The transmission trade: Mishawaka sells power's means

1869–1910

The town's most original industry made nothing anyone wore, rode, or ate: It made the machinery by which other factories moved. Wallace H. Dodge founded his company in Mishawaka in 1878 to make a patented wagon jack, moved it in 1880 to the Union Street ground it would hold for the rest of its life in the city, lost it to a lightning fire in 1881, rebuilt at once, and in 1882 patented the Independence Wood Split Pulley. The pulley is the industrial revolution's connective tissue, and its weight — as the Businesses section's full profile sets out — is in the word interchangeable: a solid pulley was bored for one shaft and scrap when the line shafting changed, while Dodge's split pulley, halves bolted around a bushing bored to the shaft at hand, could be stocked in standard sizes, clamped onto any shaft, and moved when the mill rearranged its lines. Transmission stopped being carpentry and became a catalogue. Around the pulley grew the line Howard's 1907 history lists — iron split pulleys, iron-center wood-rimmed pulleys, safety wood-rim flywheels, split friction clutches, hangers, shafting — and Dodge's second system, the rope drive: the Dodge American System of continuous-wind rope transmission, for which the company built, for the World's Columbian Exposition at Chicago in 1893, the largest rope engine yet made, and it powered the fair. A factory anywhere in America that turned a shaft was a Dodge customer, and the orders came back to Union Street. The scale is dated in the Businesses record: forty buildings across sixty-five acres by 1902, in Discover Indiana's account; and by 1910 the plant covered sixty acres with twenty-five acres of floor space and employed more than 1,200 persons — Mishawaka's largest employer, on the Melvin W. Mix biography's record. Nor was Dodge alone in the trade: the 1889 directory carries the Keasey Pulley Company in the same town, a second pulley maker in the place Dodge was making a pulley capital, and the Perkins Wind Mill and Axe Company beside them — Palmer C. Perkins's solid-wheel windmill, patented 10 August 1869, selling 1,500 mills in 1883 and 5,000 a year by 1899, a figure the trade history pairs with the judgment that Perkins had become the world's largest manufacturer of windmills, printed as that history's claim. The system's coherence is the point. One Mishawaka works sold factories the means of distributing power (pulleys, clutches, rope drives); another sold farms the means of raising it from the wind; a third, Wheelabrator after 1926, would sell foundries the means of cleaning what they cast. Mishawaka's deepest industrial specialty was never a product. It was the equipment of production itself, and the town's goods turned shafts, pumped water and scoured castings on every continent while its name stayed home. The firms' courses — Dodge's succession through Reliance, Rockwell, Baldor, ABB and RBC Bearings, Perkins's receivership, Wheelabrator's consolidation — are profiled in Businesses. What stands here is their common shape: an industrial city whose signature export was industrialization.

Sources:

1. Indiana Historical Bureau, marker 71.1999.1, "Dodge Manufacturing Company" — the 1878 founding, the 1880 move to Union Street, the Independence Wood Split Pulley patented 1882.
2. Discover Indiana (Indiana Historical Society / IUPUI University Library), "Dodge Manufacturing Company" — the 1881 lightning fire; the pulley patent dated 4 July 1882; the largest rope engine to date, built for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition; forty buildings on sixty-five acres by 1902.
3. Timothy E. Howard, History of St. Joseph County, Indiana (1907), the Dodge company history — the product line and the Dodge American (Continuous Wind) System of rope transmission.
4. Coachbuilt, the Melvin W. Mix biography — the Dodge plant by 1910 at sixty acres, twenty-five acres of floor space, and more than 1,200 employees, Mishawaka's largest employer.
5. Gas Engine Magazine, "Perkins Windmill and Engine Co." — 1,500 windmills in 1883, 5,000 a year in 1899, and the magazine's "world's largest manufacturer of windmills" judgment, printed as its claim.
6. Directory of Indiana Manufacturers and Buyers' Guide (1889), the Mishawaka page — the Keasey Pulley Company on the same page as Dodge and Perkins.
7. This build's Businesses section — the three firms' full profiles, cross-referenced and not retold.