South Bend Technology: From the Basilica Spire to the Fiber Ring

Technology · From the Basilica Spire to the Fiber Ring

South Bend's technology story runs in three ages, and the thread through all three is that the city made the machinery other places ran on. The first age is electrical: in April 1899 a Notre Dame professor strung 150 feet of wire from the Basilica spire and sent a wireless message more than a mile to Saint Mary's — an experiment the student newspaper of that week called, with its own hedge, the farthest a message had been sent in this country "as far as we know" — and five years later a Thomson-Houston man named George Cutter built a factory at Notre Dame Avenue and Northside Boulevard that became, for a time, the largest streetlight works in the United States. The second age is Bendix: the brake company founded here in 1924 grew into an aviation corporation whose South Bend works turned out the brakes, landing gear, hydraulics and instruments of the Second World War at a scale of more than ten thousand added workers — while the radios, magnetos and, later, the computers that carried the same name were made in Baltimore, Teterboro, Sidney and Los Angeles, a geography this section prints exactly, because the Bendix name is the easiest place in this record to claim for South Bend what South Bend did not make. The same decade gave the city a genuine first of a different shape: the automatic washing machine, marketed from South Bend in 1937 by a licensee company. The third age is the network: Notre Dame's computers from the UNIVAC installed about 1962 to the research-computing center of 2005; the nanoelectronics consortium the city itself put a million dollars into in 2008; two state-certified technology parks, one of them on the cleared Studebaker ground; a turbomachinery laboratory testing jet-engine parts where Studebaker built cars; a railroad station turned into one of Indiana's two carrier hotels; and a nonprofit dark-fiber ring, built by the city's own institutions from 2006, that by the 2020s ran more than five hundred miles and reached west to the ground where Amazon is now building the largest data-center campus in the state's history. One boundary is printed here and not argued again: the University of Notre Dame stands in the unincorporated community of Notre Dame, at the city's northern edge, and its record is covered in full in this build, as the university's own sections carry it.