Woodward Brand Guidelines: An 1870 Rockford Waterwheel Governor Turned Aerospace Controls

An inventor in Rockford.

Woodward began with one problem: how to keep a waterwheel turning at a steady speed. Amos W. Woodward, an inventor and mechanic from Maine who had settled in Rockford, Illinois, in 1856, designed a mechanical noncompensating waterwheel governor in 1869 and received a patent for it in 1870, according to the company history in the International Directory of Company Histories, published online by FundingUniverse. He began making the governors under the name A.W. Woodward Company. Woodward itself dates its founding to 1870 and says the Woodward Governor was “vital to some of the biggest infrastructure projects of that time.”

The business grew under his son. Elmer Woodward had worked in his father’s shop as a boy and took over more of its affairs as it began to prosper. In 1898 he patented an improved governor, the company history says, which gave the firm a lead as hydroelectric generators spread; English Wikipedia describes it as the first successful mechanical compensating governor for hydraulic turbines. In 1902 father and son incorporated the business as the Woodward Governor Company, with 25 workers in Rockford.

Hydroelectric demand carried it through the 1910s and 1920s. The company moved into a new five-storey plant in 1910 and sold widely abroad — in Europe, Japan and New Zealand among other markets — and by the 1920s more than a third of its sales went to foreign buyers, the company history says. In 1929 Elmer Woodward brought in his son-in-law, Irl Martin, to run day-to-day operations, just before the crash cut demand for hydropower governors.

From diesels to propellers.

The Depression pushed Woodward into new markets. In 1933 the company perfected a governor for diesel engines, the company history says, and soon afterwards it produced a governor that controlled the pitch of an airplane propeller, after an aviation company asked it for one. The company history dates the propeller governor to 1934; English Wikipedia gives 1933 and says Elmer Woodward’s PW-34 propeller governor is on display at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum. Either way, it gave the firm its entry into aviation.

The company went public in 1940, with a recapitalisation that let employees become shareholders. During the Second World War, the company history says, orders for its propeller controls, which synchronised the propellers of multi-engine aircraft and ships, rose sharply; it introduced its first aircraft turbine control in 1943, and its workforce grew from about 50 in 1935 to more than 1,600 at the wartime peak, working in a large new factory opened at the start of the war. English Wikipedia adds that Woodward parts were used in the General Electric engine of the US military’s first turbine-powered aircraft. After the war the workforce shrank to about 500.

Two postwar choices still shape the company’s vocabulary. In 1946 Martin introduced what he called the Corporate Partnership, under which every employee was called a “member,” the company history says; Woodward’s own website still refers to its staff as members and to a “Woodward Constitution.” And in 1955 the company built its first factory outside Rockford, in Fort Collins, Colorado. From the mid-1950s it added main fuel controls for aircraft gas turbines and electronic controls, first analogue and later digital, and opened plants in the Netherlands, England, Japan and Australia.

Suppliers behind the airframe.

Aerospace suppliers sell to a small number of buyers, and their imagery is built for engineers, airlines and investors rather than for passengers. The product is usually hidden inside someone else’s aircraft, so the pictures tend to show it before it disappears: an engine bolted to a test stand, a single fan blade lit in a studio, a fuselage section on a factory floor, or a cutaway drawing that opens up the layers of a turbofan or a landing-gear leg.

Factories are part of the story. Clean rooms, composite lay-up tables and long assembly halls appear again and again, often with people in them: apprentices, engineers and technicians in overalls, shown at work rather than posing. Many of these companies are joint ventures, partners or subcontractors on the same programmes, so a single engine or wing can carry the work of several firms, each telling its own part of it.

The trade has its own stages. The Paris Air Show at Le Bourget and the Farnborough show in England alternate year by year, and suppliers take chalets and stands there alongside the aircraft makers they serve. Services after delivery are a large part of the business too, and the language of aftermarket support, spare parts and maintenance, repair and overhaul (MRO) runs through their websites and reports.

Corporate reports often put an aircraft on the cover, even when the company makes none of it. Behind that shared look sit very different histories: century-old engine makers, plants sold off by aircraft builders, conglomerate spin-outs and private-equity buyouts. The guides in this series set out what can be checked about each one, and mark clearly what rests on the company’s own word.

From Woodward Governor to Woodward, Inc.

The company is now headquartered in Fort Collins, the town where it opened its first outside plant, and still makes products in the Rockford area. In 1998 it bought Fuel Systems Textron, renamed Woodward FST, the company history says. In January 2011 it announced that the Woodward Governor Company would change its name to Woodward, Inc., English Wikipedia says, dropping the product that had given it its name for 140 years. Woodward describes itself today as a designer and maker of “energy conversion and control solutions” for aerospace and industrial equipment, from aircraft and power plants to ships and mines.

English Wikipedia lists its aerospace work as fuel pumps, controls, actuators, air valves, sensors, fuel nozzles and electronics, with propeller and overspeed governors on turboprop and turboshaft engines such as the Pratt & Whitney Canada PT6A, the Honeywell TPE331 and the General Electric CT7 and T700. It also supplies the defence market, including parts for the V-22 Osprey and the F/A-18. In 2018 it bought L’Orange, a German maker of fuel-injection components that had belonged to Rolls-Royce’s power-systems business. A merger with the composites maker Hexcel was announced in January 2020 and called off that April, English Wikipedia says.

Recent deals have reshaped the aerospace side. On 21 July 2025 Woodward said it had completed its purchase of Safran’s electromechanical actuation business in the United States, Mexico and Canada, first announced in December 2024, including the horizontal stabiliser trim actuation system for the Airbus A350. In March 2026 it completed the purchase of Valve Research & Manufacturing, a Florida valve maker. On 15 April 2026 it announced an agreement to sell its pilot controls product line — throttle quadrants, rudder pedals and passive side sticks made in Niles, Illinois — to Ontic Engineering and Manufacturing; that sale was subject to regulatory approvals and had not been reported as completed at the time of writing.

For a design guide, Woodward shows how a company can outgrow the single object in its name and keep the surname. Compare Hexcel, the composites maker it once planned to merge with, and Parker Hannifin, another long-established American motion and control supplier. For this guide we use a millrace green and a governor brass with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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