Dover Corporation
American conglomerate manufacturer of industrial products
Dover Corporation is an American conglomerate manufacturer of industrial products headquartered in Downers Grove, Illinois. It is a constituent of the S&P 500 index and is listed on the New York Stock Exchange. Dover was ranked 484 in the 2026 Fortune 500.
History
Early history
Dover Corporation was formed in 1955, when New York City stockbroker George L. Ohrstrom Sr. recruited Fred D. Durham to manage four manufacturing companies that Ohrstrom had acquired during the 1930s and 1940s. The four original firms were the C. Lee Cook Company, a manufacturer of seals and piston rings for compressors; Rotary Lift, a maker of automotive lifts; W. C. Norris, a producer of sucker rods for oil-well pumping; and Peerless, a maker of space heaters that was divested in 1977. Durham, who had previously owned and led C. Lee Cook, was named Dover's first president. Later that same year, the Dover Corporate offices opened in Washington, D.C., and it was listed on the New York Stock Exchange.
Between 1955 and 1979, Dover acquired 14 companies. A great deal of this acquisition activity served to build the Dover Elevator business.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 10, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16974527. VIAF identifies the subject as 131977372. The Library of Congress control number is no2016031674. 4 of 4 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 2026, 1955, 1977 and 1979.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dover Corporation” 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.