Honeywell International Inc. is an American publicly traded, multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Charlotte, North Carolina. It primarily operates in three areas of business: building automation, industrial automation, and energy and sustainability solutions (ESS). Honeywell also operates Sandia National Laboratories under contract with the U.S. Department of Energy. Honeywell is a Fortune 500 company, ranked 115th in 2023. In 2025, the corporation had a global workforce of approximately 101,000 employees. As of 2025, its chairman and chief executive officer was Vimal Kapur.
The corporation's name, Honeywell International Inc., is a product of the merger of Honeywell Inc. and AlliedSignal in 1999. The corporation headquarters were consolidated with AlliedSignal's headquarters in Morristown, New Jersey. The combined company chose the name "Honeywell" because of the considerable brand recognition. Honeywell was a component of the Dow Jones Industrial Average index from 1999 to 2008. Prior to 1999, its corporate predecessors were included dating back to 1925, including early entrants in the computing and thermostat industries.
In 2020, Honeywell rejoined the Dow Jones Industrial Average index. In 2021, it moved its stock listing from the New York Stock Exchange to the Nasdaq.
In 2025, Honeywell announced it would split into three companies: Honeywell Technologies, Honeywell Aerospace, and Solstice Advanced Materials. It has been estimated that the aerospace and automation businesses could be worth as much as $104 billion and $94 billion, respectively, after the split.
History The Butz Thermo-Electric Regulator Company was founded in 1885 when the Swiss-born Albert Butz invented the damper-flapper, a thermostat used to control coal furnaces, bringing automated heating system regulation into homes. In 1888, after a falling out with his investors, Butz left the company and transferred the patents to the legal firm Paul, Sanford, and Merwin, who renamed the company the Consolidated Temperature Controlling Company.
As the years passed, CTCC struggled with debt and the company underwent several name changes. After it was renamed the Electric Heat Regulator Company in 1893, W. R. Sweatt, a stockholder in the company, was sold "an extensive list of patents" and named secretary-treasurer. By 1900, Sweatt had bought out the remaining shares of the company from the other stockholders.
1906 Honeywell Heating Specialty Company founded In 1906, Mark Honeywell founded the Honeywell Heating Specialty Company in Wabash, Indiana, to manufacture and market his invention, the mercury seal generator.
1922–1934 Mergers and acquisitions As Honeywell's company grew, thanks in part to the acquisition of Jewell Manufacturing Company in 1922 to better automate his heating system, it began to clash with the Electric Heat Regulator Company now-renamed Minneapolis Heat Regulator Company. In 1927, this led to the merging of both companies into the publicly held Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company. Honeywell was named the company's first president, alongside W.R. Sweatt as its first chairman.
In 1929, combined assets were valued at over $3.5 million, with less than $1 million in liabilities just months before Black Monday. In 1931, Minneapolis-Honeywell began a period of expansion and acquisition when it purchased the Time-O-Stat Controls Company, giving the company access to a greater number of patents for its controls systems.
W.R. Sweatt and his son Harold provided 75 years of uninterrupted leadership for the company. W.R. Sweatt faced hardship and turned an innovative idea – thermostatic heating control – into a successful business.
1934–1941 International growth Harold took over in 1934, leading Honeywell through a period of growth and global expansion that set the stage for Honeywell to become a global technology leader. The merger into the Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Company proved to be a saving grace for the corporation.
1934 marked Minneapolis-Honeywell's first foray into the international market, when it acquired the Brown Instrument Company and inherited its relationship with the Yamatake Company of Tokyo, a Japan-based distributor. Later in 1934, Minneapolis-Honeywell started distributorships across Canada, as well as one in the Netherlands, its first European office. This expansion into international markets continued in 1936, with its first distributorship in London, as well as its first foreign assembly facility being established in Canada. By 1937, ten years after the merger, Minneapolis-Honeywell had over 3,000 employees, with $16 million in annual revenue.
World War II With the outbreak of World War II, Minneapolis-Honeywell was approached by the US military for engineering and manufacturing projects. In 1941, Minneapolis-Honeywell developed a superior tank periscope, camera stabilizers, and the C-1 autopilot.
The C-1 revolutionized precision bombing and was ultimately used on the two B-29 bombers that dropped atomic bombs on Japan in 1945. The success of these projects led Minneapolis-Honeywell to open an Aero division in Chicago on October 5, 1942. This division was responsible for the development of the formation stick to control autopilots, more accurate fuel quantity indicators for aircraft, and the turbo supercharger.
In 1950, Minneapolis-Honeywell's Aero division was contracted for the controls on the first US nuclear submarine, USS Nautilus. In 1951, the company acquired Intervox Company for their sonar, ultrasonic, and telemetry technologies. Honeywell also helped develop and manufacture the RUR-5 ASROC for the US Navy.
