The year was 1911. The news of the day -- Orville Wright flew a glider for 9 minutes and 45 seconds at Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina; Chevrolet officially entered the automobile market to compete with the Ford Model T; and the Zenith Carburetor Co. was founded in Detroit, Michigan.
Today, the current record-holder for the longest scheduled nonstop commercial flight in the world clocked in at 18-and-a-half hours, Chevy and Ford are still competing for customers and Zenith Carburetor Co., now Zenith Fuel Systems and located in Bristol, is more than a century old and “makes a lot more than carburetors,” according to Darcio Giovanetti, the company’s president.
“We’ll be 105 in September,” he said. “There aren’t a lot of manufacturers that can say that. The company moved here in 1984 from Detroit because of all the union activity that was going on there. It was in the company’s best interest to move south and Bristol was a good place to locate. There was, and is, a good work force here—almost half of our employees have been with us since our grand opening.”
