Kahlson, William

William Kahlson was born in Helsinki, Finland, in 1902. His family moved to Sweden, and Kahlson immigrated to the United States in 1920. He returned to Sweden to pursue a university education, earning a degree in chemical engineering from Chalmers University. He was also an amateur wrestler, and he won the Swedish middleweight wrestling championship in 1923.

He returned to the United States and began working as a physicist for General Electric (G.E.) Company in Niles, Ohio, in 1925. He married Ruth M. Edelberg in 1926, and the couple had twin sons. He then became the plant manager of the G.E. Pitney Glass Works in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1931. There he oversaw the implementation of G.E.’s first Corning Glass Ribbon Machine to produce light bulbs. Kahlson managed the plant until his retirement in 1965; he died in St. Petersburg, Florida, in 1983.