Snap on Equipment SRL, Correggio

John Bean is one of the world's leading brands of garage equipment for garages, tyre shops and body repair service. The company's roots date back to a retired inventor, John Bean. In 1904 he founded the John Bean Spray Pump Company. When the company merged with a nearby food machinery company, it became the Food Machinery & Chemical Company (FMC). In 1996 Snap-on Corporation acquired the successful automotive equipment division from FMC and renamed it John Bean, honouring the original founder and visionary inventor. John Bean engineers continued to innovate automotive service equipment and in 1934 introduced the first dynamic wheel balancer. In 1947, John Bean launched the Visualiner which was the first optical wheel aligner in the world and quickly became the standard of the industry. In 1987 the John Bean Signature Series model 9909 became the first alignment machine with built-in training systems for the operator. The FMC Visualiner II of series 9000 in 1984 marked the first successful application of optical measuring heads with a CRT computerised aligner. FMC engineers were also the first to develop calibration for both wheel aligners and wheel balancers which could be performed by operators.