Buying Back What They Used to Have--a Directory of Lost Companies Tale

Emerson's recent purchase of the Mobray line from Roxboro appears to be ready to bear fruit already, with the announcement today of "Rosemount's first point level switch" by Emerson PR Guru Jerry Moon. Well, not exactly. Back in the day, Rosemount owned a company called Kay-Ray, which started out in nuclear gauges, but was pressured by Rosemount executives to diversify into ultrasonics. So Kay-Ray bought a blivet named Wesmar, and then Emerson, having bought a number of other blivets at the original Envirotech fire sale (not the one in the early 1990s, the one in the early 1980s), merged one of those blivets, National Sonics, with Kay-Ray. Kay-Ray's financial performance approximating a perfect vacuum, Emerson sold it to its number one competitor, what had once been known as Texas Nuclear, in the late 1990s. So now, once again, Rosemount has tuning fork type level switches.