Two inventors, who had created and developed horse trimming and sheep shearing machinery seven years earlier, finally made a formal company partnership to produce and market this equipment in 1890. By 1897, J.K. Stewart and Thomas Clark incorporated it formally as the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company. Thirteen years later, to sustain business and operations during farm and ranch off-seasons, the company branched toward making small household appliances, creating a new brand marque for that purpose precisely: Sunbeam.

The animal shearing and trimming machines* came to be marketed under the Stewart marque, and the first known appliance to bear the Sunbeam marque was called first the Princess and, in short enough order, the Ironmaster. This electric iron** revolutionised its breed audaciously by proving operatively that heat, not weight, was the salient factor in the task for which irons were created in the first place. (It should be noted here that the early Ironmaster irons are themselves much-sought collectors items.)

The company began producing a few other home products under the Sunbeam marque within reasonable order, over the next two decades, and the marque proved a success from its outset. But Sunbeam remained a Chicago Flexible Shaft Company subsidiary concern until 1925. That was when the the firm made perhaps the most important hire of its history: a shy, studious-looking 22-year-old Swedish immigrant, a draughtsman named Ivar Jepson.

Very little is known of his early life by anyone other than his family, but this much is known, at least among the small appliance fraternity: From early boyhood, Ivar Jepson had a passion for design and working forms, which he translated into a thorough training as a mechanical engineer, culminating in a graduate education in Germany. Those who remembered him long after his death have said Jepson never lost his near-complete immersion in design and working forms, seeming most content when addressing and experimenting with them.***

Had you suggested that possibility to Jepson himself, though, he might well have frowned in disbelief. Fanatic about excellence he was; composed and confident in his vision and abilities he seems assuredly to have been; yet, the evidence available suggests a shy insularity, perhaps making him unable to see his work in terms of its long-distance endurance beyond their practical strength as operating machines. For all his apparent severity in work, Jepson most likely saw himself as nothing more than a kind of practical theoretician.

Perhaps, today, we are accustomed enough to hearing and seeing those who stir vast bolts forward in most any walk of life.  But millions of Americans and many more around the world bought and appreciated Jepson's products†† and their seeming indestructibility without knowing he even existed. Enough of his design team members over the years actually became better known than he. But just as Duke Ellington did not invent but advanced and perfected jazz; as Aldous Huxley did not invent but advanced and perfected the socially satiric novel; as Sandy Koufax did not invent but advanced and perfected the art of baseball pitching; so did Jepson not invent but advance and perfect nearly all the products he sent into the American home. To the extent that any one man can be credited with transforming Sunbeam from a subsidiary to an institution, and even with revolutionising what we now call the consumer goods industry, it was Ivar Jepson.

"Because of the quantity of work that moves through our department, we don't have much time to work on abstract ideas, but must carefully screen them and select those that seem to be the most practical and then give these our utmost attention. In connection with this, it might be said that an idea is abstract or wild as long as it does not work, and is practical after it has been made to work."

* - Pictured, Sunbeam Stewart Shearmaster, Model EW310C. Photograph courtesy of EHPRES. As best as can be determined, of the two co-creators of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company, only J.K. Stewart ever affixed his own name to a particular product or marque. In due course, the company would carry three major product marques - Sunbeam (small household appliances), Stewart (shearing and trimming equipment and, later, heavy industrial furnaces), and Rain King (lawn and garden equipment). Rain King premiered in 1920, with the first known automatic lawn sprinkler, and soon enough became the marque for all the company's lawn and garden productmaking.

** - Photograph of Sunbeam Ironmaster of the late 1920s-early 1930s, approximately, courtesy of Terrible Tom Tate. Photograph of circa 1930s Sunbeam Coffeemaster courtesy of Tim Fitzmaurice.

*** - Information on this site concerning Ivar Jepson and the early years of the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company comes through the courtesy of Scott Onasch, who provided your chronicler with  "Mr. Sunbeam," by John Heskett, published in Hotwire, the journal of the Toaster Museum Foundation, Inc. Hotwire, in turn, republished the article from I.D. magazine. Chicago Flexible Shaft Company letterhead imprint scan courtesy of Kraig White.

† - This was the address for the Chicago Flexible Shaft Company's home plant. The company also owned and operated a production plant in Toronto. In due course, a Sunbeam plant would also appear in Australia, though this began, most likely, in the 1940s. The Sunbeam Corporation today is headquartered, as of 1999, in Boca Raton, Florida.

†† - Pictured, the Sunbeam Smokemaster. This was a device into which you put your regular-sized cigarettes, then pushed for a cigarette...and it would dispense you a lit cigarette! Apparently, it was a safety-built device, as well; its hot coil would not activate until you pushed for a cigarette. The Smokemaster also featured a built-in device to snuff out your cigarette, and a small chrome ashtray. This product appears to have been made between the late 1920s and early 1930s, but your chronicler is not entirely certain, however, when this charming little device was discontinued. Your chronicler does know, however, that a Sunbeam Smokemaster was auctioned on eBay during March 2000, in fact, and he thanks the seller, Sandra R. Malinas, for providing him the photograph you see on this page.

‡ - Who were some of the designers on the Jepson team? At one or another time, they included:

     - George Scharfenberg, who also designed the famous tombstone style Sunbeam T-9 toaster of the 1930s.
     - Ludvig Kocsi, whose T-20 toaster of the 1940s (the famed soft-edged, cross-slitted automatic in which you merely placed your bread into the slot(s) to activate it) was such a hit that Sunbeam kept the configuration (under various subsequent upgrades and model name changes) in production through the mid-1990s.
     - Alphonso Ianelli, Robert D. Budlong, Jay Doblin, and Henry Dreyfuss.
     - Raymond Loewy, who may have helped inspire or refine the dashes of automotive-influenced styling touches which appear on many a classic Mixmaster. Small wonder: Loewy is best remembered as a renowned automotive designer. In fact, the car many consider to have been the most striking American automobile design of the 20th Century was a Raymond Loewy design - the 1954 Studebaker Starliner.

     Photopainting of Ivar Jepson by your chronicler, based upon a photograph presumed to have been an official Chicago Flexible Shaft Company photograph, and appearing with the aforesaid "Mr. Sunbeam."