Cleveland Bulb

Little information has been found concerning the now-closed Cleveland Bulb Plant, a factory of General Electric's Lamp Glass Department. It was located within GE's sprawling East 152nd Street Facility - a vast site made up of multiple individual factories, all of which were engaged in the production of component parts and pre-materials for supply to other final assembly lamp plants. The main site was founded in 1913 and it is not certain when the Cleveland Bulb Plant joined these operations, or when it closed, but various references indicate that it was certainly operational between the years 1949 and 1979.

A 1979 reference indicates that at that time, the primary activity of this factory was the application of decorative coloured coatings to glass bulbs produced at other GE glass plants (but which may have originally been produced on this site).

It had a second product line of very high technological importance - Lucalox tubing. That material is a ceramic of transLUcent polyCrystalline ALuminium OXide, which was developed by GE's Schenectady research laboratories in the 1960s and which made the high pressure sodium lamp feasible. It forms the arc tube material of this kind of lamp.

The East 152nd Street facility was also responsible for the production of transparent fused quartz for high intensity discharge and halogen lamps, but it is not known whether or not that activity was contained within the Cleveland Bulb Plant. In later years the company's quartz production was relocated to the Newark Quartz and Willoughby Quartz plants. Some time afterwards, the production of Lucalox materials was also transferred to Willoughby, and it seems likely that the Cleveland Bulb Plant may have been closed on that occasion.