Author: Anonymous
Title: A Small Collection of Photographs, Advertising Delco-Light Products
Description: 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 .

Keywords: Electricity, Advertisement


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