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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 Indiana Landmarks' Electric Works account states flatly that the garbage disposal "was invented there." The national record does not support the sentence. The disposer was devised by John W. Hammes of Racine, Wisconsin, beginning in 1927; he filed his patent in 1933 and founded the InSinkErator company in 1938 — and the "electric pig" nickname itself attaches to Hammes's appliance in the national accounts of its introduction. General Electric marketed its own competing Disposall from 1935. The Fort Wayne part of the story is real but narrower, and it comes from Hawfield's electric-works history, quoted in Haines's Quest paper: the motor for the first electric garbage disposer was manufactured at GE's Winter Street plant in Fort Wayne beginning in 1939, and "this early electrical household gadget was called Bill Morrill's Electric Pig in honor of its inventor, Wilbur Morrill." Printed together, the record gives Fort Wayne a manufacturing role in the disposer's early life and a local name attached to a local man — and denies it the invention. A 2005 chamber-of-commerce letter answering a magazine's insult to the city rehearsed the pig among Fort Wayne's inventive honors in full civic dress; it is preserved here as a document of the claim, not of the fact.
Sources:
- Michael Hawfield, History of Fort Wayne and Allen County, 1700–2005, via Melinda Haines (2024) — the Winter Street manufacture from 1939 and "Bill Morrill's Electric Pig," quoted.
- YourSource News (Meridian) and TimeToast timeline, national accounts — Hammes's 1927 device, the 1933 patent filing, the 1938 InSinkErator founding, the "electric pig" nickname at the appliance's introduction, GE's Disposall from 1935.
- Indiana Landmarks, "From Factory to Modern Campus" — the "invented there" form of the claim; The History Center brochure, via Haines — the area-origins claim in institutional form.
- Allen Business Exchange letter, Waynedale News (2005) — the claim rehearsed in the "Dumbest City" rebuttal.