Three events occurred in the wake of electricity replacing gravity to power the Ontario & Santa Antonio Heights Rail Road Gravity Mule Car trolley: the mules returned to the farm, welldressed people around the world rejoiced and America’s favorite board game got an iconic piece to represent the average American homemaker.

And although these events gradually slip from our collective memory, they reveal one of Ontario’s most unique achievements: the Hotpoint Iron.

The saga of the Hotpoint iron began with the completion of the region’s first hydroelectric facility in San Antonio Canyon to provide electricity to Pomona Valley residents. While electricity provided a more dependable source of power than mules, it was still a novel and unreliable source of energy and sparked fierce competition between early electricity pioneers.

Earl Holmes Richardson In the mid-1890s, a young electrical engineer named Earl Holmes Richardson moved into a tent in San Antonio Canyon to maintain the facility and later moved to Ontario as a meter reader for the Ontario Power Company.

Richardson, whose restless inventiveness inspired relentless tinkering, began exploring ways to create demand for more electricity, reasoning that greater demand would spark greater supply which would reduce electricity rates.

He also reasoned that electrifying heavy and cumbersome flatirons would generate a tremendous demand, as keeping irons hot enough to press fabric posed myriad problems for homemakers. And in 1904, Richardson formed the Pacific Electric Heating Company on Euclid Avenue and focused on improving the flatiron.

Wife’s idea Yet the unsung hero of the Hotpoint saga was Richardson’s wife Mary, who suggested an ap pliance with heat at the iron’s point for detailed pressing for buttonholes, pleats and ruffles. Richardson distributed sample irons to local laundresses to collect their responses.

After a week, when they refused to part with their “hot point” irons, Richardson knew he had a winner.

Over time, Richardson’s company evolved into the Edison Electric Appliance Company and later became a division of General Electric Company known as GE Hotpoint. The Hotpoint Iron became one of the most popular appliances in the world, and by the time the plant closed in 1982 it had produced more than 150 million Hotpoint irons.

Yet, while the Hotpoint Iron proved Richardson’s greatest success, his company turned into one of the region’s biggest employers. Over time, it produced electric toasters, coffee makers, hotplates and even an early crockpot called “the Jug Cooker.”

Game changer for the foothills GE Hotpoint’s success proved a game changer for the foothills communities. With the region’s economy rooted firmly in agriculture from the early mission era, GE Hotpoint brought the first large-scale manufacturing to the region and at one point employed more than a quarter of the city’s labor force.

So successful and ubiquitous was Richardson’s invention that when the Parker Brothers Company introduced the board game Monopoly in the 1930s, they created six game pieces to illustrate some aspect of the nation’s economy such as a top hat to represent the wealthy.

The icon they chose to represent the average American homemaker was an iron.