Edison Park, Twinsburg

The GE Edison Park facility is believed to have opened in the late 1970s as the headquarters of the HID and Halogen business units. Alongside this was built a state-of-the-art cleanroom facility for the manufacture of the company's most advanced high intensity quartz and ceramic light sources. One of the major product lines planned to be made at Edison Park was the revolutionary Halarc Electronic, the world's first self-ballasted metal halide lamp. Most regrettably that product technology was so far ahead of its time that it proved to be a commercial failure, with a cost that was too high to justify once the energy crisis that had spurred its development was over. This was followed by a particularly painful period in GE Lighting's history, when in the early 1980s it faced a problem of serious overcapacity in lamp manufacturing. As part of the Lighting Leadership plan that was unveiled in 1983, ten of the company's USA lamp plants were slated for closure, including Edison Park, which was considered to be a luxury the company could not continue to justify. In 1984 its manufacturing operations were absorbed into the company's other HID and halogen plants with the loss of around 30 jobs, while another 155 were transferred to the group headquarters at nearly NELA Park in Cleveland, Ohio. The site was subsequently taken over by other GE divisions and remains operational as a GE Energy facility.