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Electrical inventor · Fort Wayne Electric and General Electric works
On the record
James J. Wood was born 25 March 1856 at Kinsale, County Cork, Ireland. His arc-light dynamo, patented 19 October 1880, made him a partner in the Fuller-Wood Company (1880–85), and his arc system was used to floodlight the Statue of Liberty in 1885. He came to Fort Wayne in December 1890 as chief electrician of the Fort Wayne Electric Light Company — the Jenney company's successor — and after the 1894 reorganization the firm's apparatus sold under the "Wood Systems" trademark. The News-Sentinel credits him with the stationary and revolving electric fans of 1902. He held some 240 patents and served General Electric's Fort Wayne Works as factory manager and chief engineer, then as consulting engineer, until his death on 19 April 1928. It was Wood who, with A. Myers, arranged for GE to manufacture the Audiffren refrigerating machine at Fort Wayne, and he appears beside the Abbé Audiffren in GE's photograph at Épinal in August 1911. (A circulating biographical page that also credits him with Brooklyn Bridge cables and a submarine conflates him with another man; those claims are not his and are not repeated here.)
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- § 05 — business
Sources: News-Sentinel, Cityscapes (Leininger, 19 December 1982); Prabook, James J. Wood; Scientific American, 6 October 1894; General Electric photograph caption, Google Arts & Culture.