The Legacy of Western Gear Corporation

For six decades in Washington, including 25 years on the Everett waterfront, the Western Gear Corporation designed and built cutting-edge industrial products for customers around the world. Its projects ranged from mountaintop telescopes that explored the stars and tracked spacecraft, to machinery that lifted 14 million pounds of equipment and payload from the floor of the Pacific Ocean, to the gear-driven turntable that moves the revolving restaurant atop the Space Needle in Seattle (shown in a test above). Sold to a Wisconsin company in 1982, Western Gear was closed in 1986 to make room for construction of Naval Station Everett… read more >