Nippon Electric Company - by Bradford Morgan White

Kunihiko Iwadare was born on the 15th of August in 1857 in the castle town of Kokura, Japan. He graduated from the Imperial College of Engineering in Tokyo and he subsequently briefly worked as a telegraph engineer for the Japanese government. Iwadare traveled to New York City in 1886 where he met Charles Batchelor. Batchelor was an inventor working with Thomas Alva Edison. Batchelor started working with Edison as a lab assistant, but the two quickly became business partners. This partnership became a legal structure as Batchelor was among the investors in the Edison Electric Light Company, Edison Lamp Company, Edison Machine Works, and the Edison General Electric Company. This last was a merger of other Edison companies, and later became the General Electric Company, which exists to this day, after acquiring Thomson-Houston with the support of Anthony Drexel and J. P. Morgan. Batchelor was the man responsible for recruiting Nikola Tesla to Edison’s employ, and he was the first executive of the General Electric Company serving as Treasurer and General Manager. In late 1886, Batchelor recruited Kunihiko Iwadare to work for Edison Machine Works. Initially, Iwadare was in Manhattan, but he transferred to Schenectady in January of 1887.

It is unclear exactly how long Iwadare worked for Edison. Different sources make different statements. I reached out to some researchers in Japan who’d done work on his early life, but I received no responses. At any rate, Iwadare returned to Japan with an intent to do his part in building an electrical industry in his homeland. He worked as an engineer for the Osaka Electric Lamp Company, and then left the company 1898. For a few months, he worked as a sales representative for both General Electric and Western Electric, but his relationship with Western was the more important of the two. When Western decided to establish a firm in Japan, Iwadare worked with Takeshiro Maeda and Walter Tenney Carleton to do so. On the 31st of August in 1898, this turned into a public joint venture known as the Nippon Electric Company, Ltd with Western Electric holding a fifty four percent stake and at which Iwadare was the managing director, Maeda oversaw sales, and Carleton oversaw the facilities that had been purchased from Miyoshi Electrical Manufacturing. The company purchased a second factory from Mitsui in 1900, and immediately began working to adapt it to its own needs. This was completed in December of 1902.

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