Cabot Corporation

Cabot will be a great company--the best company in all markets that it serves, best particularly in safety, quality and innovation; employee, customer and community satisfaction; and shareholder return. Cabot will become a great company by striving for excellence in everything it does, through: highly motivated employees; a values-based organization; surpassing customers' needs and earning their admiration; and expanding the use of core technologies. Cabot Corporation is a diversified, global chemical and plastics manufacturer with industry leadership in such areas as carbon black, fumed silica, tantalum powder production, and plastics compounds. It is also involved in liquified natural gas importation and distribution and the manufacture of industrial safety products. Godfrey Lowell Cabot, the founder of Cabot Corporation, lived to be 101, and the choices he made early in his career set much of the company's course to the present day. Born in 1861, he was both a Cabot and a Lowell, a son of two of the most powerful and prestigious old Boston Brahmin merchant families. After graduating from Harvard in 1882, he went to the oil and gas fields of western Pennsylvania to start a business. There he found that the industry produced huge amounts of carbon debris, waste products of gas blow-offs and refining. Godfrey's older brother Samuel had founded a paint and stain business, using coal tars to make black pigment. Godfrey decided to build his business around carbon black, the very substance that was fouling the oil fields. Distinct from soot, this substance, a form of carbon sometimes called lamp black, had been around for a long time. Prehistoric cave dwellers used it to draw animals on cave walls, and the Egyptian pharaohs used it as a pigment. The Cabots saw similar applications for it. The Cabots built a plant in Buffalo Mills, Pennsylvania, that used natural gas to produce carbon black in 1882, and in 1884 Godfrey patented a carbon black production process that used stationary plates and rotating burners. In 1887 Godfrey bought out Samuel's interest in the business. At about this time, a glut developed in the carbon black market; at the same time, new uses were being found for natural gas, which was the raw material for carbon black. Cabot's response was to purchase gas leases and drill on the sites, drilling his first successful gas well in Saxonburg, Pennsylvania, in 1888. He continued, despite the glut, to buy up small carbon black factories as well, and by 1897 he was probably the largest producer in the industry. In 1898, with the exhaustion of the Pennsylvania gas fields, Cabot moved his operation to West Virginia, where he acquired oil and gas leases, which he drilled successfully. He continued to add gas sites in West Virginia, consolidating his holdings, and building a natural gasoline extraction plant near Elizabeth, West Virginia, in 1914. These holdings were the forerunners of Cabot's natural gas processing plants in the Southwest. While the advent and spread of high-speed presses and similar applications greatly expanded Cabot's business, World War I demonstrated the potential for carbon black in the modern economy. It had been known for a while that carbon black could inhibit damage to materials caused by the sun; a few years before the war, the India Rubber Gutta-Percha and Telegraph Works Co. of Silvertown, England, began to manufacture automobile tires using carbon black as a stabilizing or reinforcing agent. During World War I the United States began using carbon black, and its superior properties became evident in improved tread wear and lower rates of tire failure. After the war, its use spread throughout the tire industry, providing a tremendous burst of growth to Cabot and other suppliers. The company came to excel in producing different grades and types of carbon black for different applications. In 1922 Cabot's company was incorporated as Godfrey L. Cabot, Inc. At about this time, the locus of c