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THE FACTORY BUILD-OUT · 1881 TO 1920
A new industry, born local: The second wave of the transformation was not an import but an invention. James A. Jenney came to Fort Wayne in 1881 with an arc lamp and a small dynamo of his own devising; on 1 November 1881 R. T. McDonald organized the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company with $100,000 of authorized capital to manufacture his system. In June 1883 Jenney ringed a Fort Wayne baseball field with his arc lights for a night game advertised as the country's first; in 1884 the company lit the New Orleans World's Fair. Through a succession of reorganizations — the Fort Wayne Electric Light Company, then the Fort Wayne Electric Corporation — the enterprise passed to General Electric. The year of that acquisition is given differently by the institutions that tell it: 1892 in a case study of the redevelopment, 1898 in the National Register history of the campus, and 1899 in Indiana Landmarks' account. All three datings stand in the record; the succession itself is not in doubt. The firm's full history is in the Business section.
What the cluster meant: Under General Electric the Broadway works turned from lighting to the machinery of electrification itself — fractional-horsepower motors, transformers, dynamos, alternators and switches — and the campus grew to 39 acres and more than 1.2 million square feet, its 22 buildings raised between 1893 and 1968, the majority between 1907 and 1927. The plant is credited, in the National Register history and Indiana Landmarks' account, with the invention there of the first modern refrigerator's ice-making predecessor and of the electric garbage disposal — credited, and printed here as the credit the record gives. Electricity also pulled a supply chain into being around it: magnet wire, taken up in the next entry, existed because motors needed insulated windings, and in 1930 Magnavox moved to Fort Wayne expressly, the News-Sentinel's history says, to be near the magnet wire supply and the center of the national consumer market. By the measure of the census, electrical machinery stood beside foundries and machine shops as one of the city's two most important industries by 1909. At its wartime peak in 1944 the Fort Wayne works employed about 20,000 people — described by Visit Fort Wayne as about a third of the city's workforce, and in the National Register history as roughly 40 percent of it in the late 1940s; both characterizations stand, attached to their sources, and either way a single plant's payroll had become a third or more of the city.
Sources: the Business section's Jenney Electric → General Electric entry (the 1881 organization, the capital, the 1884 fair); the National Register history of the Electric Works campus as reported by Whatzup and Union Street Market (the 1898 acquisition, the buildings of 1893–1968, the credited inventions, the late-1940s 40 percent); Indiana Landmarks, "Innovation Sparks New Use at Fort Wayne Factory" (the 1899 dating, the 20,000 employed in 1944, the product range); the KSM case study of Electric Works (the 1892 dating, the 39 acres, the 2015 closing); Visit Fort Wayne (the June 1883 night game as advertised, a third of the workforce in 1944); News-Sentinel, Hawfield, on magnet wire (the Magnavox move of 1930).