Hey Guys,

I thought you might be interested in seeing a few pictures of my visit to the former DIC TOOL Hytron plant in Meadville, Pa today. While the plant is no longer in production they still have a large inventory they are selling off. The extremely friendly staff was more than happy to give me a tour of the plant and while most of the equipment for the actual manufacturing has already been scrapped it was neat to see where production once was. The large sphere was for testing the lumens of the bulbs during production. They would pull samples from the production line to test that the bulbs were satisfactory. Although they havent produced light bulbs in a few years they were still doing teflon coating for I believe he said sylvania up until recently. The building itself is in the process of being sold to some sort of church outreach group so the building will be completely emptied by mid January.

David

Cool ! Welcome to LG !

Thank you very much!

Sad to see such a thing, but that’s really neat that you were able to document some lamp history there. Good work!

Welcome to LG! Sad to see the plant go, but hey, at least it's being repurposed instead of torn down!

Thank you! Im glad I was able to save a little bit of history while I was there. I tried to get some of the etches as they said they had thousands but unfortunately they had all been tossed into the garbage a while back.

Thank you! I was thinking the same, at least it isnt being demolished like every other old building around.

I was able to save a few old blueprints and a couple small fixtures from the plant.

Nice pics. Thank you for sharing! From what I understand, Hytron was forced into closure by April 2018 because of the ban on rough service incandescent lamps. During the last couple of years they only made clear lamps because Sylvania who made the glass stopped making frosted glass. Now, you can't even buy any raw materials to make bulbs in the USA!

Thank you! No problem at all. Oh wow, its too bad they're getting so strict on incandescent bulbs. I prefer the light given off by them compared to LED by far. Especially in my older lamps and light fixtures. Thanks for the information! I'll have to see if I can get some more pictures when I go back to the plant in a couple weeks!

That's great to hear you could visit this old lamp plant and save some of its history!  Thanks for the photos.  I don't know much about Trojan, maybe the people left there could provide some details about the company origins and history?  The blueprint drawing shows a curious phenomenon of many lamp plants : even when all the external dimensions are in inches, the internal construction is always designed on the metric system!