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THE BUILD-OUT COMPLETES ITSELF · 1885 TO 1930
Pumps: Sylvanus F. Bowser sold his first self-measuring pump to a Fort Wayne grocer on 5 September 1885; by the mid-1910s his company was the established leader in fuel pumps at home and abroad, and with the Wayne Pump Company and the Tokheim works beside it, Fort Wayne became — in the American Oil & Gas Historical Society's phrase — the gas-pump manufacturing capital of the world. The claim is the society's, printed as a claim. What is counted fact is the cluster's presence: three competing pump works in one city, a six-story Bowser office block by 1917, and the firm's millionth pump dedicated as a memorial in June 1923.
Wire: George A. Jacobs, a chemist who had worked at the Fort Wayne General Electric plant, perfected a practical method of baking enamel insulation onto copper wire and, with the Mossman family, founded the Dudlo Wire Company in 1911; its Wall Street plant opened in 1912 in a building fifty by one hundred feet. By 1922, on the account of Jacobs's biography, Dudlo was the largest manufacturer of magnet wire in the world. The parent did not survive — it passed to General Cable in 1927 and the Fort Wayne operation was wound up by 1933 — but the knowledge stayed and multiplied: Jacobs himself founded Inca Manufacturing, sold to Phelps Dodge in 1930–31 (the year is given both ways); Victor Rea, a Dudlo superintendent, founded Rea Magnet Wire in 1933; and Essex bought the old Dudlo plant in 1936. By 1960, five Fort Wayne operations — New Haven Wire and Cable, Phelps Dodge, Rea, Superior Essex and General Electric's own wire operation — were together producing nearly 90 percent of North America's magnet wire, the figure repeated in the city's histories; and the city carried the nickname "Magnet Wire Capital of the World," a nickname, not a census category — though one with few rivals in fact. The firms' full records are in the Business section.
The rest of the diversification: Around the giants the census's long tail filled in: Kerr Murray, from 1862, built complete gas works — holders, purifiers and apparatus — for other cities' town-gas plants, an export industry in iron; the Olds Wagon Works and the Horton works followed, Horton rising on its self-contained washing machine until, by a Fort Wayne Magazine account of 1924, it made half the washing machines in the world — a trade claim, printed as one. Eckart (1887) and Eckrich (1894) made the city a meat-packing town of the second rank; Wayne Knitting Mills, taken up with the workforce below, clothed it. The point of the cluster, for this section, is structural: by 1920 Fort Wayne no longer depended on the railroad cycle alone. It made the equipment of three successive ages — rail, electricity and the automobile — inside one city limits.
Sources: the Business section's entries for S. F. Bowser & Company, Dudlo Manufacturing, Inca Manufacturing, Rea Magnet Wire, Essex Wire, Kerr Murray Manufacturing and Horton Manufacturing (dates, fates and the claims as attributed there); American Oil & Gas Historical Society (the pump-capital phrase, the 1885 first sale); ACGSI, Dudlo Company (the Wall Street plant of 1914 in its photo record — the plant's opening is given as 1912 in the Jacobs biography and 1914 in ACGSI's captioning; both stand in the Business record); History Center Notes & Queries, Tom Castaldi, "The Magnet Wire Capital of the World" (2013) and the News-Sentinel's magnet-wire history (the spin-off succession and the two-thirds-of-the-nation figure for the successor firms); the 1960 ninety-percent figure as compiled in the city's histories.