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Inventors, Inventions & Breakthroughs · the patent record
Fort Wayne likes to say things were invented here, and unusually often the saying survives the checking — but not always, and never in exactly the shape the saying takes. This section works from the patent record and the contemporary press: the inventors themselves, what they actually patented and where, and the breakthroughs this city's people and laboratories genuinely had a hand in. Where an invention was made somewhere else by someone born or raised here, the entry says so in so many words. Where a famous local claim fails — a fan, a garbage disposer, a refrigerator — the claim is printed anyway, with the record that corrects it. The companies these inventors built are told in the Business section; this section owns the people, the patents, and the tests.
Royal Baking Powder: the Hoaglands and Thomas Biddle
1865–1868 · THE DRUGSTORE FORMULA
The formula: The first Fort Wayne invention of national reach came out of a drugstore at Columbia and Calhoun streets. Griswold's 1917 pictorial history dates the beginning to 1865: Joseph C. Hoagland, a Fort Wayne druggist…
Alice Hamilton: the founder of industrial medicine, raised here
1869–1919 · THE BREAKTHROUGH MADE ELSEWHERE, THE SCIENTIST FORMED HERE
The formation: Alice Hamilton (27 February 1869 – 22 September 1970) was born in New York City and raised on her family's estate in Fort Wayne, educated at home in a household that expected its daughters to achieve; she studied…
James A. Jenney and Charles D. Jenney: the arc-light patents
1881–1882 · THE FATHER, THE SON, AND THE LAMP
The patents: James A. Jenney came to Fort Wayne in 1881 to manufacture an arc lamp and a small electric dynamo he had invented; the History Center's exhibit record has him demonstrating the city's first arc light in a warehouse…
Sylvanus Freelove Bowser: the pump inventor's own record
1854–1938 · THE PATENT TRAIL BEHIND THE PUMP
The inventor: The Business section tells S. F. Bowser & Company; this entry keeps the man and his patents. Sylvanus Freelove Bowser (8 August 1854 – 3 October 1938), a Fort Wayne man who had worked as a traveling salesman, first…
Marmaduke M. M. Slattery: the alternating-current man
1851–1892 · THE SLATTERY SYSTEM
The system: Marmaduke Marcelus Michael Slattery was born in Limerick, Ireland, in 1851, took his B.A. at Marlborough College in 1873, came to the United States in January 1880, worked in the engineering department of the United…
James J. Wood: two hundred forty patents
1856–1928 · GE'S MOST PROLIFIC FORT WAYNE INVENTOR
The record: James J. Wood (25 March 1856 – 19 April 1928) was born at Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland, and patented his arc-light dynamo on 19 October 1880 — the first of some 240 patents across forty-eight years. His dynamo and…
George Jacobs and Ethel Mossman Jacobs: the enamel that made magnet wire
1901–1912 · THE PROBLEM TAKEN UP HERE, THE INDUSTRY FOUNDED HERE
The problem: Every electric motor, transformer and coil in the world is wound with magnet wire — copper or aluminum wire carrying its own insulation. At the turn of the century that insulation was cloth: bulky, short-lived, and…
The refrigerator threads: Wolf's Domelre, Mellowes's unit, and the Monitor Top
1911–1934 · THE CLAIM FILE'S SECOND THREAD, TOLD IN FULL HERE
The factory first: The civic claim "Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913" is tried in this history's account “Fort Wayne invented the refrigerator, in 1913.” , which finds the wrong inventor and the wrong year attached…
Gertrude A. Muller: the Toidey and the first car seats
1887–1954 · THE PATENT RECORD'S WOMAN OF THIS CITY
The work: Gertrude Agnes Muller (9 June 1887 – 13 October 1954) was a Fort Wayne woman whose inventions were not factory floor accidents but a deliberate career. Employed at Van Arnam Manufacturing, makers of wooden toilet seats…
The electric pig: a claim that fails, and the Fort Wayne part that stands
