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Precision medical wire · Fort Wayne Metals Research Products Corp.
On the record
Founded: 1946, Fort Wayne, strong. Ardelle Glaze started Fort Wayne Metals, Inc. in 1946 to make magnetic recording wire — agreed by the Junior Achievement Business Hall of Fame profile (2015), the Waynedale News Waynedale Chamber account (2005), Business People and ThomasNet. The first plant was on McArthur Drive in Waynedale, and the Waynedale Chamber of Commerce, started in the late 1940s, lists Fort Wayne Metals Company as charter member #8, with Ardelle’s signature as proprietor contemporary corroboration of an operating late-1940s Waynedale firm. No incorporation record was retrieved, so the year is not proven.
Founder: Ardelle Glaze (born 1910, West Virginia; died 1985). A machinist and research scientist at the University of Chicago’s Armour Research Foundation, where he worked on a team that developed magnetic wire recording technology during the war years — the experience the 1946 company was built on.
What it did (first company): stainless and magnetic recording wire for wire audio recorders, before tape. Scott Glaze’s figure — within five years the company made 80% of the recording wire in the United States — is carried as a family/company claim, documented as a claim, not as an audited market share. As tape replaced wire, the focus shifted to other wire products, including, by the late 1950s, wire for medical uses.
Course (first company): grew to about 80 employees by the mid-1960s. The acquisition chain is kept as the two accounts give it and not merged into one sale: Waynedale News names acquisition by the Wilbur B. Driver Corporation; the JA profile says that when the company “was sold a second time, it became a small component of GTE Sylvania.” Fate of the first company: the Fort Wayne plant was closed and production moved to Pennsylvania, with the year carried as 1968 on the dated (Waynedale News) account, flagged as single-chain.
Refounding: 1971, with a 1970 variant flagged. Ardelle Glaze (aged 60 or 61 — the family accounts differ by a year; his 1910 birth year supports 61) remortgaged his home, sold his stocks and formed Fort Wayne Metals Research Products Corp., starting in part of the old McArthur Drive building, dedicated from the start to wire for the medical industry. A 2011 expansion account says the Research Products corporation “began operations” in 1970 — carried as an not established variant against the two family accounts’ 1971 formation.
Fate: still operating, family-owned, headquartered in Fort Wayne. Scott Glaze joined at the 1971 beginning and took over as president on Ardelle’s death in 1985, when the company employed 30 people. Growth thereafter: 570 team members across seven Allen County locations in 2011, with production in Castlebar, Ireland; over 1,200 employees in 2022; more than 1,500 employees in Indiana, Ohio and Ireland in 2024. The present company is the 1971 Research Products corporation, not an unbroken continuation of the 1946 corporation: the 1946 firm was sold, its Fort Wayne plant closed (1968), and Ardelle Glaze founded the present firm anew in 1971. Any account printing “founded 1946, operating continuously since” without that break misstates the record as the family itself tells it. Its products today are precision medical-grade wire, strands, cables and components, with, in Business People’s 2022 account, more than 90% of its materials ending up in the human body.
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- § 05 — business
Sources: Junior Achievement of Northern Indiana, BEL Hall of Fame 2015 profile, Ardelle Glaze — https://northernindiana.ja.org/dA/94abbd9f19/file/2015 Ardelle Glaze.pdf ; Waynedale News, “Waynedale Chamber of Commerce Charter Member” (2005) — https://waynedalenews.com/2005/01/waynedale-chamber-of-commerce-charter-member/ ; Trade & Industry Development, 24 Mar 2011 — https://www.tradeandindustrydev.com/region/indiana/news/fort-wayne-metals-establishes-whitley-county-4959 ; Business People, 10 Feb 2022 ; Indianapolis Business Journal, 18 Oct 2017 — https://www.ibj.com/articles/65876-manufacturer-of-medical-device-parts-plans-511m-expansion-337-hires ; IBJ, Indiana 250, 2024 — https://www.ibj.com/articles/indiana-250-scott-glaze . Sources as cited in the profile.