Guide Lamp Division, General Motors

Guide Lamp made headlamps. Formed in Cleveland in 1906 to repair carriages and acetylene lamps, it built the first electric automotive headlamp two years later and was absorbed into General Motors in the 1920s, after which it spent its life pressing sheet-metal lighting and body hardware in Anderson, Indiana. Its place on a firearms site is an accident of 1942: US Army Ordnance wanted a submachine gun that could be stamped rather than machined, and went to a lamp plant to get one. Guide Lamp built more than six hundred thousand M3s, and before that the FP-45 Liberator, a single-shot pistol turned out by the hundred thousand for distribution to resistance movements. It never made another firearm, and in 1984 its lighting and hardware work was merged with Fisher Body to form GM’s Fisher Guide Division.