The Westinghouse Lamp Plant was constructed on Arlington Avenue in 1920 near the Watsessing Station of the rail line in the Watsessing neighborhood that connected Montclair, Glen Ridge and Bloomfield. The population in the area had grown since the time that the Township of Bloomfield  was incorporated as a township from portions of Newark Township by an act of the New Jersey Legislature on March 23, 1812 until World War II. The population boom was contributed by the manufacturing jobs at the Westinghouse Lamp Plant along with other manufacturing plants such as General Electric, Lehn and Fink and Schering during the war time.
The Westinghouse Lamp Plant was devoted to lamp manufacturing in its early years. The plant had a research department to find a new suitable material for a light bulb filament. After World War I, the department led by Harvey C. Rentschler, and his deputy, John W. Marden, started looking into uranium to discover whether there was any similarity with tungsten to be used as a filament. The problem at the time was to make uranium into a metal form so that researchers could work with it. Westinghouse failed to establish uranium as a viable filament material, however, the research department continued to experiment with it until they found an electrolysis method to use a fused uranium salt to produce a metal. The metal was pure enough for nuclear research in many university laboratories during the 1930s. By 1941, Westinghouse Lamp Plant had the only practical process for producing pure uranium metal.