Facts and History of Electrical and Electronic

The first significant application of controlled electricity in Cleveland was telegraphy, which made its appearance in the city in 1847 on the premises of the Lake Erie Telegraph Co. Fire-alarm boxes were the second useful manifestation of the “new” power in the city, and by 1865 there were 24 of them. The telephone came in 1877. Besides these communications uses, the other main areas of electric-industrial progress in the latter part of the 19th century were lighting, traction, and industrial electric hoist, and in these areas as well, Cleveland’s technical-entrepreneurial talent was quick to perceive opportunities and act on them.
His major contribution was the practical development and commercial exploitation of the arc light. Although the latter was invented in England in 1808, Brush devised its practical application by developing an improved dynamo to provide a steady current, and by making design changes in the arc fixture itself that improved the quality of the light and extended the working life of the carbon electrodes. He also redesigned the lamp’s circuit to make arc lighting possible from central stations. Brush began to sell small arc lighting systems in the late 1870s for use in stores, factories, and hotels. The brilliance of the light produced by his 12 lamps caused a sensation and foretold the decline of the gas-lighting era. As a result, Brush sold central power stations to San Francisco, New York, Baltimore, Boston, and Philadelphia. In 1880 Brush bought the Cleveland Telegraph Supply Co., where he had done the developmental work, .The battle between electric and gas lighting lasted some 30 years, and although advances were made in gas-lighting technology, electricity won out. viewing comparative costs, voted to go back to gas light in 1883 but reversed itself 17 days later. About the time that Brush was developing his arc light, Thomas Edison designed a practical incandescent lamp which later had great significance for Cleveland, because the companies that formed the National Electric Lamp Assn. in 1906 centered much of their light-bulb production in this area. The Cleveland-area electrical industry grew rapidly during the 1800s, led by the expansion of applications in communications,hoisting equipment lighting, and traction. The Brush Electric Co. added the manufacture of arc light carbons to its activities and also began marketing an incandescent lighting system, the rights for which it had purchased from a British firm. As the use of electricity expanded, the need grew for added power-generation and -distribution facilities, and when the Brush Electric & Power Co. merged with the Cleveland Electric Light Co. in 1892, a large powerhouse was constructed on Canal St.In addition to lighting, traction, and industrial applications, the electrical home-appliance field was richly represented in Cleveland by World War I. Heating-related appliances included coffee percolators, hotplates, frying pans, corn poppers, baby-bottle warmers, kitchen ranges, hair dryers, and radiant heaters. In addition, there was heavy production of vacuum cleaners, washing machines, fans, vibrators, and sewing machines. By 1919 Cleveland led the nation in the production of electric batteries and vacuum cleaners (7 different makes of vacuum cleaners were being produced in the city in 1931). In the mid-1920s, Cleveland ranked 3rd in the production of radios, after New York and Chicago. Theodore A. Willard, whose WILLARD STORAGE BATTERY CO. was Cleveland’s largest battery producer, founded the city’s first high-powered radio station.

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In the 1920s, John A. Victoreen, an inventive Cleveland radio amateur, started a radio parts business. Soon, however, his attention turned to radiation measurement, and he developed the Condenser R-Meter, an instrument for measuring accurately the intensity and total dosage of x-ray delivery,Leading Cleveland companies active in the electronics field during the immediate postwar period were Victoreen Instrument Co., Hickok Electrical Instruments Co., and Brush Development Co. In 1946 Victoreen was the city’s major producer of electronic tubes, employed 75 people, and achieved a total output worth $4.5 million. The Hickok Co. manufactured precision radio and radar test equipment, and was active in exporting. Brush Development, founded in 1930 to market products developed by Brush Laboratories, began producing voice-recording equipment in 1938, and during the war was the main supplier of wire recording equipment to the armed forces. For industry, Brush made oscillographs and hypersonic analyzers, piezoelectric crystals, and other products. Cleveland Electronics, Inc., representative of other firms in the area engaged in the production of electronic goods, was turning out 50,000-60,000 radio loudspeakers per month and preparing to manufacture similar components for the new television industry by 1946. National Spectrographic Laboratories, Inc., another Cleveland firm, made electrical excitation units for spectrographic analysis. Phasing devices and tuning-fork frequency controls were produced by Acme Telectronix, while the Bird Electronic Corp. manufactured testing equipment, filters, and high-frequency antennas. The total value of the city’s electronic products for the year 1946 was more than $10 million.
Cleveland, while not industrially top-ranked among centers of the rapidly developing microelectronics field, had establishments that have made a considerable mark in it nonetheless. This and other Keithley-developed instruments were manufactured for him by another firm for 5 years until 1951, when Keithley moved his operation to larger quarters and began manufacturing on his own. Sensitive measuring instruments remained the core of the company’s output, which came to include voltmeters, ammeters, digital multimeters, and complex testing systems incorporating both computer hardware and software. The company’s product-development path in itself traces some of the most important steps in the technological advance of electronics since the 1940s–vacuum tubes to discrete transistors to integrated circuits, and finally, to complex computer-linked systems that can handle the tasks of measurement and computation virtually simultaneously.