MANUFACTURING: Hygrade Out from Under

For most of its 40 years in the lighting business, Hygrade Sylvania Corp. has lived off scraps from other people’s patent tables. It has not been a bad living. Hygrade has missed no dividend since 1921, earned $856,807 on an $11,022,424 gross last year. But last week Hygrade directors began to move out from under the table. Gathered in their Salem, Mass, office, they voted $250,000 (or more if needed) for a new factory. Its product-to-be: fluorescent lighting, in which Hygrade owns basic patents of its own.

Hygrade was started by husky, sporting Yankee Frank Poor, later joined by his brothers Ed and Walter. Once high in the field of 10-watt bulbs for electric displays, they found after World War I that General Electric’s patents were law-proof, settled down to make bulbs under G. E. license, on a production quota of 2% of G. E.’s own. Pushing like a radish sprout under a rock, the Poor Brothers merged with other small licensees, ran their quota up to 10%, became No. 3 lamp maker (after G. E. & Westinghouse).

Still pushing, the Poors went into radio tubes, on license from R. C. A. A merger with Sylvania Products Co. in 1931 got them 100% more tube capacity, also Hygrade Sylvania’s present president, bespectacled Benjamin Erskine (who owned Sylvania). Now Hygrade is the No. 2 tube maker, but pays 5% royalties to the No. 1 maker, R. C.’A.

When fluorescent lighting showed commercial possibilities several years ago, Hygrade researchers went quickly to work. Mercury vapor inside fluorescent lamps is ionized by an electric discharge between electrodes at each end, produces short ultraviolet rays which must then be converted by a fluorescent powder to visible light. In February Hygrade’s chief research engineer, James L. Cox, got an award from N. A. M. for a new method of coating the lamps with a porous powder so that longer rays of the visible range are efficiently radiated. Costly to install, fluorescents waste only 75% of their energy in heat (incandescents waste 90%), are therefore more economical than incandescents in many uses. Millions who saw their cool, ghostly rays at the World’s Fairs last summer are already spending $1,000,000 a week to install fluorescents in factories, stores, some homes.