Profile · West Allis, Wisconsin
Walter Geist
Longtime Allis-Chalmers executive and company president (1942–1951); inventor of the Texrope multiple-V-belt drive; career centered on the West Allis works
$1 million+ (1951$)
Walter Geist is the person inside the factory that named West Allis. Born in Milwaukee in 1894 and self-educated, he went to work at Allis-Chalmers as a messenger in the blueprint department at fifteen and spent his working life at the West Allis works. He did not inherit the company. He invented his way up. In the 1920s he looked at old multi-groove rope drives and replaced the rope with several V-belts running in parallel. He filed in 1925. The patent (U.S. 1,662,511, 1928) was broad enough that Allis-Chalmers sold the idea as Texrope and collected royalties from everybody else. Geist rose from milling-machine assistant manager to sales manager to vice president, then became president in 1942. TIME called him the “up-from-office-boy” boss. During the 1946–47 Local 248 strike he sat in the West Allis front office and played for time until the union broke. He was still president when he died on January 29, 1951, at fifty-six. The New York Times obituary led on the office-boy-at-fifteen detail, not the title. The orange tractors are what people remember. The belts are what paid for them. The lock for West Allis is a lifetime at the plant that gave the city its name, not a claim that he was born there.