Rowe Industries was a manufacturer of guitar pickups and other music-related devices, as well as electrical components utilized in the aerospace industry into the 1980s. Owner Horace "Bud" Rowe established a working relationship with budding electrical component designer Harold "Harry" DeArmond (January 28, 1906 – October 12, 1999). DeArmond is credited with developing the first commercially available detachable guitar pickup. Rowe-DeArmond collaboration Early developments Harold "Harry" DeArmond (January 28, 1906 – October 12, 1999) was an industrial designer of electrical components. His younger brother John was a budding guitarist at age 10 but wanted to make his guitar louder and better-sounding, and in 1935 created a magnetic pickup using components from the ignition coil of a Ford Model A. Harry realized the commercial potential of such a device, and began developing the idea into something commercially feasible. In part to support this undertaking, he founded DeArmond Research, at 4124 Secor Road in Toledo, Ohio (West Toledo), which he operated until the 1960s. One of his early contracts was as a design consultant for small manufacturing firms owned by entrepreneur Horace Rowe, a relationship that lasted through 1975. In 1931, Rowe founded his first company, Fox Electrical and Manufacturing, located at 3120 Monroe Street in Toledo, Ohio. Among other commercial directions, Fox manufactured small electric motors, which required the tooling to create coils of insulated copper wire. DeArmond interested Rowe in turning the company's knowledge of coil winding to the building of guitar pickups. The name was changed to Fox Sound Equipment Corporation in 1935. A pickup-building operation was soon opened. Bud Rowe consolidated his companies in 1940 as Rowe Industries, under which it operated through 1970. The first DeArmond pickups The first RH ("round-hole") and FH ("F-hole") guitar pickups were constructed in 1939. "Mounted within a metal casing, …six Alnico II pole pieces on a bakelite spool" with a coil of 42-gauge copper wire. (That same year, John DeArmond, age 14, hopped a train to California, where he worked as a musician until he was able to join the Navy.) The RH was designed to fit into the opening of a standard ("round hole") guitar, with a wire clip at one end and two adjustable spring-steel arms at the other, making the device readily removable. To avoid interfering with performance, the device projected only a few millimeters above the soundboard. The FH model had a significantly different appearance. One end