GAF began in a New Jersey sawmill with 18 workers and a chemist working on asphalt
The company behind the Timberline shingle grew from one chemist’s asphalt experiments and later merged with a German-rooted film maker the U.S. government had once seized.
Parsippany, NJ
In 1886, the Standard Paint Company set up shop in a remodeled sawmill in Bound Brook, New Jersey. It had 18 employees and made waterproof and insulating paints and varnishes. One of those employees was a young chemist named William Griscom, who spent his time working out new ideas for asphalt compounds.
Within a few years, that work produced something new: asphalt roofing that came in rolls, ready to lay. Because it resembled rubber, the company called it RU-BER-OID. The material was unveiled at an exhibition in Rhode Island in 1891, and the company dates its introduction to 1892.
That roll of roofing is the root of GAF, which today is North America’s largest roofing manufacturer. Along the way the company merged with a chemical and film maker that had been founded as the American arm of a German conglomerate and seized by the U.S. government. It spent years as the official film of Disney’s theme parks, and it changed hands in a proxy fight. Through most of it, the work kept returning to the problem Griscom started on: how to put asphalt on a roof so it holds up and goes on fast.
The early improvements were practical. In 1898, ceramic granules were added to Ruberoid rolls to make them tougher and more resistant to fire. By 1904, Standard Paint had perfected embedding colored granules in the asphalt coating, a method the company says is still used today.
In 1912, in an effort led by Griscom, Standard Paint introduced individually cut asphalt shingles. They were made from rag felt and dipped in asphalt by hand, one at a time. Compared with rolls, they were easy to install, cheap and weatherproof. The roofing line did well enough that in 1921 the company renamed itself after its product and became The Ruberoid Co. In 1933 it brought out Tite-On shingles, which the National Roofing Museum describes as the first interlocking asphalt shingles. Ruberoid listed on the New York Stock Exchange in July 1935.
The other half of the company had a very different start. In April 1929, the German chemical trust I.G. Farben set up an American arm, the American I.G. Chemical Corporation. Its board included Edsel Ford of the Ford Motor Company and Walter Teagle of Standard Oil of New Jersey. The company made dyestuffs, solvents, photographic film and other chemicals. In 1939, after merging with the photographic supplier Agfa-Ansco, it renamed itself General Aniline and Film Corporation. That is where the letters G, A and F come from.
In February 1942, the U.S. government seized General Aniline under the Trading with the Enemy Act. It was the largest asset the country took over during World War II. For the next 23 years, government-appointed directors ran the company; one company history counts seven chief executives and more than 80 directors in that stretch. A long legal fight with a Swiss holding company that had owned most of the stock kept management cautious. Once the dispute was settled, the shares were sold to the public in 1965, in what that history calls one of the largest competitive auctions in Wall Street history.
Two years later, in 1967, Ruberoid merged with the film and chemical company. The combined business took the General Aniline & Film name and later became GAF Corporation.
The same year as the merger, a Ruberoid engineer named Phil Bottoli laminated two strip shingles together. The doubled shingle was stronger, and it had a depth a flat strip lacked. The company called it Timberline. It became North America’s best-selling shingle, and the company credits its dimensional look with helping define the modern asphalt shingle.
For a while, roofing shared the stage. In the 1970s and 1980s, GAF was a major name in film and cameras. It was the official film of Walt Disney World and Disneyland and made the View-Master, the stereoscope toy that let children cycle through cardboard reels of color photographs. Much of the company’s profit in that era came from its chemicals division, which also produced the mineral granules used on roofing shingles.
Starting in 1978, GAF spent five years selling off businesses. By 1983, only chemicals and building materials were left. That year, Samuel J. Heyman led a proxy takeover and became chairman and CEO. He moved the headquarters from Manhattan to Wayne, New Jersey. In 1985, GAF made a hostile bid for Union Carbide. It withdrew the offer in early 1986 after Carbide restructured, and came away a large shareholder.
Heyman wanted to take the company private. The October 1987 stock market crash set him back, but in March 1989 he completed a leveraged buyout with a group of GAF managers. In the 1990s, the chemicals business was spun off as International Specialty Products, and GAF became a roofing company again. The company credits Heyman’s heavy investment in its manufacturing network with helping make it the industry’s largest roofing manufacturer. GAF has been privately owned since the 1989 buyout and is a subsidiary of Standard Industries, a privately held industrial company.
The innovations after that look small from the street but matter on a roof deck. In 1991, a new way of applying granules let GAF create shadow and color patterns on the upper and lower layers of a shingle. In 1997, the company began certifying contractors and backing their workmanship as well as its own materials. That program grew into the Master Elite, Certified Plus and Certified designations, which determine which enhanced warranties an installer can offer. In 2003, GAF introduced what it calls the industry’s first self-adhered TPO membranes for commercial roofs, which went down without hot asphalt or messy adhesives. In 2007, it acquired ElkCorp, another residential roofing manufacturer.
In 2011, GAF became the first roofing manufacturer to put a lifetime limited warranty on all of its laminated shingles. That July it marked its 125th anniversary, and Bob Tafaro, then president and CEO, explained what he thought had kept it going. “There are many reasons why GAF has survived all of these years. But none of them is as remarkable as one — and that’s innovation,” Tafaro told Roofing Contractor in 2011.
Martin Grohman, then the company’s director of sustainability, pointed to a plainer habit in the same article. Breakthroughs at one plant were shared across the company through an internal website. “Probably the coolest thing we’ve done is just that: share best practices among plants,” he told the magazine.
The shingle kept changing. In 2020, GAF released Timberline HDZ, built with what it calls LayerLock technology and a larger nailing area, and paired it with a wind warranty that carries no maximum wind speed when the shingles are installed with four required GAF accessories. In 2021, it introduced a patented process for recycling old asphalt shingles. In 2022, its sister company GAF Energy launched Timberline Solar, which GAF calls the world’s first nailable solar shingle. It is nailed down like roofing instead of mounted on a rack bolted through the shingles.
The company also trains roofers. The GAF Roofing Academy offers tuition-free classroom and hands-on instruction and has trained women, veterans and people who have been incarcerated. In a company history published in 2025, GAF said the academy had trained more than 3,400 people and placed more than 2,000 graduates in roofing jobs. The same account put the company at more than 30 plants and 4,800 employees, and claimed one in four U.S. homes sits under a GAF roof. Independent roofing contractors install its products.
GAF is now based in Parsippany, New Jersey. John Altmeyer, who spent 21 years as president of Carlisle Construction Materials before joining GAF in 2021, became CEO in 2023. In June 2025, GAF announced that John Barkhouse, its president, would succeed him on Jan. 1, 2026, with Altmeyer becoming executive chairman.
The company’s best-selling shingle is still a Timberline. Under the newer names, it is the shingle Bottoli made in 1967: two strips laminated into one, its surface embedded with colored granules the way Standard Paint learned to do it in 1904.