A controlling interest in the company was acquired in 1886 by a group of investors led by Washington H. Lawrence.
Brush Electric installed about eighty percent of the nation's arc-lighting systems during the early 1880s.
The original factory works of the Boulton Carbon Company began operations in 1881 and were located on Clifton Street (now East 39th Street) between Payne Avenue and Superior Avenue, at the Pennsylvania Rail Road tracks, in East Cleveland.
In 1885, the Boulton Carbon Company factory works were expanded to a larger facility on Willson Avenue (now East 55th Street near Euclid) between the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern and the Pennsylvania Railroad Companies lines, from which they had connecting tracks.
This location afforded the company greatly increased capacity along with favorable shipping facilities and options.
Case Western Reserve professor Albert Michelson, who later received the Nobel Prize for his work in physics disproving the "Ether Hypothesis" by conducting the famous Michelson-Morley Experiment, visited the Boulton factory twice in 1885 in conjunction with his research.
In 1886, former Brush Electric Company Superintendent/General Manager Washington H. Lawrence led a group of investors (including Myron T. Herrick, James Parmelee and Webb Hayes) in buying a controlling interest in the Boulton Carbon Company.
By 1894, he had formed the Boulton & Crown Carbon Company with a factory on 17th Street in North Tonawanda, New York.
For a brief time in 1896, Boulton went to work for the Prudential Life Insurance Company to make ends meet.
Destitute and now despondent from the death of his son, Boulton attempted to commit suicide on September 9, 1896, with a combination of a morphine overdose and chloroform.
When found by the police, Boulton had a note in his pocket that read: "I have swallowed 20 grains of morphine and have put myself to sleep with chloroform.