For the first half of the twentieth century Safety-Flo’s Research and Development divisions were separate entities that harbored deep rivalries. Research delved deeply into the frontiers of pneumatics, fungi, undersea audio transmission, and traffic control, while Development strove to turn these and other ideas into new products.

The lack of communication between the departments is perhaps best illustrated by the Great Athlete’s Foot Fungus Fungus outbreak of 1948. Having isolated a strain of the fungi coccypitus estrepitus that seemed to attack and destroy the common dermopedic malady (hence its name, the athlete’s foot fungus Fungus), Chief Researcher Otto Kemmerlich sent a drum of it over to Development to see what they could do with it. There it was apparently mislabeled as a paint additive, and, when it came time to repaint the Development building, was mixed into the paint. Within a week the building was covered with a thick, burry carpet of yellowish fuzz that eventually choked all vegetation within a half-mile radius, inundating the rest of the Safety-Flo campus and the nearby town of Carmine, Ohio.

In the midst of all the hubbub, Kemmerlich noted that among all the Safety-Flo employees and displaced Carmine residents, not a single case of athlete’s foot was reported.

After the company finished resettling in its current Otisburg, Ohio location, Les Phillips, comptroller from 1952-55, set the course for a seven-year restructuring program that, among other things, formally united the two entities. The newly created division would be called Research and Development, and all its members would work on the same set of projects.