ABOUT ADS OF OLD

After being involved in the welding industry in the early part of my working life and being made redundant three times before I was the age of 25, I decided enough was enough.  Collecting was a vast hobby of mine and I did it really well - never throwing a thing away!

I first got interested in the Petrol pumps and Globes which in turn lead me to Enamel advertising and all other aspects of period advertising from an oil bottle to a neon sign from fridges to pumps you name it if it had an advert on it i liked it and collected it. So that’s how it all began in the late 80s early 90s.Twenty years on and its my main source of income and has been for the last twenty years, times have changed and the world has got a smaller place but there’s one thing for sure old advertising is timeless and still dose it for me and many others around the world.

It was not until the early 1800s that porcelain enameling on cast iron was developed and practiced in central Europe . Later, around 1850, sheet iron manufacturing processes developed, porcelain enameling was initiated in the USA and Britain .

The hey-day of enameled iron signs was comparatively short. They reached their peak before the 1914 war, went into decline from 1918 and there end was in sight by 1939.In half a century leading to World War II, millions of signs were produced. During the 1950s, however after a virtual halt of production in the previous decade, and with the continued rationing of steel, there emerged a new and powerful rival in the form of huge advertising hoardings.

 The porcelain enamel process involves the refusing of powdered glass on a metal surface via two principle processes. Cast Iron, dry process enamels, were the first to be used on a large scale.

The enamelling of iron only became possible because of the ability to vitreous-enamel sheet wrought iron, and it was not until the 1920s, when Armco produced a sheet sufficiently free from defects, that the sheet steel could be used for signs.

Petrol pumps were first introduced in this country in 1922 by Stenson Cook after a visit to the USA , previously to pumps we all bought petrol from garages or hardware store in 2 gallon cans. It was a revolution to be able to fill your car up from a pump instead of having to plan your trip between garages and hardware stores. As time marched on and the petrol retailers got bigger petrol pumps were apparent on all our garage forecourts up and down the country and small garages could have up to 10 different makes of petrol for sale, so was introduced the petrol globe to identify the various brands that were available from each pump, these were first manufactured out of glass but as time and cost got watched more and more closely these globe were made of plastic. Plastic globes were not really introduced until the 70s so glass was the predominate material through the age of petrol globes.

I do hope if you have found this site by chance and never considered owning a piece of this country’s fine advertising art that it may have installed an interest. To maybe owning and gaining pleasure from what I can only say is a part of this once fine land.  

Nigel Dinsdale