Moisture meter company Wagner Meters (Rogue River, Ore.) was founded in 1965 and recently, in honor of the company’s 50th anniversary, the grandson of company founder Delmer Wagner wrote a blog post about the start of the company and how it progressed over the last half-century.
In the early 60s, Wagner was an electrician who worked for a sawmill in Oregon. He heard how frustrated management was with contact moisture detectors used on lumber, and he created a new product that was more reliable, easier to calibrate and less costly to make. The mill eventually took out a patent on the device.
Wagner left the mill and two years later in 1965 founded Wagner Electronics, through which he designed and sold his second in-line transistorized moisture detector. Wagner followed up with a number of innovations, including the first non-contact meter, the ability to calibrate meters in percent moisture content instead of the relative scale, and an in-kiln moisture detector.
In 1987, Wagner sold the company to his son, Ed, who had developed the technology behind the company’s first pinless meter they began selling in the early 80s.
The recession in the early 90s convinced the company that it needed to expand beyond the forest industry, and in 1992 Wager Electronics began selling equipment to the wood flooring industry.
Through the company’s wood flooring connections, it began to hear complaints about concrete moisture causing problems to the floor covering. In 2005, Wagner introduced the Rapid RH, an in-situ relative humidity testing system for concrete. Today, the Rapid RH product is in its fifth iteration.
Wagner Electronics became Wagner Meters in 2010. The key to the company’s longevity? Fostering a company culture of innovation and manufacturing reliable products, wrote Wagner’s grandson Eric. His full-length history can be read here.
