About the Earlbeck Corporation

Earlbeck Gases & Technologies dates back to 1919, when it was first formed as the T.A. Canty Company, a wholesale welding products distributorship.  Among Canty’s employees was Al Earlbeck, who joined the business as a high school student and decided to make it his career.  By 1949, Canty was ready to retire and Al Earlbeck and another employee, Bill Landrum, negotiated a buyout.  The company name was changed to Earlbeck & Landrum, a partnership that lasted for five years.  In 1952, Earlbeck took ownership of the entire business and renamed the company Earlbeck Welding Supplies.  It has been a family-owned business ever since.

For the next 20 years, Al Earlbeck grew the welding company, fostering a philosophy of knowledge-based, solutions-oriented selling built on a foundation of loyal customer relationships. His creed had been: “I believe that a distributor should know more about his products than his customers do, and has a responsibility to recommend what is honestly best for his customers to use.”  This is still true today.

In 1977, at the age of 25, after earning a degree in Mechanical Engineering, Jim Earlbeck was named vice-president.  Four years later, he became president. 

Corporate goals were modified to strengthen the technical side of the business, such as welder training and testing and expanding the portfolio of product offerings to include compressed and cryogenic gases. In order to provide a complete range of support for its customers.   Both had been accomplished, a gas distributor in 1988 and creating the Earlbeck Technical Center, a 4500 sq. ft. training and testing facility with 12 booths at our Baltimore facility and an additional 8 booths in a mobile facility contained in a 40-foot trailer.  The technical center became an AWS Accredited Test Facility, one of only 80 in the nation in 2010.

In 2002, the company’s name was changed to Earlbeck Gases & Technologies.  We have two branches with our main location in Baltimore and another in Beltsville, MD to serve the Washington D.C., Prince George and Montgomery county areas.

Technical support and top tier service remain our goal.