Carolina Welds

The Carolina Welds Plant of the General Electric Company of America did not produce complete lamps, but was a component factory that supplied materials to other final-assembly lamp, electronic tube and cathode ray tube plants. Its main products were welded wire assemblies, in which a number of different metal wires are welded together end-to-end. These are employed as the electrical feedthroughs in lamps of all kinds. The special 2-core 'Dumet' wire, whose thermal expansion coefficient matches that of soft glasses and which is employed as the vacuum-tight glass-to-metal seal in lamps, was also manufactured at Carolina. The site was opened in 1946 with a $ 1.5M investment and 25 employees, as a sister factory for the earlier-established Jefferson Welds Plant to provide additional capacity. However Carolina quickly outstripped its predecessor and rapidly grew to become the largest manufacturer of lead wires in the world, supplying not only GE's American plants with leadwires, but also a large number of competitors around the world who relied on GE for the supply of these specialised components. By 1953 it had grown to 300 employees. Following GE's takeover of the Hungarian Tungsram company in 1990, much of the component manufacturing was transferred to those considerably lower cost East-European facilities. In October 2010 GE announced its intention to close the facility, and precisely one year later production was ceased with the loss of the final 46 jobs.