Ardelle Glaze — the founder who founded it twice

1910 – 1985 · founded 1946 and again in 1971

Ardelle Glaze was born in West Virginia in 1910 and grew up in Akron, Ohio; he worked at distilling bourbon, in the baking industry and at machine repair, studied at the Illinois Institute of Technology, and spent the war years as a research scientist at the Armour Research Foundation in Chicago, on the team that developed magnetic wire recording. In 1946 he started Fort Wayne Metals, Inc., on McArthur Drive in Waynedale, to make that recording wire — within five years, by his son Scott's account, the company was making eighty percent of the recording wire used in America, and his ECHO wire was the dominant recording medium of the 1950s. Yet though he was founder and president, his investors controlled the company he had built. He sold it in 1968 — the accounts of the sale name different buyers, and the Waynedale plant closed — intending to follow the medical market he had seen coming. In 1971, at sixty-one, he remortgaged his home, sold his stocks and founded Fort Wayne Metals Research Products Corporation, the medical-wire company that stands in Fort Wayne today. The inventive record — the drawn brazed strand that solved the fracturing of heart-access wires, and the patents around it — is the Inventors section's, cross-referenced here. His son Scott Glaze became president in 1985 and is the company's chairman and chief executive. Glaze died in 1985; the Junior Achievement Business Hall of Fame profiled him in 2015.

Sources:

1. Businesses — "Fort Wayne Metals" (the 1946 founding to make magnetic recording wire; the founder's dates and Armour Research Foundation years).
2. Junior Achievement of Northern Indiana, Business Hall of Fame profile of Ardelle Glaze (2015), quoting Scott Glaze — the eighty-percent figure as a family account, the loss of control, the 1971 remortgage-and-refounding; the Waynedale News Waynedale Chamber account (2005) — the McArthur Drive plant and the 1968 close.
3. Inventors & Inventions — Glaze's inventive content, cross-referenced and not retold here.