distributors publish photographs of test rigs, live-fire demonstrations and installer courses, and many list training centres and technical schools alongside their products. Approvals and listings from testing bodies are usually printed on data sheets and in catalogues.

The trade meets at shows. The NFPA Conference & Expo in the United States and Firex in London are among the events where makers set out sprinklers, valves, cylinders and panels on stands for contractors and engineers. The brands in this guide range from privately held specialists to units of large building-technology groups, and their colours, names and typography are set out here as an unofficial reading of how each presents itself.

Kidde Global Solutions, from December 2024.

The brand changed hands again in December 2024. Carrier completed the sale of its Commercial and Residential Fire business to an affiliate of the private equity firm Lone Star Funds, creating Kidde Global Solutions, headquartered in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida, the International Fire & Safety Journal reported on 20 December 2024. The new company groups Kidde with other fire and life-safety brands, including Edwards, Gloria and Aritech; its president and chief executive is Dan Thompson.

Kidde describes itself as a maker of residential smoke alarms, carbon monoxide alarms, fire extinguishers and safety accessories, and says it produced the first integrated smoke detection system a century ago — its own claim. English Wikipedia gives its headquarters as Mebane, North Carolina, and places Kidde Canada, formerly the Pyrene Company, in Toronto.

The name has followed the founder through every change of form: Walter Kidde & Company, Kidde & Company, Kidde, Inc., Kidde plc, and now a brand within Kidde Global Solutions, which took the founder’s surname for the whole group.

For a design guide, Kidde shows how a founder’s surname can carry a brand through a construction firm, a conglomerate and a string of British and American owners. Compare Honeywell, another surname that became an industrial brand, and NOTIFIER, a maker of fire alarm panels. For this guide we use a signal red, charcoal and chalk with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Kidde’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.