From Farnsworth to L3Harris · the imager line

1949/1951 — present

Television's factory becomes the weather eye: The second great Fort Wayne defense line begins with Philo T. Farnsworth. His Television and Radio Corporation, established in Fort Wayne in 1939 on the Capehart cabinet-and-electronics base, did radar and electronic-device work during the Second World War — the firm record is in the Business record — and after the war passed to International Telephone & Telegraph. The year is carried in the sources two ways: the ACGSI people record, citing Michael Hawfield's Cityscapes history, dates ITT Aerospace Optical Division's purchase of Farnsworth to 1949, while ITT's corporate history dates ITT's purchase of Farnsworth's television company to 1951. Both dates stand here; the fact of the purchase does not. Under ITT the Fort Wayne operation — ITT Aerospace/Optical, later ITT Aerospace/Communications — turned the television pioneer's imaging skill to a new subject: the earth from orbit. Fort Wayne built imagers for the GOES weather-satellite line across the decades; a late-1990s regional profile put ITT Aerospace/Communications at 1,411 Fort Wayne employees producing ground-to-air communication equipment alongside the space work. The line's signature modern instrument is the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the sixteen-band primary payload of NOAA's GOES-R series satellites, designed and built by the Fort Wayne lineage under its Exelis Geospatial Systems name.

The corporate chain after ITT is documented at each step: ITT spun its defense businesses off as Exelis in 2011; Harris Corporation acquired Exelis in 2015; Harris merged with L3 Technologies in 2019 to form L3Harris Technologies, and the Fort Wayne campus — on the Lima Road / Cook Road ground, where a small Farnsworth museum is kept in the company's building — is its Spectral Solutions home. The present scale is the company's own: more than 600 Indiana-based team members including 320 engineers and scientists, as regional coverage of the company reports it; payloads built in Fort Wayne since the 1960s; a Farnsworth Innovation Center added in 2021 bringing the campus to 150,000 square feet; and a 125-million-dollar expansion completed 16 April 2025 — a 95,000-square-foot facility tripling manufacturing and testing space to a capacity of up to 48 payloads a year — supporting the Space Development Agency's Tracking Layer and the Missile Defense Agency's Hypersonic and Ballistic Tracking Space Sensor program. L3Harris stated at the dedication that it had five satellites on orbit and thirty-four in work for those two programs, and that the same infrared-sensor line serves civil weather programs for customers around the globe, including the imager for NOAA's GeoXO system. The Fort Wayne plant thus holds both ends of its own history at once: the weather imagers it has built since the ITT years, and the missile-warning payloads built on the same infrared craft.

Sources:

1. Input Fort Wayne, "How the aerospace industry built a market and a legacy in Fort Wayne" (24 April 2024) — the Farnsworth-to-ITT line, the Exelis (2011) / Harris (2015) / L3Harris (2019) chain, the WWII radar work, the Farnsworth Museum in the L3Harris facility, and the ABI as the GOES-R primary payload.
2. ACGSI, "Philo Taylor Farnsworth" — "ITT Aerospace Optical Division bought Farnsworth in 1949" (Hawfield, Cityscapes), against ITT Corporation's corporate history dating the purchase to 1951; both carried in the text.
3. L3Harris Technologies press releases, 16 September 2021 and 16 April 2025 (l3harris.com) — the Farnsworth Innovation Center and 150,000-square-foot campus; the 125-million-dollar, 95,000-square-foot expansion, payloads built in Fort Wayne since the 1960s, capacity of 48 payloads a year, five satellites on orbit and thirty-four in work, SDA Tracking Layer and MDA HBTSS, and the GeoXO imager.
4. Via Satellite, 16 April 2025 — the expansion, the infrared-sensor focus for missile defense and civil weather, and the Fort Wayne workforce figures as reported from the company (more than 600 team members, 320 engineers and scientists).