FACTORY OF THE FORT WAYNE ELECTRIC CORPORATION, FORT WAYNE, IND.

First Wood Dynamo.

TRICAL ENGINEER, may make a short account of the history of the Company more than usually interesting, as well as timely.

It was in November, 1881, that Messrs. Oscar A. Simons, H. G. Olds, C. L. Olds, R. T. McDonald and P. A. Randall, organized the Fort Wayne Jenney Electric Light Company, for the purpose of manufacturing electric lighting apparatus under the Langley patents. In the Spring of 1882, the Company purchased the Jenney patents and on October 2, 1882, began to manufacture thereunder. In the Fall of 1883, the Company moved to a four story building on East Columbia street, Fort Wayne, employing at that time about sixty hands, but in less than three years found themselves so cramped for room that in 1886, the Company purchased the Gause Mower Works, the present site of the factory. Large additions were immediately made, and employment was given to about two hundred people. In 1887 the company obtained control of the patents of M. M. M. Slattery and began the manufacture of alternating incandescent apparatus.

In the Fall of 1888, the works at Fort Wayne were destroyed by fire and the Company were given temporary quarters at the factory of the Kerr Murray Manufacturing Company until July, 1889, when they removed to the new factory buildings, which had been erected in the meantime. In August, 1889, the Fort Wayne Electric Co., as then called, opened a factory at Brooklyn, N. Y., for the manufacture of the Wood arc lighting system. In 1890, the Brooklyn factory was removed to Fort Wayne, and consolidated with the parent plant, and in 1892, the Company built extensive additions to their works to accomodate the large increase in their arc business. On January 3, 1893, a portion of the factory was again destroyed by fire, but repairs were immediately made and facilities for manufacturing increased. During 1892, the manufacture of the Wood alternating system was begun together with that of power generators and motors.

II.

With this brief history of the corporation as an introduction, we come to the description of the works as they now stand. Situated directly on the line of the Pittsburgh, Fort Wayne & Chicago Railroad, the works constitute an aggregation of twelve buildings. The three principal buildings-the Main Shop, the East Shop and the Office Building-are of brick, the two former being each three stories in height. Besides enjoying the advantages of direct transportation facilities for the manufactured product, the

works are also supplied with natural gas, which is used under the boilers and throughout the establishment for all heating purposes. The warehouse and store-room, having railroad sidings on two sides, is 300 feet long by 50 feet wide.

find a collection of machine tools, capable of handling Entering upon the ground floor of the Main Shop, we anything up to a 500-kilowatt machine. Here are constructed and assembled all the incandescent, alternating and continuous current power generators of the Fort Wayne Corporation. The alternating machines range in capacity from 37.5 to 300 KW. and our illustration on page 555 gives a view of the latest 6,000 light Wood machine of this type. In the alternators the entire magnetic frame is cast, the pole pieces being slotted near their tips to prevent the generation of Foucault currents, the slots being cast and not milled. These pole pieces have slipped over them a compound coil of copper wire which is composed of four layers of comparatively small wire connected in series with the exciting dynamo, and over these, two layers of heavy wire through which the rectified portion of the main circuit passes, as shown diagrammatically on By this method compensation or over-compage 556. pounding for any line loss is made good, automatically and instantaneously.

The armature of this alternator is made up of C-shaped stampings; it is of the iron clad type, the teeth of which

THE OLD FORT WAYNE FACTORY.

are wound with a very few turns of copper ribbon. The induction in the teeth is about 8,000 lines per sq. cm., and the length of the conductor on the armature is 3.6 inches per volt. The electrical efficiency of the machine is 95 per cent. The initial excitation is produced by a small exciter driven from a pulley on the end of the main armature shaft.

The new Wood. 160 K. w. compound alternator and exciter, coupled to a 300 H. P. vertical cross compound engine built by the Ball Engine Co., of Erie, Pa., and running at 240 revolutions per minute, is shown on page 554.

EXCITER

Elec. Engineer

DIAGRAM OF WOOD COMPOUND ALTERNATOR. (See page 558).

shown in the illustration on this page, an electric motor drives a rose bit by means of flexible shafting, which the workman passes over the surface, and by means of which the casting can be cleaned up even into its innermost recesses with ease and dispatch.

In a corner of this room, also, the insulation of the commutators of the continuous current machines is tested in a novel way. Instead of applying a direct high potential a small series-wound machine with a Siemens armature is employed, giving normally about 200 volts potential. The terminals of the machine are connected by wires with two consecutive bars of the commutator and the machine is then short-circuited at a point directly above an air blast outlet. Upon the separating of the conductors again and opening the short circuit, the air blast blows out the arc, and the high self-inductive discharge of the machine,

CLEANING A CASTING BY ELECTRIC MOTOR.

incandescent machines. For the direct current incandescent machines a flat twin wire is employed, and each layer of conductors is insulated from the next by a winding of