Why something that is good is "OK"

I never really wondered about this, but one day I found out the deal behind this, and it's kinda neat.

In 1904, a Swedish inventor named Oscar Kjellberg received two patents. One was a materials patent for a covered welding electrode. The other was a process patent for overhead welding with covered electrodes. He started a company called ESAB (which is the Swedish abbreviation for "Electrical Welding, LTD") to distribute his electrodes. Today ESAB is the biggest welding-supply company in the world. (Note: Kjellberg thought the process patent was more important than the materials patent because being able to overhead weld with an arc welder meant you could also weld vertically with one, which means you can arc-weld a ship together. ESAB was founded in Gothenburg. The Port of Gothenburg is the biggest in Scandinavia, one of the biggest in the world, and there were a lot of ship-repair and shipbuilding companies there.)

You're thinking to yourself, "what the hell is a covered welding electrode?" If you've ever seen a welding electrode, you've noticed that it looks a little like a long, skinny metal corn dog--it's got a little steel handle and a fuzzy, clayey-looking deposit along most of its length. This deposit is the covering, and it's technically called flux. When you weld with the rod, the flux heats up and creates a kind of smoke which drives air away from the puddle of molten metal that is your weld in progress. Air--or, more specifically, oxygen--is a bad thing in a weld because it makes the weld weaker. Before the covered electrode came out, you bought flux in a can, sprinkled it around the weld area and performed your weld--which took time, was messy and, because flux was a powder, was impossible to use on anything but the top of a flat object. But with covered electrodes, you could weld in any position you wanted--overhead, vertical or horizontal. (They still sell powdered flux--it's used in an assembly-line welding system called Submerged Arc. If you're running subarc, you're manufacturing something.)

Kjellberg was smart enough to realize that even though he had a patent on his electrodes, they weren't that hard to make and, before long, everyone was going to come up with some way to stick flux onto a steel rod. He needed some way to differentiate ESAB's electrodes from all the others, so he started stamping his initials on their steel ends. You guessed it: his initials are OK.

Before long, people started asking for those "OK" welding rods, and because OK welding rods were good, everything that was good was OK.

One theory holds that it was one U.S. President (can't remember who, but someone here will tell us) who would say "orl 'krekt" (all correct) which became "O.K."

known to his friends as "Old Kinderhook"