Puffer-Sweiven History

While fighting a disastrous fire in Marshalltown, Iowa, a young waterworks engineer was forced to hand-throttle the city’s steam-driven pumps throughout the night.

That engineer was William Fisher, and the year was 1876. Exhausted from that experience, he decided there must be a better way to maintain water pressure as downstream conditions changed. And there was a better way – thanks to this young engineer’s inventive mind – it was called the type 1 Pump Governor.

The Fisher Governor Company continued to grow and expand its flow control product offerings in the early part of the 20^th century. From 1905 through 1962, the Fisher sales representative network was established and began to expand throughout North America, forever changing the way Fisher products and services were delivered and supported.

Within a year of joining the Fisher Governor Company in 1925 with his Chemical Engineering degree from Iowa State College, a young Kenneth Leroy "Ken" Puffer developed the company’s first natural gas regulator, the Type 735. Around the same time, Clinton Elsworth “Bud” Sweiven joined the Fisher Governor Co., as a sales engineer. Over the next 20 years, both men honed their expertise in technical products and applications and learned the gold standards in customer service and collaboration from Fisher, the flagship brand of Emerson.

By the end of World War II, Ken Puffer and Bud Sweiven had 20 years of experience working for the Fisher Governor Company. On November 11, 1945, they founded Puffer-Sweiven as the Fisher Sales Representative for the Texas Gulf Coast Region. They served as role models of leadership and loyalty for what were previously known as Local Business Partners, and are now identified as Emerson Impact Partners.