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 date is carried three ways in the record: Jacobs formed the Dudlo Wire Company with William Mossman and his son B. Paul Mossman in 1911 and built the Wall Street plant in 1912; the News-Sentinel's industrial history dates Dudlo Manufacturing's start of the industry to 1914, in a 50-by-100-foot building on Wall Street. Dudlo pioneered the process for enamelling magnet wire, and Roy M. Bates's 1965 company history records that it "made Fort Wayne the magnet capital of the world." Jacobs is the first of this section's movers: the city's signature technology trade began as one GE chemist's spinoff.

The spinoffs: Dudlo passed to General Cable; the new owners closed the Fort Wayne offices in 1930 and moved manufacturing to Rome, New York, in 1933. The talent stayed and multiplied. Victor Rea, a former Dudlo superintendent, resigned in 1933 and started Rea Magnet Wire with other former Dudlo men. Jacobs himself, unhappy with the new owners, started the INCA Manufacturing Company, which became the Phelps Dodge magnet-wire operation. When the Allen County Genealogical Society surveyed the trade, it counted the result: at one time Superior Essex, Rea Magnet Wire, Phelps Dodge and General Electric in Fort Wayne were producing ninety percent of the magnet wire in the United States.

Essex: Essex Wire Corporation, founded in Detroit in 1930 by Addison E. Holton out of Ford Motor Company's wire and cable division, bought the idle Dudlo plant in 1936 — Holton was hunting capacity for the enamelled magnet wire the motor makers demanded — and the revived plant became Essex's largest. Company literature records that in the 1940s Essex was producing enough magnet wire to build the millions of transformers used by America and its allies in the Second World War, plus field telephone wire for the Army Signal Corps and wiring harnesses for B-24 bombers. The headquarters followed the plant: the standard company history dates Essex's relocation of its headquarters to Fort Wayne to 1954, while the United Technologies company history puts the head-office move under president Walter Probst, who succeeded Holton in 1959. Both dates stand as their sources give them. Essex spent the later twentieth century as a United Technologies subsidiary, and in 1998–99 combined with Superior TeleCom to form Superior Essex, whose headquarters later moved to Atlanta.

The trade today: The Wall Street ground where Dudlo started still makes magnet wire: Superior Essex's Fort Wayne plant at 1601 Wall Street passed into Essex Furukawa Magnet Wire, the 2020 joint venture with Furukawa Electric, and back under full Superior Essex control in 2024 as Essex Solutions. Rea Magnet Wire ran the longer hometown course — sold by Victor Rea to Alcoa in 1960, bought back from Alcoa in 1986, and grown until in 2006 it purchased the Phelps Dodge Magnet Wire Company's North American business outright, reuniting Jacobs's INCA line with Rea's under a Fort Wayne roof. On 31 March 2023 the Rea shareholder families sold Rea's North American magnet-wire assets to Elektrisola, the German family-owned wire maker, which kept the Rea name, the plants and the employees — about 800 in all, about 230 of them in Fort Wayne, the Journal Gazette reported at the sale.

Sources:

1. News-Sentinel, "City's magnet wire industry started with Dudlo" (industrial-era history series) — Jacobs, the 1914 Wall Street start, the Essex purchase of 1936.
2. Allen County Genealogical Society of Indiana (ACGSI), Dudlo Company page — the 1911 formation with the Mossmans, Bates's "magnet capital of the world," the ninety-percent figure, the spinoff chain.
3. Rea Magnet Wire Company, company record — Jacobs the GE chemist; the plant built 1912; the 1930 office closure and 1933 Rome move; Victor Rea's 1933 founding; the 14 February 2006 Phelps Dodge purchase.
4. International Directory of Company Histories, Superior Essex Inc. — Essex founded 1930 by Addison E. Holton; the 1936 Dudlo purchase; the wartime production, in the company's own literature; the headquarters relocation dated 1954.
5. United Technologies Automotive Inc., company history — Holton's Ford-division origin; Walter Probst's succession in 1959 and the head-office move to Fort Wayne.
6. Rea Magnet Wire / Elektrisola announcement, 31 March 2023, and the Journal Gazette's report of the sale — the asset sale, the retained name and employees, about 800 employees with about 230 in Fort Wayne; Victor Rea's 1960 sale to Alcoa and the 1986 buyback.