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 GE arrived; the developers of Electric Works named their venture RTM Ventures in his honour. James J. Wood, who arrived in 1890 and ran the works through its lighting era, gave the "Wood system" of arc lighting its name. Between them they made the plant GE bought.

The wire men: George A. Jacobs, the GE chemist who founded Dudlo and with it the magnet-wire industry — and then, displaced by his own buyers, founded INCA and started the line that became Phelps Dodge's. Victor Rea, his protégé out of the Dudlo superintendency, who founded Rea Magnet Wire in 1933, sold it to Alcoa in 1960 — and whose company's buyer group took it back from Alcoa in 1986. Addison E. Holton, Essex's founder, whose 1936 purchase of the idle Dudlo plant made Fort Wayne a headquarters city for the wire trade. Their companies are in the magnet-wire entry above; the decisions were theirs.

The electronics builders: Homer E. Capehart, who founded his phonograph company in Fort Wayne in 1927 and built the plant Farnsworth bought — his later career in the Senate belongs to the People record. Philo T. Farnsworth, who brought his television company, its laboratory and its engineers to Pontiac Street in 1938–39, is profiled in Inventors & Inventions; the industry consequence — the ITT works — is this section's. Frank Freimann, Magnavox's president in its Fort Wayne decades, presided over the Government & Industrial company's growth into a top-tier defense contractor; his profile sits in Founders & CEOs. Gerry Martin, the Magnavox executive who championed the Odyssey inside a skeptical company, and George Kent, whose Fort Wayne engineering group turned the Brown Box into a production design, are the two names the video-game record attaches to this city. Lou Dollive, president of ITT Aerospace/Communications Division in the SINCGARS years, spoke for the radio works at its appropriations peak.

The modern names: Doug Horner, who founded Medical Informatics Engineering in 1995 and built the MedWeb and WebChart, is the modern layer's clearest mover. The produced-technology founders raised here — Jeff Hammerbacher of Cloudera among them — are carried in Dot-Com Winners and Founders & CEOs, as are Chuck Surack of Sweetwater and Ardelle Glaze of Fort Wayne Metals, whose twice-founded company is the medical-wire counterpart to this section's magnet-wire story. The pattern across a century and a half is the section's closing fact: Fort Wayne's technology base was built less by corporations arriving than by engineers already here deciding to start, buy back, or stay.

Sources:

1. The entries of this section and their sources — McDonald and Wood (the GE entry); Jacobs, Rea and Holton (the magnet-wire entry); Capehart and Farnsworth (the Pontiac Street entry); Martin and Kent (the Odyssey entry); Dollive (the SINCGARS entry); Horner (the modern-layer entry).
2. Union Street Market / Electric Works, site history — RTM Ventures named for Ranald T. MacDonald, founding president of the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Company.
3. the Founders & CEOs and Dot-Com Era section of this history — the profiles of Freimann, Hammerbacher, Surack and Glaze, cross-referenced and not retold.