Biohazard and Pathogen Disinfection in Dayton, OH

Dayton is the county seat of Montgomery County and the sixth-most populous city in Ohio, with a population of 137,644 at the 2020 census.

Dayton was founded on April 1, 1796, when 12 settlers known as the Thompson Party traveled up the Great Miami River from Cincinnati, and it was named after Jonathan Dayton, a signer of the U.S. Constitution who owned much land in the area.

Dayton was incorporated as a village in 1805 and chartered as a city in 1841, and its oldest surviving building, Newcom Tavern, once housed the city's first church.

Dayton is nicknamed the 'Gem City' and the 'Birthplace of Aviation,' because the Wright brothers designed and built their Wright Flyer in Dayton and later made their test flights at Huffman Prairie just outside the city.

According to the National Park Service, citing U.S. Patent Office figures, Dayton had been granted more patents per capita than any other U.S. city by 1890.

Dayton saloonkeeper James Ritty invented the first mechanical cash register in 1879, and in 1884 John Henry Patterson bought Ritty's company and founded the National Cash Register Company (NCR), where Charles F. Kettering later developed the electric cash register and the automobile self-starter.

The catastrophic Great Dayton Flood of March 1913 led to the creation of the Miami Conservancy District in 1914, one of America's pioneering flood-control systems of dams and hydraulic pumps.

During World War II, Dayton hosted the Dayton Project, a branch of the Manhattan Project that developed polonium triggers for early atomic bombs, and NCR built the U.S. Navy Bombe code-breaking machines that helped crack the German Enigma cipher.

The Dayton Agreement, the peace accord that ended the Bosnian war in 1995, was negotiated at nearby Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, one of the largest air bases in the United States.

Dayton has about 58,477 households according to Census Bureau QuickFacts (2020-2024), and only about 48.4% of its housing is owner-occupied.