Parnall & Sons
UK business
Parnall & Sons Limited was a shop and ship fitting and aircraft component manufacturer in Bristol, England. The original company was set up in 1820 by William Parnall in Narrow Wine Street, initially making weights and measures, before expanding into shop keeping equipment and shop fittings.
By the 1880s Parnall & Sons was the largest shop fitting company in England with showrooms in Narrow Wine Street and Fairfax Street, a scale works at Fishponds and branches in London and Swansea. The scales and weighing machines produced at the Fishponds foundry on Parnall Road included the hardy Patent Agate Hand Scales and the Patent National Balances invented by Mr Parnall, which sold 20,000 in 10 years. In 1889 the company expanded into shopfronts, including glasswork and iron architecture and had over 400 employees. By the 1890s "there is hardly a city or town in Great Britain where their productions are not known and appreciated". Weighing machine production was phased out after W & T Avery was associated and the company concentrated on its well-known shop-front business. The foundry was later sold to George Adlam & Sons the iron founders and brewers engineers.
During World War I, the company started manufacture of aeroplanes and seaplanes, producing over 600 by 1918. George Parnall left the company soon afterwards, who eventually went on to form Parnall and successfully continued aircraft design and manufacture elsewhere in Bristol.
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This entry incorporates text from “Parnall & Sons” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.