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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 record does show is density, and it is remarkable enough in its own right. The Commissioner of Patents' index for 1888 already lists Slattery several times over; the 1889 county history opens its account of the city's flagship works with the sentence that their patents were the proprietor's own family; James J. Wood alone accounts for 240 patents, ranked by his own employer behind only Edison among its inventors; Farnsworth's counts run to 165 on the conservative archive and past 300 U.S. and foreign on the Hall of Fame's; Bowser's filings run from 1887 into the 1910s in two countries. The aggregate also catches the supporting cast the profiles pass by — Thomas Duncan, who came in the 1890 migration of the Thomson-Houston works and developed the watthour-meter models the Fort Wayne Electric Corporation sold, in the metering histories' account. The supported claim is a shape, not a number: for a century, each of this city's defining industries began as a local patent portfolio — the Jenneys' lamps, Bowser's pumps, the Dudlo process, Farnsworth's television works and fusor, Bowmar's product engineering, and the weather-instrument line — and the portfolios were written by men and women who lived here while they wrote them.
Sources:
- ACGSI, Slattery page — the Commissioner of Patents' 1888 index listing Slattery's patents.
- Valley of the Upper Maumee River (1889), Vol. II — the Jenney works' patents as the family's own.
- The entries of this section, severally — Wood's 240 (GE), Farnsworth's two counts (NIHF; IBHA), Bowser's 1887–1912 trail (Dewan).
- Giuliano Dall'Osto, "Forerunners: Thomas Duncan" (metering history) — Duncan's watthour-meter work for the Fort Wayne Electric Corporation.
- The ranking searched for and not located — no official period ranking of cities by patents is printed.