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Founder and president, Western Gas Construction Company
On the record
Guldlin trained at the Technical College in Bergen and the Polytechnikum in Munich, worked two and a half years in the engineering department of the Baldwin Locomotive Works in Philadelphia and for gas engineer James R. Smedberg of Lancaster, and came to Fort Wayne in 1885 as engineer for the Kerr-Murray Manufacturing Company. In 1888 he opened a mechanical and consulting engineering office with W. A. Croxton and Frank D. Moses; in 1890 he incorporated the Western Gas Construction Company with Gordon W. and Ernest F. Lloyd of Detroit, and in January 1902 he bought the Lloyds out. The company — builders of gas-works machinery and coke-oven apparatus — grew from a 65-by-100-foot machine shop erected in 1893 to a plant of about thirteen acres employing more than 400 shop hands and a field erection force of about the same size, which Griswold calls the largest in the world devoted exclusively to gas apparatus. Its exhibit at the St. Louis exposition of 1904 won three grand prizes, five gold and four silver medals, with a personal grand prize to Guldlin for his inventions. He married Addie L. Bleekman on 28 August 1889; she became a national figure in the home-economics work of the General Federation of Women's Clubs.
Sources: Griswold, Pictorial History, Vol. II (1917), biographical sketch and portrait, read first-hand. No second source reached for this profile.