1976 GRAYBAR ELECTRIC Co. ADVERTISING DESK CALENDAR PEN HOLDER

Description

1976 GRAYBAR ELECTRIC Co. ADVERTISING DESK CALENDAR PEN HOLDER
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THIS MONTH, WE ARE PLEASED TO OFFER MANY FINE ANTIQUE AND COLLECTIBLE ARTIFACTS AND RARITIES FROM MISSISSIPPI AND LOUISIANA ESTATES AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS
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OTHER
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DESCRIPTION
FROM AN OLD AND PROMINENT NEW ORLEANS, LOUISIANA ESTATE, AN ADVERTISING DESK CALENDAR WITH 1976 CALENDAR SHEETS.
OVERALL CAST GREY RESIN COMPOSITE MATERIAL, IN THE STREAM LINE MANNER, FITTED WITH A SILVER CHROME METAL BRACKET PLATE TO THE TOP, RETAINING THE CALENDAR SHEETS.
MEASURING 10 x 6" OVERALL, STANDING AROUND 1.5" TALL AT THE TOP, TAPERED DOWN TO A PEN HOLDER, WEIGHING A SUBSTANTIAL -12- OUNCES.
TO THE CHROME PLATED BAR, ENAMEL FILLED RECESSED STYLIZED LETTERS READ ~
GraybaR
~
Everything Electrical
~Graybar
Electric Company
CONDITION REPORT
> A WELL PRESERVED EXAMPLE ~ PERHAPS TYPICAL AND MINOR ELEMENTS RELATIVE TO AGE AND MATERIALS ~ OVERALL GOOD, VINTAGE CONDITION, BEST NOTED BY EXAMINING THE IMAGES OFFERED.
HISTORY of GRAYBAR ELECTRIC COMPANY
Graybar is an American employee-owned corporation, based in Clayton, Missouri. It conducts a wholesale distribution business for electrical, communications and data networking products, and is a provider of related supply-chain management and logistics services. It is included on the Fortune 500 list of the largest United States corporations.
The Graybar Electric Company was incorporated on December 11, 1925, as the successor company of the general electric supply business of the Western Electric Company, which was founded in 1869 in Cleveland, Ohio, by Elisha Gray and Enos M. Barton. The separation of product lines was intended to provide a separate identity from the telephone supply function of Western Electric to the Bell System, given its importance as the largest merchandiser of electrical apparatus and related equipment in the world in the 1920s.
During the post-Civil War Reconstruction Era, an entrepreneur named Enos M. Barton, who had served as a telegrapher during the war, worked for W.U. Telegraph in Rochester, New York. During this period, Barton met George Shawk, the foreman of the company's Cleveland, Ohio shop. When that shop was closed down, Shawk bought some of the equipment and went into business for himself, making various kinds of electrical and other apparatus, including inventor's models. While on a trip to Rochester, he and Barton, who was then 26, agreed to go into partnership.
To raise the 0 her son needed for his share of the business venture, Barton's widowed mother mortgaged her home.
The new firm, located at 93 St. Clair Street in Cleveland, grew. In May 1869, Elisha Gray, an Oberlin College professor and inventor of telegraphic equipment, bought out Shawk's interest.
Up until then, Gray had been one of the firm's top customers. He had invented a needle annunciator for hotels and elevators, a telautograph (a machine for the electrical transmission of writing), and the telegraph answer-back call box. Gray and Barton joined forces with an investment of ,500 each, with Gray as the senior partner. The success of the new company attracted the attention of General Anson Stager, general superintendent of the Western Union Telegraph Company. He offered to enter the business as an equal partner with Gray and Barton, providing the company's headquarters was moved from Cleveland to Chicago, Illinois. In December 1869, the company moved to 162 S. Water Street, Chicago. The great Great Chicago Fire in 1871 came within two blocks of its small plant.
The destruction caused by the fire resulted in greater growth for Gray & Barton, as the company sold fire alarms and helped rebuild the Western Union infrastructure in the city.
After several relocations, all in Chicago, the business was incorporated as the Western Electric Manufacturing Company in 1872 to meet the capital requirements of the telegraph supply business. The new company so closely allied with the elder Western that three of its five directors were Western Union executives. Moreover, Stager was named president, although it was Barton as secretary/treasurer who actually handled day-to-day affairs.
