The brake maker and the cabinet maker: Bendix and Pine

1868 – 1936

Vincent Hugo Bendix (born 1882): the inventor-executive whose name is still on the street. Bendix was born on 12 August 1882 at Moline, Illinois, the son of a Swedish Methodist minister. His Bendix drive — the self-engaging starter drive that let electric starting replace the crank — was worked out in 1910 and patented on an application filed 2 May 1914. In 1919 he bought the Winkler-Grimm wagon plant in South Bend and made the city his manufacturing seat; the Perrot Brake Company followed in November 1923, the Bendix Corporation in 1924, with its first plant at 401 North Bendix Drive, and Bendix Aviation was incorporated on 13 April 1929. The corporation's deep record — brakes, starters, aviation instruments, the works that became Honeywell's South Bend plant — lives in the Businesses section. His People entry carries the collision his plant is remembered for: in November 1936 his workers sat down in the plant, about a thousand of them for eight days, in the first sit-down strike in a United States auto plant, six weeks before Flint made the tactic famous. The men who sat down are profiled in the labor entry below; the man whose name was on the gate stands here, an inventor whose devices started the century's cars and whose plant started its labor movement's decisive tactic.

Leighton Pine: Singer's man, and the reason the world's sewing-machine cabinets were made here. In 1868 the Singer company sent Pine, a cabinet worker from its New York office, to build it a works in South Bend, in the center of the black walnut country. Pine bought the East Race site for 2,500 dollars and supervised the construction; the plant employed 168 men in its first year. By 1891 the works had 898 employees, and when some Singer officials wanted the cabinet works removed to Cairo, Illinois, around 1900, Pine argued it stayed — and won, acquiring the west-side Division Street site where the new plant, finished in 1901–02 on about sixty acres, was intended to be the largest sewing-machine cabinet factory in the world. At its 1914 peak the works employed about 3,000 and made, on the attributed estimate the Businesses section carries, about three-quarters of the world's sewing-machine cabinets. Pine's vital dates are not established in the record read for this section; his monument is institutional rather than biographical — a company town's worth of employment that existed because one manager argued his plant's case in New York and prevailed.

Sources:

1. Businesses section of this history (banked) — Bendix's birth and parentage, the 1910 drive and the 2 May 1914 patent filing, the 1919 Winkler-Grimm purchase, Perrot Brake (November 1923), the Bendix Corporation (1924) and 401 North Bendix Drive, Bendix Aviation (13 April 1929), and the November 1936 sit-down; Singer's 1868 dispatch of Leighton Pine, the East Race site and first-year employment, the 1891 workforce, the Cairo removal fight and the Division Street plant of 1901–02, and the 1914 peak.