World Dryer Brand Guidelines: The 1950 Illinois Hand-Dryer Maker With a 1974 Globe

An inventor’s answer to the paper towel.

World Dryer is an American maker of electric hand dryers based in Berkeley, Illinois. English Wikipedia says the company was founded in 1950 by the inventor George Clemens, who set out to build a hand dryer that could “compete against paper towels.” The International Directory of Company Histories, in a 1999 entry, also says World Dryer was established in Illinois in 1950, and adds that its first warm-air hand dryer followed in 1951. Capstone Partners, the financial adviser on the company’s 2017 sale, gives the founding year as 1948, so the sources do not all agree on the date.

The first product was the Model A. Wikipedia says Clemens patented it in 1953, while the company history published by its present owner, Zurn Elkay, dates the Model A’s introduction in the United States to 1950. According to Wikipedia, manufacturing and export outside the United States began in 1955 through Warner Howard Limited, and a recessed model, the Model RA, followed in 1968.

The 1999 directory entry describes the company’s classic dryers as wall-mounted, warm-air machines found in public washrooms around the world, built in steel and cast iron. Wikipedia lists its products today as hand dryers, baby changing tables and hair dryers.

The brand’s mark has a documented starting point. Wikipedia says the company adopted its current “globe” logo in 1974, the same year it introduced the Model B hair dryer.

Beatrice, a buyout and a run of acquisitions.

World Dryer spent much of its history inside larger groups. Wikipedia says the food company Beatrice Foods acquired it in 1974. The International Directory of Company Histories places the purchase in Beatrice’s years of diversification, between the 1960s and 1983, when Beatrice bought a group of equipment makers that included Taylor, Wells, Bloomfield, World Dryer and Market Forge.

Accounts differ on how World Dryer left Beatrice. Wikipedia says Beatrice spun it off as an independent company in 1985. The 1999 directory entry describes a buyout: in November 1984 Beatrice agreed to sell five of its equipment businesses to the New York buyout firm Gibbons Green van Amerongen, which formed Specialty Equipment Companies of Aurora, Illinois, and completed the purchase in January 1985, with World Dryer among the units. The existing managers kept running the businesses, the entry says, and in 1998 it listed World Dryer as one of Specialty Equipment’s four operating divisions.

World Dryer also grew by buying other dryer makers. It took over Electric-Aire, whose lower-cost dryers in plastic housings sat alongside World Dryer’s steel and cast-iron models, according to the directory entry, which dates the deal to 1994; Wikipedia gives 1992. Wikipedia adds that in 2000 the company bought Nova Hand Dryers of Quebec. By the time of its 2017 sale it was selling dryers under the World Dryer, American Dryer and Nova names, according to Capstone Partners, which describes the business at that point as a portfolio company of the investors NewCastle Partners and Greyrock Capital Group; a NewCastle executive quoted there called the holding a ten-year investment.

Wikipedia’s product timeline runs from the Model A to automatic machines. It says the company introduced the NoTouch and the Airspeed in 1986, and calls the NoTouch the first automatic hand dryer. Later models it lists, introduced from 2005 onward, include the AirMax, the SMARTdri, the SLIMdri and the VERDEdri.

Washroom equipment as a category.

Washroom hygiene is a design field most people meet without noticing. The hand dryer by the airport gate, the towel dispenser in an office corridor and the soap unit above a stadium basin are chosen not by the people who use them but by architects, facility managers and cleaning contractors. The makers of these products speak first to that professional buyer, and their brands are built to read clearly in a specification sheet or a trade catalogue as much as on a wall.

Much of the work is systems design. A paper towel or soap brand usually sells a dispenser together with the refill made to fit it, so the visible object on the wall carries the name while the paper, foam or gel inside is what is bought again and again. Hand dryer makers sell the opposite way: one machine, mounted once, with filters, covers and accessories around it. Both approaches lean on a small number of named ranges rather than long product lists.

Materials do much of the talking. Stainless steel fittings, white and grey plastics and plain labelling recur across catalogues, for products that may end up in very different washrooms, from a hospital to a hotel lobby. Colour tends to appear in small accents, on a cover, a light or a refill pack, rather than across the whole object.

The category also presents itself in person. Trade fairs such as Interclean and the ISSA Show, where cleaning and facility-management suppliers gather, give makers a place to launch dispensers, dryers and digital refill services, and some fairs run innovation awards of their own. The guides in this series look at how individual makers handle those shared conventions.

A hand-dryer brand inside a water-products group.

In October 2017 Rexnord Corporation acquired World Dryer, and the business became part of Rexnord’s Zurn unit, PHCP Pros reported on 10 October 2017, describing World Dryer Corp. as based in Berkeley, Illinois. The trade magazine cited the deal’s press release as saying World Dryer had the largest installed base of commercial electric hand dryers in the world and about 800 distributors around the world; those are the companies’ own figures. It said the combination would bring Zurn’s plumbing products and World Dryer’s hand dryers together for commercial building owners. Capstone Partners records the buyer as Zurn Industries, a Rexnord subsidiary, and dates the transaction to 4 October 2017.

Zurn has changed shape since. Zurn Elkay’s own history says Rexnord bought Zurn in 2007, that Zurn moved its headquarters to Milwaukee’s Water Technology District in 2016, and that in 2022 Zurn Water Solutions and Elkay combined to form Zurn Elkay Water Solutions. That history names World Dryer among its brands alongside Wilkins and Hadrian, and its 2017 entry calls World Dryer the leader in the commercial electric hand dryer market, which is the parent company’s own description.

So the brand that began with one inventor’s dryer now sits inside a group built around plumbing and drinking-water products, still under its own name and, according to Wikipedia, still under the globe it adopted in 1974.

For a design guide, World Dryer shows how a plain piece of washroom equipment can keep one emblem through several owners: Beatrice, a buyout company, private investors and now Zurn Elkay. Compare Excel Dryer, another American hand-dryer maker in this series, and Dyson. For this guide we use a washroom navy, a brushed steel grey and a warm cream with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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