Heise-Dresser Facility On The Market

By Steve Bigham

Recent rumors that the Heise-Dresser facility on South Main Street is moving out of town are untrue, according to representatives of the company. However, the corporation is reportedly up for sale.

“The rumor is just a rumor. Business will go on as usual until a buyer is found. We’re hoping that will occur by the end of year or early next year,” noted spokesperson Zelma Branch from her Houston, Texas, office. The Newtown facility is now part of the much larger Dresser Industries, Inc., of Texas – one of the world’s largest suppliers of high-tech products and services to worldwide energy and natural resources and industrial markets.

Otto W. Heise started the Heise Bourdon Tube Company in the late 1920s and moved it from Bridgeport to Newtown a few years later. He set up shop in a colonial home near his own home on Brushy Hill Road. There, he developed a line of pressure gauges that became the premier pressure measurement tools in the world.

In 1961, he built the South Main Street facility to accommodate the massive amounts of business he picked up from the aerospace and ship building industries. In 1967, he built an addition, complete with a domed observatory with a powerful telescope that allowed him to gaze at the heavens – the same heavens that NASA was watching with the help of his gauges.

Mr Heise died at age 77 in 1972 and Dresser Industries, Inc., of Dallas, Texas, purchased his company the following year.

The top of the observatory has long been welded shut and the telescope was given to the Taft School in Watertown. Mr Heise often invited high school students to explore the universe inside his observatory.

A 15,000 square foot addition in 1980 increased the size of the Newtown building to 40,000 square feet.

During his lifetime, Mr Heise was generous to the town, donating $25,000 to build the swimming pool at Newtown High School, $30,000 for improvements at Edmond Town Hall, and $10,000 to improve Taylor football field behind Hawley School.