For over 20 years, Stewart went to great lengths to keep this secret, even as his success in business made him a well known multi-millionaire. Stewart was actually an invented identity, created and curated by a man hoping to cut ties with his past.
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Like a real-life version of the TV character Don Draper, John K. Stewart, a closer look reveals that no such person actually existed. Because while every history written about Chicago Flexible Shaft, Sunbeam, and Stewart-Warner will note the contributions of John K. This leaves quite the legacy for the man credited as the “founder” of all three of these companies-a true man of mystery, I might add. If you’ve never heard of the business, it might be because it essentially “spun off” into two of the most successful appliance manufacturers of the 20th century, the Sunbeam Corporation (best known for toasters and mixers) and the Stewart-Warner Corporation (best known for speedometers)-each of which employed upwards of 4,000 workers in Chicago by the 1950s, earning them their own separate pages on this website.
In due course, of course, smaller electric models sent these heavyweight machines out to pasture, but by that point, the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company had already lived up to its name and adapted-shedding its rural roots to make snazzy automobile accessories and kitchen appliances for America’s new urban modernia.