1927–1939 · THE GARBAGE DISPOSER, TESTED
The claim: Civic retellings list the garbage disposal among the things invented in Fort Wayne — the History Center's own materials carry it ("over 100 inventions, including the garbage disposal, originated in the area"), and…
Philo T. Farnsworth: the Fort Wayne chapter
1906–1971 · HE WORKED HERE; THE INVENTION IS NOT FROM HERE
The geography, once: Philo Taylor Farnsworth (19 August 1906 – 11 March 1971) invented electronic television in California — the first successful electronic transmission on 7 September 1927 in San Francisco, U.S. Patent No.…
The turbosupercharger: produced here at a scale no other factory matched
1941–1944 · A BREAKTHROUGH OF PRODUCTION, STATED AS PRODUCTION
The distinction: The turbosupercharger — the exhaust-driven compressor that let aircraft engines keep their power in thin air — was a General Electric development of the company's eastern engineering works, and no honest Fort…
Ardelle Glaze: recording wire, then the wire inside the body
1910–1985 · THE MATERIALS INVENTOR
The wire: The Business section holds the corporate record of Fort Wayne Metals — Ardelle Glaze (1910–1985) founding it in 1946 to make magnetic recording wire — including Scott Glaze's figure that within five years the company…
Medicine: the modest record, kept modest — a powder, a syndrome, and a negative
1947–1956 · THE MEDICAL RECORD AS IT VERIFIES
The powder: Fort Wayne's medical inventiveness is real and small, and this entry refuses to inflate it. In 1947 Roy Schomburg, a longtime Fort Wayne pharmacist, with his father Carl, patented Schomburg Stomach Powder — a bismuth…
Robert F. Borkenstein: the Breathalyzer, and the legend of the color camera
1912–2002 · BORN AND FORMED HERE, THE INVENTION MADE IN INDIANAPOLIS
The man: Robert Frank Borkenstein was born in Fort Wayne on 31 August 1912 and raised here; the Depression ended his schooling, and he worked in Fort Wayne as a photographic technician — the local telling that his color-film…
The fusor: fusion demonstrated in a Fort Wayne laboratory
1962–1968 · FARNWORTH'S LAST INVENTION, PATENTED FROM THIS CITY
The device: Farnsworth's Fort Wayne years produced one more invention of the first rank, and its patent documents carry the city in so many words. Working for ITT in Fort Wayne with Robert L. Hirsch and Gene A. Meeks, Farnsworth…
The Bowmar Brain: the first American pocket calculator
1971 · FORT WAYNE'S PRODUCT, TEXAS'S CHIP
The machine: The Business section tells Bowmar Instrument Corporation — founded in 1951 by Edward A. White, who had learned his trade in Farnsworth-Capehart's electromechanical works — and its calculator lines; this entry tests…
The weather eyes: instruments built here on every American weather satellite
1978–PRESENT · THE BREAKTHROUGH AS INSTRUMENTATION
The instruments: The last breakthrough in this section is not a patent but a lineage of instruments, descending from the Fort Wayne works that passed from Farnsworth's company through ITT to Exelis, Harris and today's L3Harris…
The record searched: Black inventors and the honest negative
THE PATENT RECORD AS REACHED · A STATED NEGATIVE
The search: This section searched for a Black inventor with a documented Fort Wayne patent record — in the patent indexes as they are reachable online, in the Allen County genealogical society's people pages, and in the published…
The patent city in aggregate: density, not a rank
1888–1970 · THE PATTERN THE RECORD SUPPORTS
The pattern: Civic memory sometimes claims Fort Wayne stood among America's leading cities for patents, and this section looked for an official period ranking to carry the claim — and did not find one, and prints none. What the…
The research city now: the Mirro Center
2015–PRESENT · THE INSTITUTIONAL PRESENT TENSE
The center: The modern layer of this record is institutional, and its anchor is Parkview Health's Mirro Center for Research and Innovation, which opened in April 2015 on the Parkview Regional Medical Center campus: a $20 million…
