Wallace H. Dodge — the jack inventor, and the joint-patent pattern

born 1849 · died September 1894 · the company founded 1878, incorporated 1880

The founding act: Wallace Harlow Dodge was a Mishawaka man — Discover Indiana calls him Mishawaka-born — who patented his Magic Jack, a wagon jack of his own invention, and in 1878 founded the Dodge Manufacturing Company in Mishawaka to make it. The state's marker for the company opens the record on the same line: "Wallace Dodge founded company here, 1878." The company was incorporated in 1880, by Wallace H. Dodge, William W. Dodge, and George Philion, and moved that year to the Union Street site it would occupy for the rest of its life in the city. In 1881 the little factory burned, uninsured, and was rebuilt at once.

The founder's name, and the names beside it: The Inventors section establishes the pattern this class keeps meeting, and it is stated at the head of that file because three entries depend on it: all three foundational Mishawaka patents are joint, and the popular telling drops a name from two of them. The Magic Jack is patent US 208,940, to Miles D. Williams and Wallace H. Dodge — not Dodge alone, as the marker line tells it. The Independence Split Pulley of 4 July 1882, the invention that made the company a national house, is US 260,462, to Dodge and George Philion — the same Philion who stands beside the Dodge brothers in the 1880 incorporation. Dodge the founder is therefore printed as the record gives him: the company's founder and president, and the senior partner in joint inventions, whose junior partners the corporate record keeps and the monument drops. What Williams's share and identity were is a named gap of the Inventors record, with its settling sources.

The run, at founder size: Around the pulley grew the full transmission line — iron and wood pulleys, flywheels, split friction clutches, hangers, shafting — and the Dodge American System of rope transmission, whose largest rope engine yet made powered the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893. By 1902 the works consisted of forty buildings across sixty-five acres. Wallace Dodge died in September 1894, and the presidency passed out of the founding family to the man who had built the company's selling machine — the next entry. The company's course after its founder — the product line to 1949, the Reliance acquisition of 1967 and the long ownership succession to RBC Bearings — is the Businesses section's, cross-referenced and not retold.

Sources:

1. Businesses & Banks — "Dodge Manufacturing" (the 1878 founding and the Magic Jack; the 1880 incorporation by Wallace H. Dodge, William W. Dodge, and George Philion; the Union Street move; the 1881 fire; the pulley of 4 July 1882; the rope drive and the 1893 exposition engine; forty buildings on sixty-five acres by 1902; the death in September 1894).
2. Inventors & Inventions — the joint patents printed from the patent record: US 208,940 (Williams and Dodge) and US 260,462 (Dodge and Philion), against the marker line's single name.