In the center of a giant factory building where thousands of Lancastrians once worked, the tiny workforce of Pennsylvania Scale Co. toils day in and day out.

Unlike RCA and its successor Thomson, which occupied the site on New Holland Avenue, this company has stayed in business and forges ahead as it marks its 100th anniversary this year despite uncertain economic times.

But like RCA, the company has weathered many changes over the last century, leaving it a shadow of its former self: a business that, at its peak in the 1960s, employed more than 200 workers making commercial and industrial scales at a plant in Leola.

Since 2002, the company has been owned by the Connecticut-based Emery Winslow Scale Co., which makes truck scales at its plant in Terre Haute, Ind.

Still, the Lancaster company is proud to mark a century of producing a "Made in the U.S.A." brand and fills orders to the tune of $3.5 million in yearly sales, according to Rob Woodward, Pennsylvania Scale's vice president and general manager.

Ten workers, including Woodward and office staff, occupy 15,000 square feet in Burle Business Park, the former RCA plant now parceled into segments housing various enterprises, including Lancaster-Lebanon IU-13 educational services, Advanced Cooling Technology, the Lancaster General billing department, and a company that makes police shields.

Pennsylvania Scale is one of the few companies in the complex actually making a product, notes Woodward.

These days, the workers — five of whom have 30 or more years with the company — produce electronic weighing and counting scales, floor scales for shipping and receiving, airline baggage scales, and controls for weighing systems used by trucking scales companies. Recent clients  include JetBlue and Alaska Airlines and the U.S. Postal Service.

In fact, the postal counter at the Red Rose Commons Weis supermarket has one of the company's point-of-sale scales, Woodward says.

Employee Ken Nauman, 63, has been with the company 35 years. On a recent day he was assembling display monitors and platforms for airline baggage scales.

Such scales can be found at airports around the United States and in Canada and Mexico. Woodward and Nauman talked of how baggage scales made in 1991 for the USAir terminal in Pittsburgh, the company's first airline contract, are still in use.

"That's kind of who we are," said Woodward. "Our stuff lasts a long time."

'The Pennsylvania Scale Co.'s beginnings reach back to the early 1900s, when John Burkholder developed and patented a spring-less mechanical scale that used a metal ribbon pulled across a metal piece called a cam.

In 1908, he established the National Scales Corp. in a machine shop at 409 Lancaster Ave. The fledgling company began to develop the Pennsylvania-brand gasoline pumps and scales using this ribbon-and-cam mechanism.

In 1911, the company changed its name to National Store Specialty Co.; by 1914, it had built a new factory in Leola. In the early years, the company turned out scales primarily for local retailers, such as mom-and-pop stores. By 1938, it began to phase out the gas pump business.

During World War II, the company joined in the war effort by producing devices that opened parachutes.

In the 1940s, Allen Johnson, a scale distributor who eventually became CEO, helped the company develop scales that could count parts based on weight, which opened up industrial markets and made it a leading producer of counting scales. The company also began to sell postal scales during that era, primarily to Pitney Bowes.

In 1954, the company changed its name to Pennsylvania Scale Co.

The move toward electronic digital scales began in the late 1960s, and by 1978 all products were electronic.

"That was a pretty big sea change," said Woodward.

The company also weathered tough times, losing money in the late 1980s through the early 1990s, according to a previous newspaper story. Then in 2000, the company was sold to Grupo Epelsa, a Spanish company, which was nearly the "kiss of death," says Woodward.

"We languished and then we were bought by our present owner, a good old American company," he says.

That was in 2002. Also that year, Pennsylvania Scale moved to Burle from its 81,000-square-foot Leola factory at 21 Graybill Road, which had been expanded several times over the years.

"Now we're sort of free to be who we were and who we could have been," he adds.

But who they are now is quite different from who they were in their heyday.

Tom Judith, 62, a 43-year employee, described how the Leola plant was a machine shop with a lot more workers.

"At the time we had just a little over 200," he recalled. Then, he did "a little bit of everything."

He started there when he was only 19. "Most of the guys, I grew up with them," he said.

At the Leola plant, the workers would machine and drill raw castings. Now, finished metal castings are purchased from other companies, and the workers mainly do assembling and calibrating.

The Terre Haute factory manufactures the larger platforms, while the Lancaster facility produces all the electronic components used in both factories.

Pennsylvania Scale brand products are sold to companies, including Tyco, mostly through distributors such as the local Garber Scale & Calibration as well as McMaster-Carr and Omega Engineering.

Pennsylvania Scale's reputation, Woodward says, keeps the company afloat amid economic conditions that include higher steel prices and the competitive market's "downward retail pressures," what Woodward calls a "perfect storm for retail manufacturing."

Despite that, he adds, "We have the established brand that people know us and appreciate our quality."