Explaining New Technology

From, maybe, 1911, a postcard that is so heavily retouched it might as well be a cartoon:

There really was a big electric sign there showing a kitten tangled in silk thread, but I assume the actual sign had supports that are not visible here. The front gives us a short explanation of the wonders of electric-sign advertising – a new thing at that time – but the back goes all out:

The preprinted text is more “gee whiz” stuff about the sign. The handwritten text makes it clear that this particular postcard was send by the Corticelli company to a potential customer. In other words, not only is the entire postcard an ad about both the product and advertising, but this copy of it was mailed specifically as an ad.

The words “see it before April 30th” imply that the sign was a temporary installation. (That might explain the hand-drawn aspect of the card: it had to be prepared in advance, so the artist may have been given a photo of the building and a drawing of the proposed sign and told to imagine what it would look like.) But there apparently was a more permanent sign, nearby, shortly after:

If that’s the same location, then the first image is badly inaccurate as to what the building looked like. The “Louis Martins” sign make me think that the Corticelli sign was on the 1910 Crossroads Building, which was to some extent constructed simply to carry signs.

In any case, in our advertising-soaked age it can be hard to image that the benefits of an eye-catching illuminated sign had to be explained, but the first postcard existed to do exactly that.