02/26/2026
"BORN IN SCOTLAND IN 1871, JOHN FAULDS of Oak Park, Illinois seems to have made commercial bakery ovens his life’s work—as early as 1900, when he was still listed as “a citizen of the United Kingdom of Great Britain,” he appears on a patent document for an oven, using hollow tiles to distribute heat more evenly, for his employer, a company called Middleby-Marshall.
Over time Faulds would come to focus on the question of how to squeeze more capacity into the floor space an oven occupied—the obvious limitation being that an oven could only be as deep as a baker could comfortably reach inside, so a bigger oven was, by necessity, a wider oven. His initial solution was to stack a series of shelves inside the oven which spun like a lazy susan, so it could be twice as deep but you could spin it around to reach what you wanted. On August 15, 1928 Faulds applied for a patent for this design, which was granted as Patent No. 1,771,885 on July 29, 1930.
In 1932 he launched Faulds Oven & Equipment Co. near Pulaski and Diversey, and two years after that he patented an oven with a ferris wheel design in the middle and stationary shelves on either side. It was another 15 years before he filed an application for a fully rotating-shelves gas oven on December 2, 1949. He was granted Patent No. 2,650,554 on September 1, 1953—as it happens, two years after his death at age 80, by which time his son was running the company. If you see one in use, it’s likely to be this design, with full-width shelves of quarter-inch steel.
Faulds’ oven was really a bakery oven, with six shelves of 1/4″ thick steel, sized so they would exactly accommodate three standard 18″ by 26″ sheet pans, suitable for mass production of pastries or breads.
After coming back from his service in World War II, John Faulds Jr. took over his father’s business. Thanks to G.I.s like John Jr. (though not him—he was stationed in the Aleutians), an Italian discovery called pizza became popular in postwar America.
Through the 1950s and 1960s Faulds ovens were a popular choice for pizzerias, not only in Chicago but throughout the upper midwest and beyond.
But like a lot of small manufacturing concerns, Faulds seems to have found it hard to weather the economy of the late 60s and early 70s. A manufacturer’s directory suggests that John Faulds Jr. sold part or all of the company around 1969, because suddenly one Maxwell Brace III is listed as the president and Faulds has the (somewhat honorary-sounding) title of Sales and Engineering Manager. The plant manager by then is one David Moskal, and by the late 70s Moskal is listed as the president and the address has changed to north Kedzie.
By the 1980s Moskal was running what was left of it as a parts supplier from a small warehouse on Clybourn. He died in 2009, and John Faulds Jr. died in Florida in 2012.
(*History and pic courtesy of Mike Gebert) - https://fooditor.com/restoring-badass-chicago-pizza-oven-ord-pizzeria/
