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Technology Out of Fort Wayne · The Industry and Its Movers
Fort Wayne's technology story is not a startup story. For a century and a half the city made the electrical industry's working parts — arc lamps, fractional-horsepower motors, transformers, and the enamelled magnet wire that went inside all of them — and then, without changing streets, it became one of the places where the United States builds its eyes in orbit and its military radios. The General Electric works on Broadway employed more than 20,000 people at its 1944 peak. The magnet-wire trade founded here by a GE chemist's spinoff once accounted, with GE itself, for some ninety percent of American production. The defense-electronics plants that grew out of Farnsworth's and Magnavox's Fort Wayne operations put the imagers and sounders on every NOAA weather satellite generation from 1978 forward, built the Army's SINCGARS combat radios, and still operate today as L3Harris, Raytheon and BAE Systems sites. What follows is that arc at documented size — including the famous products that turn out, on testing, to be only partly Fort Wayne's, and the ones that are not Fort Wayne's at all.
The Jenney works and the General Electric century
1881 – 2015
The founding: The works began as a hometown company. The Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company was organised in 1881 by Ranald T. McDonald — the developers who later revived the campus spelled the name MacDonald, and both…
Magnet wire — the trade Fort Wayne founded
1911/1914 – TODAY
The founder: The magnet-wire industry — the enamelled copper wire wound into every motor, transformer and generator — was started in Fort Wayne by George A. Jacobs, a chemist who had worked in GE's Fort Wayne plant. The founding…
Magnavox — the consumer decades
1930 – 1980s
The arrival, dated three ways: The Magnavox Company — founded in California in 1917 by Edwin Pridham and Peter L. Jensen, the co-inventors of the moving-coil loudspeaker — moved its manufacturing to Fort Wayne at the turn of the…
The Odyssey — invented elsewhere, engineered here, built in Tennessee
1969 – 1972
The popular claim, tested: Fort Wayne is often said to have made the first home video-game console. The record splits the claim three ways, and this section prints the split rather than the slogan. The invention was not Fort…
Capehart, Farnsworth, and the Pontiac Street plant — ITT's roots here
1927 – 1954
The seed corn of the defense industry: Fort Wayne's second electronics lineage began with a phonograph maker. Homer E. Capehart founded the Capehart Corporation in Fort Wayne in 1927 to build automatic phonographs and high-end…
ITT's radios — SINCGARS and the tactical-communications works
1970s – 2015
The Army's combat net radio, made here: The Single Channel Ground and Airborne Radio System — SINCGARS — was the standard combat radio of the U.S. Army and allied forces for a generation, and Fort Wayne was its home plant. ITT's…
The weather instruments — Fort Wayne's eyes in orbit
1978 – TODAY
The largest technology story in this record: Every day's American weather forecast rests in part on instruments designed and built in Fort Wayne. L3Harris's own Indiana fact sheet states the span: the company's Fort Wayne…
Magnavox's defense company — and its Raytheon heir
1951 – TODAY
The Government & Industrial company: The defense half of Magnavox, organised as the Magnavox Government and Industrial Electronics Company, was by 1952 already the majority of the Fort Wayne workforce, and it grew into one of the…
The sonobuoys went to Columbia City — the Ultra boundary
1997 – TODAY
A Fort Wayne product that is no longer Fort Wayne's: The sonobuoy business Magnavox built in Fort Wayne from the 1950s did not follow the rest of the company into Raytheon. When Raytheon took over the Hughes defense operations…
BAE Systems — the engine controls of the jet age
1980s – TODAY
The quiet giant by the airport: BAE Systems' own account puts its Fort Wayne presence back to the 1980s. For some fifteen years the works occupied a 1942 building on Taylor Street — built, the developer's account records, where…
The modern layer — health software, geothermal, and water
1995 – TODAY
The honest frame: Outside the defense plants, Fort Wayne's post-2000 technology layer is not a software cluster and this record does not dress it as one. The city's great internet-era win was a retailer, Sweetwater, whose story…
The movers — the people who built the base
1881 – TODAY
The founders of the electrical century: Ranald T. McDonald organised the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company in 1881 and stood as its founding president — the decision that put an electrical works on Broadway a decade before…
