Hundreds of American companies shifted their peacetime assembly lines to wartime work during WWII. The contributions of large companies to prominent weapons are best known. Ford made B-24’s. Fisher and Chrysler made Sherman tanks. Eastman managed the centrifuges at Oak Ridge. Boeing made the B-17 and the B-29. The Detroit Historical society lists 103 companies in that city alone that did work for the War Department.

The contributions of uncounted smaller companies probably best illustrate the breadth of the industrial impact of the war. The Vokar Camera Company made proximity fuses in Dexter, Michigan. Honeywell made tank periscopes in Minneapolis. The Herschede Hall Clock Company in Cincinnati made artillery sights. The Chrysler Desoto plant in Evansville made so much .45 caliber ammunition that it was not all used up until the Vietnam War.

In 1940, shortly after the Neutrality Act was amended to allow the sale of weapons to England, the Argus Camera Company began preparing for War Department work. By the end of 1940 it had contracted with Bendix Radio in Baltimore to make radio components and had began construction of an addition (now torn down) on West William Street to manufacture military optics.

Argus’s WWII optical production was well documented from the beginning. Wartime issues of the monthly employee newspaper Argus Eyes often included photos of the optical staff and products. Argus's annual reports from 1943 on showed military sights, scopes, and optical components. A new plant, across the street from the orginal Argus factory on 4th Street, was completed in 1942 and expanded in 1944. Ater the war, Fortune Magazine highlighted the “optical division” in a multi-page article titled The Fall and Rise of Argus.

Much less attention was paid to the radio production that was done in old Plant 1. Over the years it came to be referred to as “Bendix sub-contract work.” Virtually the only documentation consisted of passing mentions in Argus Eyes and 6 pages of cryptically captioned photos in a 1946 Argus report headlined “World War II Activities.”

This site documents an exhibit held in October of 2015 that attempted to capture Argus’s WWII radio production by identifying and displaying every device shown in the 1946 report. After 3 years of HAM swap meets, eBay, flea markets, purchases from “warbird” websites, and a generous loan from a radio expert in Iceland, we achieved about half of that objective. The exhibit showed what we had found and found out, and attempted to put the Argus material into technical and historic context.

It was held on the ground floor of the old Argus plant in Ann Arbor. The exhibit space was generously provided by the O’Neal Construction Company, which bought and restored the Argus factory in 1983, and whose offices occupy most of the building. The O’Neal Company also hosts the Argus Museum on the second floor of the building. The Museum is curated with great creativity and assertiveness by Cheryl Chidester and recently became part of the Washtenaw County Historical Society.

Adrian Wylie, a professional photographer and Ann Arbor resident, photographed the exhibit. The original objective of this site was to provide a guide to anyone tasked with re-assembling the exhibit from its current storage in the basement of the Argus Museum. Adrian’s work was so complete and detailed that it became clear that the website could easily serve as an on-line equivalent of the original exhibit, and so it has been designed with that objective.

Each item and document in the exhibit is shown on an individual page. These pages are collected into 14 sub-areas, each of which deals with a military radio system for which Argus made components. Items that were not made by Argus but that were important parts of a system using Argus-made components are included to show the technical context of Argus's contribution.

The page for a given item has a photo of the item and an image of the "info placard" that was located with the item in the exhibit. The placard gives essential information on the item and displays a color-coded line that indicates Argus's role in the production of the component: The links on the left of the home page go to the respective system sub-areas, and the links at the top of each sub-area divide the items in the area into hardware (“items”) and documentation (texts and wall hangings). There is a summary of the highlights of each area under the “overview” link.