Conneaut Base Plant

The Conneaut Base Plant was General Electrics second facility for the manufacture of lamp bases/caps, opened in 1941 as a high volume facility dedicated to producing the medium screw brass bases for ordinary incandescent lamps (type E26). Nine months after its opening, wartime restrictions on the use of brass forced the plant to be retooled to make bases from the considerably inferior steel sheet for the duration of the war. Conneaut was a high volume operation, running 24 hours per day, 7 days per week. It later diversified into producing other specialised metal parts, in particular the iron-nickel ferrules used for the glass-to-metal seals of PAR and medium bi-post lamps. Still later it embraced plastic moulding facilities, producing parts for camera photoflash lamps. In 1977 together with its sister plant, the Providence Base Plant, GE manufactured more than 2.5 billion lamp bases of all kinds. The factory was hit hard, however, following GE's takeover of the Hungarian Tungsram lighting company, whose base production facilties in Eastern Europe were considerably more cost-efficient. In parallel the early 2000s witnessed a sharp decline in the volume of lamps being made in the USA, with those types employing medium screw bases shifting from GE's American-made incandescent lamps to imported compact fluorescent and halogen types. These trends in cost and volume gradually made the Conneaut Base Plant too expensive to keep open, and the plant was closed in 2008.