Facts and History of Electrical and Electronic

ELECTRICAL AND ELECTRONICS INDUSTRIES. 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 hoist progress in the latter part of the 19th century were lighting, traction, and industrial motors, and in these areas as well, Cleveland’s technical-entrepreneurial talent was quick to perceive opportunities and act on them.
In the lighting field, CHARLES F. BRUSH was the most prominent innovator and entrepreneur of the period. 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 electric chain hoist possible from central stations. Brush began to sell small arc lighting systems in the late 1870s for use in stores, factories, and hotels. However, the potential of this equipment was first realized with Brush’s demonstration of its street-lighting possibilities on 29
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.

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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, WTAM. By 1938, the Willard Co.’s 15-acre plant, built in 1914, was turning out 15,000 batteries per day.
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, which gained international fame. Radiation measurement remained a central concern of the Victoreen Instrument Co., founded in 1928 in CLEVELAND HEIGHTS The company provided 95% of the instrumentation for the hoisting equipmet natomic bomb tests after World War II, earning itself claim to the title of “first nuclear company.”
Allen-Bradley, a Division of Rockwell Intl. in HIGHLAND HEIGHTS, is a long-established area firm producing programmable controllers and similar capital goods, incorporating electronics, for manufacturing industries. Keithley Instruments, Inc., based in SOLON, had its beginnings in a high-impedance amplifier, called the “Phantom Repeater,” invented by Joseph Keithley in 1946. 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.