Did you Know

The history of Molex is, in large part, the story of the Krehbiel family, who had emigrated from their native Switzerland to Germany and then relocated again to the United States in the 1820s.

Later, while the U.S. was preparing to enter World War I, the government asked Frederick Augustus Krehbiel (the first of four generations of the family involved with Molex) to design a refinishing plant to generate toluol, a byproduct of coal that was intrinsic to the production of TNT. With his plant in action, Krehbiel observed piles of coal tar pitch, a waste product left over after the coal was refined. Several years later in Canada, Krehbiel noticed an equally worthless material gathered in giant piles: the fine, little strands of asbestos known as asbestos tailings. Krehbiel realized that if he used the coal tar pitch as a binder and the asbestos tailings as filler, then combined them with limestone, which would serve as a reinforcing agent, he could create a new material--a plastic--that could be produced at a nominal cost. He dubbed the new material Molex - derived by taking "mol" from the substance's molded state and adding on "ex," which Krehbiel felt was a modern sound. In 1938, Krehbiel, then in his late 60s, and his son Edwin formed a new company, Molex Products Company, naming it after the product he had created and basing it in Brookfield, Illinois. They began using Molex as a material to make flowerpots.

Now run by J. Joseph King – the first person outside the Krehbiel family to serve as company president and above – the transformation from a flowerpot material to appliance electrical insulation (the first product tooled and marketed with Molex was a molded terminal block for General Electric's Hotpoint range) to the production of connectors used to link electronic components is complete. From the Krehbiels to today, Molex has built one of the largest electronic connector companies in the world out of scraps – not bad.