Brush Development Company was a manufacturer of

audio Audio most commonly refers to sound, as it is transmitted in signal form. It may also refer to: Sound *Audio signal, an electrical representation of sound *Audio frequency, a frequency in the audio spectrum *Digital audio, representation of sound ...

phonograph A phonograph, later called a gramophone, and since the 1940s a record player, or more recently a turntable, is a device for the mechanical and analogue reproduction of sound. The sound vibration Waveform, waveforms are recorded as correspond ...

ic products and

magnetic recording Magnetic storage or magnetic recording is the storage of data on a magnetized medium. Magnetic storage uses different patterns of magnetisation in a magnetizable material to store data and is a form of non-volatile memory. The information is ...

technologies located in

Cleveland Cleveland is a city in the U.S. state of Ohio and the county seat of Cuyahoga County. Located along the southern shore of Lake Erie, it is situated across the Canada–U.S. maritime border and approximately west of the Ohio-Pennsylvania st ...

Ohio Ohio ( ) is a U.S. state, state in the Midwestern United States, Midwestern region of the United States. It borders Lake Erie to the north, Pennsylvania to the east, West Virginia to the southeast, Kentucky to the southwest, Indiana to the ...

. It was absorbed into Clevite in 1952.

History

The business was founded in 1919 by Alfred L. Williams as Brush Labs to develop products that used

piezoelectric Piezoelectricity (, ) is the electric charge that accumulates in certain solid materials—such as crystals, certain ceramics, and biological matter such as bone, DNA, and various proteins—in response to applied stress (mechanics), mechanical s ...

crystals. Associates spun off the Brush Development Company in 1930 with piezoelectric phonograph pickups as its main product.http://www.audiotools.com/dead_b.html Audiotools: Defunct Audio Manufacturers Later it began manufacturing wire recorders,

microphone A microphone, colloquially called a mic (), or mike, is a transducer that converts sound into an electrical signal. Microphones are used in many applications such as telephones, hearing aids, public address systems for concert halls and publi ...

s, and

speakers Speaker most commonly refers to: * Speaker, a person who produces speech * Loudspeaker, a device that produces sound ** Computer speakers Speaker, Speakers, or The Speaker may also refer to: Arts and entertainment * Speaker (song), "Speaker" ( ...

. During World War II, Vice President for Research Dr. Semi Joseph Begun was awarded a contract from the US National Defense Research Council for research on a substitute for stainless steel wire used in wire recorders by the military. Post-war, Brush manufactured a dictation recorder in 1946, and released the first USA built tape recorder in 1947 with the Brush Soundmirror. In 1950, Brush built the Model BL-206 and BL-216 Multichannel Oscillographs, and associated Model BL-932 DC Amplifiers. In 1952 Brush Development Company merged with the original Brush Labs and the Cleveland Graphite Bronze company to create Clevite. Audio products continued to be sold under the Brush trademark until 1960. The Clevite company was absorbed by Gould-National Batteries in 1969.{{cite web, title=BRUSH DEVELOPMENT CORP. – The Encyclopedia of Cleveland History, url=http://ech.case.edu/cgi/article.pl?id=BDC, publisher=Case Western Reserve University, accessdate=December 6, 2012

References

Sources

*Gerard M. Foley. personal recollections of work sponsored at Battelle Memorial Institute by Brush 1943–1945. Manufacturing companies based in Cleveland