1950–1970s In 1953, in cooperation with the USAF Wright-Air Development Center, Honeywell developed an automated control unit, that could control an aircraft through various stages of a flight, from taxiing to takeoff to the point where the aircraft neared its destination and the pilot took over for landing. Called the Automatic Master Sequence Selector, the onboard control operated similarly to a player piano to relay instructions to the aircraft's autopilot at certain way points during the flight, significantly reducing the pilot's workload."Punched Tape Controls Aircraft In Flight" Popular Mechanics, May 1953, p. 89. Technologically, this effort had parallels to contemporary efforts in missile guidance and numerical control. Honeywell also developed the Wagtail missile with the USAF.
From the 1950s until the mid-1970s, Honeywell was the United States' importer of Japanese company Asahi Optical's Pentax cameras and photographic equipment. These products were labeled "Heiland Pentax" and "Honeywell Pentax" in the U.S. In 1953, Honeywell introduced its most famous product, the T-86 Round thermostat.
In 1961, James H. Binger became Honeywell's president and in 1965 its chairman. Binger revamped the company sales approach, placing emphasis on profits rather than on volume. He stepped up the company's international expansion – it had six plants producing 12% of the company's revenue. He officially changed the company's corporate name from "Minneapolis-Honeywell Regulator Co." to "Honeywell", to better represent their colloquial name. Throughout the 1960s, Honeywell continued to acquire other businesses, including Security Burglar Alarm Company in 1969.
In the 1970s, after one member of a group called FREEBruce Johasen, "Out of Silence", Minnesota History (Spring 2019), 189: "Halfhill steered the group through the administrative channels needed to establish FREE as a student group". on the Minneapolis campus (U of M) of the University of MinnesotaNeal R. Peirce, "The Great Plains States of America: People, Politics, and Power in the Nine Great Plains States", George J. McLeod (1973), 145; available online, accessed February 7, 2014 asked five major companies with local offices to explain their attitudes toward gay men and women, three responded quickly,Anon., "Three big companies say they hire Gays", The Advocate (30 September 1970). insisting that they did not discriminate against gay people in their hiring policies. Only Honeywell objected to hiring gay people.Sources: Michael McConnell Files, "Full Equality, a diary" (volumes 1a - d), Tretter Collection in GLBT Studies, U of M Libraries. Letter to FREE from Vice President Gerry E. Morse, Honeywell Inc. (29 June 1970): "We would not employ a known homosexual." Later in the 1970s, when faced with a denial of access to students, Honeywell "quietly [reversed] its hiring policy".Lars Bjornson, "A quiet win: Honeywell yields", The Advocate (10 April 1974), 13.
The beginning of the 1970s saw Honeywell focus on process controls, with Honeywell merging its computer operations with GE's information systems in 1970, and later acquiring GE's process control business. With the acquisition, Honeywell took over responsibility for GE's ongoing Multics operating system project. The design and features of Multics greatly influenced the Unix operating system. Multics influenced many of the features of Honeywell/GE's GECOS and GCOS8 General Comprehensive Operating System operating systems. Honeywell, Groupe Bull, and Control Data Corporation formed a joint venture in Magnetic Peripherals Inc. which became a major player in the hard disk drive market.
Honeywell was the worldwide leader in 14-inch disk drive technology in the OEM marketplace in the 1970s and early 1980s, especially with its SMD (Storage Module Drive) and CMD (Cartridge Module Drive). In the second half of the 1970s, Honeywell started to look to international markets again, acquiring the French Compagnie Internationale pour l’Informatique in 1976. In 1984, Honeywell formed Honeywell High Tech Trading to lease their foreign marketing and distribution to other companies abroad, in order to establish a better position in those markets. Under Binger's stewardship from 1961 to 1978 he expanded the company into such fields as defense, aerospace, and computing.
During and after the Vietnam Era, Honeywell's defense division produced a number of products, including cluster bombs, missile guidance systems, napalm, and land mines. Minnesota-Honeywell Corporation completed flight tests on an inertia guidance sub-system for the X-20 project at Eglin Air Force Base, Florida, utilizing an NF-101B Voodoo by August 1963. The X-20 project was canceled in December 1963."Fiery Crash of Drone Plane Kills Two, Injures One – Four Firemen Overcome In Wake Of Blaze." Playground Daily News (Fort Walton Beach, Florida), Volume 16, Number 271, August 20, 1963, p. 1. The Honeywell Project, founded in 1968, organized protests against the company to persuade it to abandon weapons productionState ex rel. Pillsbury v. Honeywell, Inc., Minnesota Supreme Court, 1971
In 1980, Honeywell bought Incoterm Corporation to compete in both the airline reservations system networks and bank teller markets.
Honeywell Information Systems
In April 1955, Minneapolis-Honeywell started a joint venture with Raytheon called Datamatic to enter the computer market and compete with IBM. In 1957, its first computer, the DATAmatic 1000, was sold and installed. By the release of the DATAmatic 1000, however, Minneapolis-Honeywell bought Raytheon's interest in Datamatic and turned it into the Electronic Data Processing division, later Honeywell Information Systems (HIS) of Minneapolis-Honeywell.