Anonymous

A Small Collection of Photographs, Advertising Delco-Light Products

S. l. s. n. 1920. First Edition. Four original, sepia-tone photographs, n. d. (1920s); 3 1/2 x 5 3/4; one with a small crease to lower left corner; all four with remnants of glue and paper to verso (removed from an album [?]); very good condition. A great group of candid photographs, they also doubled as advertisements for Delco-Light Products. Each one depicted a group of Delco employees/salespeople, in a bucolic setting, in a field ringed with trees. In the first one, they stood in a row, holding a very-large, Delco banner; in the second, the ladies in the group were sitting in front of the banner; in the third, the people had made a "train" - leaning forward, holding onto each other, grinning widely; in the last one, several of them had tumbled to the ground, rolling around, still clutching the banner. The Dayton Engineering Laboratories Co. (DELCO) was founded in Ohio by the inventor of the first electric starter Charles Kettering in 1909. At first, supplying electrical components to the automotive industry, by 1916 the company began manufacturing a line of Delco-Light electric-generating plants and motors for powering small appliances. From the start, its focus was rural America, where the salespeople would travel at night and demonstrate the plants on the prospective buyers' farms. Manufacturing over a 100 models and reaching its heyday by the mid-1930s, the company's sales began to decline after the Second World War, mostly due to President Roosevelt's rural electrification efforts and it folded in 1947. Very good .

ZH BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 002573

Catalogue: Electricity

Keywords: Electricity, Advertisement

Fuller, Frank

A College of Electrical Science

Menlo Park, NJ, By the author, 1883. First Edition. Broadside; 12 x 9 1/2; off-white stock, printed in black; fragile, with two small chips to left corners and several closed cuts to edges; good to very good condition. Published in April, 1883, at a pivotal point in the history of electricity and its applications, the circular would be reprinted in late June, 1883 in the "Electrical Review." Just months earlier, the Technical University of Darmstadt, Germany had introduced the first course in Electrical Engineering in the world. In the US, the first Electrical Engineering curriculum was created at MIT in 1882, in the Physics Department, although the first Department of Electrical Engineering and the first Electrical Engineering graduates were not produced until 1885 at Cornell University. The current broadside outlined, in great detail, the urgent need for an entire educational institution with various departments of Electrical Science. It pointed out that various technical colleges gave classes in matters. pertaining to electricity, but the studies were not nearly complete enough to satisfy the rising demand for such specialists. It also stated the fact that Menlo Park, New Jersey, home of Edison's laboratory, would be the perfect place to establish a college of electrical science. The circular ended with a description of the proposed, future institution, the promised investments in it by prominent gentlemen, and the possibilities for future inventors to develop new technologies under the best possible conditions. OCLC lists one variant copy at the Smithsonian; none in the trade. Good .

ZH BooksProfessional seller

Book number: 002511

Catalogue: Electricity

Keywords: Electricity, Edison, Electrical Engineering