General Electric · superchargers, then engine controls

1938 — 2000 and its successor

The turbosupercharger plant: GE's Fort Wayne Works — its civil record from Jenney Electric forward is in the Business record and its Broadway campus in the Architecture record — was asked as early as 1938 to develop motors for military aircraft. In 1939, fearing German bombing of its English factory, Rolls-Royce chose Fort Wayne to build starter motors for military aircraft, in the account of GE's own Fort Wayne historian Clovis Linkous. The largest addition came when the U.S. government chose Fort Wayne for a new plant to build turbosuperchargers — the exhaust-driven compressors that gave wartime aircraft power, speed and altitude. Ground for the Taylor Street plant was broken on 6 December 1941, the day before Pearl Harbor; on the night of the attack the great GE sign on Broadway, lit since 1928, was turned off, and it stayed dark until the war's end. Taylor Street production was given highest priority: by 1944 it exceeded 50,000 turbosupercharger units, the highest supercharger production of any factory in the country, and GE employed more than 20,000 people in Fort Wayne — over a third of the city's workforce — with women rising from 20 percent of the GE workforce in 1940 to 40 percent in 1944. The News-Sentinel's wartime summary adds the rest of the Fort Wayne GE war list: gunnery controls for airplanes and warships, aircraft magnetos and radio equipment, and a plastic firing pin for 40mm anti-aircraft ammunition of which GE made 100 million.

The defense line did not end in 1945; it changed product. In the mid-1980s General Electric established its Fort Wayne plant to supply controls for GE aircraft engines — the Full Authority Digital Engine Control (FADEC), the engine-mounted computer that meters fuel and manages performance. GE sold the plant to Lockheed Martin in early 1997, when it became the primary manufacturing site of Lockheed Martin Control Systems; in 2000 BAE Systems acquired that division, and the Fort Wayne controls line continues today as BAE's — see the BAE entry below. The Broadway and Taylor Street campuses themselves closed as GE operations in the following decade; their reuse is the Architecture record's Electric Works chapter.

Sources:

1. Carol Young Lindquist, "Electric Works," Fort Wayne Quest Club paper (17 March 2023), citing Linkous, General Electric at Fort Wayne, Indiana (1994) — the 1939 Rolls-Royce starter-motor decision, the Taylor Street plant and its 6 December 1941 groundbreaking, the darkened sign, the 50,000-unit 1944 production, and the 20,000 wartime employment.
2. Indiana Landmarks, "Innovation Sparks New Use at Fort Wayne Factory" (2021) — superchargers for military aircraft in the 1940s; 20,000 employed in Fort Wayne in 1944.
3. News-Sentinel, "Allen County went to war with Japan" (From the Archives) — GE's wartime product list and the 100 million plastic firing pins.
4. IndustryWeek, "IW Best Plants Profile — 2000: BAE Systems Controls, Fort Wayne" — the plant established by GE in the mid-1980s for aircraft-engine controls, sold to Lockheed Martin in early 1997, and to BAE Systems in 2000; about 600 employees at the profile date.