Although the young firm thrived in the telegraph industry, it was not until the invention of the telephone by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876, and the incandescent lamp by Thomas Alva Edison in 1879, that Western Electric began to gain stature as a large company.
Part-owner Gray held the title of company electrician and spent his days working on his inventions, becoming increasingly less involved in the operations of the shop, and eventually he sold his interest in Western Electric in 1875 and retired to pursue independent research and to teach at Oberlin College. In 1876, he filed a caveat with the U.S. Patent Office, announcing his intention to soon patent an invention that would transmit vocal sounds telegraphically. Gray dubbed his telephone "the harmonic telegraph". Only hours earlier, however, Alexander Graham Bell applied for a patent for the same idea, which became known as the telephone. As it turned out, what Bell actually patented would have never worked, while Gray's idea would have. Western Union acquired both Gray's and Edison's telephone patents to challenge the American Bell Telephony Company, renamed AT&T in 1899, which led to a patent infringement suit and Bell ultimately being named the inventor of the telephone. Therefore it was Bell's patent and not Grays that launched the telecommunications industry.
Further information: Elisha Gray and Alexander Bell telephone controversy
As applications of electricity broadened, Western Electric not only sold the electric bells and batteries, telegraph keys, fire alarm boxes and hotel annunciators it originally manufactured, but also many items it purchased from other manufacturers.
Stager served as president of Western Electric until shortly before his death in 1885, and Barton then served as president from 1886 to 1908.
Western Electric Company was the first company to join in a Japanese joint venture with foreign capital. It invested in Nippon Electric Company in 1899. Western Electric held 54% of NEC at the time. Their representative in Japan was Walter Tenney Carleton.
By the turn of the century, Western Electric had become the main producer of telephone equipment in the United States. It also manufactured arc lamps, lighting equipment and power apparatus, ranging from small fans to huge motors and generators. Alongside manufacturing, the distribution business continued to grow, handling an extensive line of electrical supplies such as wire, conduit, wiring devices and pole line material.
By the 1910s, the company became the worlds largest distributor and the United States leading wholesaler of electrical supplies. These facts attracted investment by the American Bell Telephone Company, which also discovered that Gray and Barton could purchase supplies and sell them to the telephone companies more efficiently than the companies could acquire the supplies themselves.
A chain of warehouses was established across the nation, and the growth of the distributing business continued to increase through World War I and into the post-war period.
On December 31, 1920, the supply department of Western Electric was divided by forming operating divisions for general electrical supplies and telephone equipment. In 1923, the general supply business opened separate general offices in the newly constructed Pershing Square Building in New York City.
Scores of electrical supply manufacturers were using the company's distribution network, and business relationships were formed. Some of these relationships, such as with General Electric and the Square D Company, are more than a century old and still exist today. Having become the largest merchandizer of electrical supplies in the world and close to fifty distributing houses in the United States, the division was incorporated as a separate entity on December 11, 1925 with the name Graybar Electric Company, in honor of Western's original founders, Elisha Gray and Enos Barton.
On January 1, 1927, Western Electric's holdings in Graybar were transferred to Electric Research Holdings, a Western Electric company. Graybar was sold to the Graybar Management Corporation on December 31, 1928, a company held by the employees of Graybar, who purchased their shares for its capitalized value of million, which consisted of million in cash and million in cumulative preferred stock.
During the 1930s, the company explored many avenues of income, including a line of appliances and sewing machines under the Graybar brand. By 1941 the company's sales volume was more than 0 million, the number of distribution houses had jumped to 86, and there was a corresponding increase in personnel. Also that year, the remaining outstanding shares of stock were purchased from Western Electric with a million check signed by Graybar President Frank A. Ketcham.
When the country entered World War II, Graybar's ingenuity and knowledge of logistics proved to be of immeasurable value in providing war-needed goods. Graybar became a vital link between America's manufacturers and America's defense needs. Defense-related business continued in the postwar era, with Graybar again aiding the military during the subsequent Korean War and Vietnam War. Overall the company enjoyed strong growth in the years following World War II, its momentum not checked until the recession of the mid-1970s, which led to Graybar slashing its workforce by 20%. As a result, when economic conditions improved in the 1980s Graybar was unable to gear up quickly enough to meet the rising demand for electrical products.
The corporate headquarters moved from the Graybar Building in New York City to Clayton, Missouri in 1982.
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