Marshall Burns Lloyd was born on March 10, 1858 in St. Paul, Minnesota, United States, the son of John and Margaret (Conmee) Lloyd. His father was an Englishman who had emigrated to Canada in 1832 and in the early fifties had settled in St. Paul with his bride. While Lloyd was still an infant, however, his parents returned to Canada to live and settled on a farm at Meaford on Georgian Bay.
Lloyd obtained a limited education.
At the age of fourteen Lloyd went to work in the village store. Possessing unusual initiative and aggressiveness he soon gave up this work to sell fish, catching his own fish and peddling them from door to door. At sixteen he went alone to Toronto and for two years worked in a grocery store and also peddled soap. At eighteen he became a rural mail-carrier on the sixty-five-mile route between Port Arthur and Pidgeon River, and while so engaged he joined the rush of settlers and real-estate speculators to Winnipeg. For a living he worked as a waiter, and by shrewd purchases of land with his meager savings he accumulated several thousand dollars within a few months. With this fund he went to North Dakota, bought a farm at Grafton, and brought to it his parents and brothers and sisters.
He soon discovered that he did not like farming and went alone again to St. Thomas, North Dakota, where he engaged in the insurance business. While thus employed he patented a weighing scale for the use of farmers and undertook to manufacture the article in St. Thomas. Shortly after getting under way, however, the factory was completely destroyed by fire and Lloyd lost everything. In the hope of securing financial aid to rebuild his plant he went to Minneapolis, Minnesota, but was not successful. In order to live he became a shoe salesman and in his spare time worked on other inventions.
After more than ten years Lloyd was eventually rewarded when the C. O. White Manufacturing Company of Minneapolis gave him an interest in the company in exchange for the right to use a machine he had patented for weaving wire door and table mats. He then patented a machine for weaving wire spring mattresses. With this invention he was able to buy out the White Company in 1900 and to found the Lloyd Manufacturing Company. The success of his woven-wire bed spring was immediate and he sold manufacturing rights not only to American industrialists but also to manufacturers in Europe, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.
Following this venture he perfected a machine to make wire wheels for baby carriages and began their manufacture first in Minneapolis and then in Menominee, Michigan, where his plant was permanently established. His next successful invention was the machinery for manufacturing thin tubing out of ribbons of steel of any width, and the machinery to weave wicker-ware of other than flat surfaces. He changed the time-honored method of weaving, and instead of attaching the weft or warp to the frame of the article desired, he found a way of weaving the wicker independently of the frame and attaching it afterward. He then devised a loom to weave wicker in the new way. This machine, capable of weaving wicker-ware more exactly and in one-thirtieth of the time required by the expert hand-weaver, revolutionized the wicker-manufacturing industry.
In addition to his activities in the several manufacturing companies which he founded, Lloyd, a few years before his death, successfully organized a community cooperative department store and theatre in Menominee. He was also mayor of Menominee for two terms from 1913 to 1917. He died in Menominee.
Lloyd was married three times but there were no children from any of the marriages. His third wife, Mrs. Henriette Hammer Pollen of Orange, New Jersey, whom he married on April 11, 1922.
