You’ve likely driven by it dozens or hundreds of times, a giant 135,000 square-foot industrial complex right in the heart of downtown Traverse City. But what is Cone Drive, and what takes place inside the huge building that employs more than 165 on 12th Street near Lake Avenue?

According to Cone Drive Operations CEO Kurt Gamelin, one popular assumption is that the company manufactures automotive parts, which isn’t entirely wrong: the company makes gears and gear drives—some of which power production equipment for car parts.

But the full picture is much broader. Founded in the 1920s, Cone Drive specializes in something called “double enveloping worm gearing.” With a unique contoured design, this type of gear spreads the load of the gearbox across more surface area than a standard gear.

The added surface area makes it possible for Cone Drive to build more powerful gears in smaller packages. A competitor, Gamelin says, would need a gear twice as big to transmit the same amount of horsepower and torque. Due to design and manufacturing hurdles, Cone Drive is one of the only companies in the world that produces its type of gear.

The exceptional size-to-power ratio made Cone Drive a valued defense contractor back in the 1940s.

"The military saw the advantage of the high torque density of the gear set, where you could use a smaller gear set to drive a heavy load,” Gamelin says. “So literally every gun [used by the U.S. military] ended up with a Cone gear set during World War II.”

In fact, Cone Drive’s importance to the war effort might explain how it ended up in Traverse City. When war broke out, Cone Drive was headquartered in Detroit. Legend has it the government wanted to get the company out of a major city in case of an attack on American soil. The more remote counties of northern Michigan, it seems, proved attractive.

Whether this explanation is fact or fiction has been lost over time, though Gamelin agrees the story would make sense.

Another possible explanation is that Traverse City was the home of John Parsons, whose company was based in the 12th Street building before Cone Drive moved to town. It was in this building that Parsons invented the world’s first numerical control (NC) machine in 1948.

The NC machine paved the way for modern automation; it built the technology by which computers could control machines rather than manual cranks and machinists. Parsons himself was honored by President Reagan for ushering in a second industrial revolution.

When Cone Drive moved to Traverse City in 1950, the company started incorporating numerical control into its products. Today the company is a world leader in precision motion control technology, a vital part of modern automation. From solar panels that move to track the sun to satellite antenna dishes that turn to receive signals, Cone Drive manufactures gear sets that allow for exact automated positioning.

Across its three locations (TC, Ludington and China), the company has 450 employees  All told, Cone Drive serves 30 markets, including solar, satellite communications, oil and gas, robotics, food processing and packaging, plastics, and construction. The company also remains an important defense contractor (Gamelin notes there’s a Cone Drive gear on every Predator drone).