OConnor Engineering Laboratories was founded in 1949 by Chadwell O’Connor. Chad, once a designer and builder of steam power plants, always had a passion for steam locomotives.

 

In the late 1940s, he decided to document them on film before they were all gone, but found it impossible to pan smoothly with his Bell & Howell camera. To solve this problem, Chad designed and built a Fluid Head camera support that would allow his lightweight camera to follow the moving trains without jumps, and distracting starts and stops. One day, in 1949 while he was filming the trains at Glendale Station, another steam train enthusiast noticed this unusual setup and stopped to ask a few questions. He liked the concept, and asked Chad to build a Fluid Head that would solve pan & tilt problems on his new film, ‘The Living Desert’.