The first animated electric sign debuts in Times Square - April 28th, 1937

On this day in 1937, the first animated electric sign was installed on Broadway in New York City. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show for those who can never know enough about history.
I'm Gabe Lucier, and in this episode, we're taking a

(00:20):
wide eyed look at the work of Douglas Lee aka
The Sign Came. He was the man behind the dazzling
signs that illuminated Times Square and other urban centers throughout
the mid twentieth century, and the outsized impact he left
on modern consumer culture can still be seen today. The

(00:47):
day was April twenty eighth, nineteen thirty seven. The first
animated electric sign was installed on Broadway in New York City.
A forerunner of the modern digital build board, the sign
featured two thousand light bulbs that could turn on and
off in sequence to depict a cartoon scene. The sign's

(01:08):
four minute spectacle included a prancing horse and a ball
tossing cat, the motions of which were rendered through the
careful coordination of blinking yellow bulbs. The animal antics played
out on the side of a building right there in
Times Square, providing a free cartoon show for the man
in the street, provided, of course, that he didn't mind

(01:30):
a few ads in between. Although photographs of the original
sign are sadly lost to history, we at least know
a fair bit about the team who brought it to life.
The sign itself was designed by renowned graphic artist Dorothy Sheppard,
and its electronic animations were provided by Felix the Cat
Master animator Otto Mesmer. The project's mastermind, however, was advertising

(01:55):
executive Douglas Lee. He was an Alabama native, but had
discover covered his knack for sales while attending the University
of Florida. While enrolled, he bought all the advertising in
the school's yearbook on credit and then resold the ad
space for a profit. The scheme earned him about five grand,
enough to convince him to drop out of college and

(02:17):
get into the sales game full time. Lee made his
way to New York City in the early nineteen thirties
and got to work setting up his business. His first
success came in nineteen thirty three, when he secured the
right to install a sign at a busy intersection in
the Bronx. Lee was then able to persuade the Saint
Moritz Hotel to put up a billboard on that site.

(02:40):
His pay for leasing the space was fifty dollars a
month and a free room at the hotel for one year.
That was enough to give Lee a foothold in the city.
The money paid for his meals at the local automat,
and the lodging gave him a Central Park South address
to use on his stationery. It seemed to do the
trick too, because later that same year, Lee signed a

(03:02):
deal with A and P Coffee to advertise its brands.
The idea that sold them was a fifteen foot wide
sign shaped like a cup of coffee with actual steam
rising out of the top. It was installed at the
southeast corner of forty seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, a
highly trafficked area where it was sure to attract a
lot of attention, both for A and P and for

(03:25):
Lee himself. Pretty soon, other companies wanted their own oversized
ads with eye catching gimmicks, and Lee was all too
happy to oblige. In the years ahead, he put up
those kinds of signs, dubbed spectaculars, all over Time Square. Then,
in nineteen thirty seven, he debuted an innovation that would
go on to define the nighttime landscapes of mid century

(03:48):
American cities. The animated electric sign to design and direct
the characters and moving graphics for his new kind of ad,
Lee enlisted the expertise of cartoonist Auto Mesmer. He had
been out of the cartoon game since nineteen thirty when
the studio that produced his Felix shorts went belly up. However,

(04:09):
Mesmer's career got an unexpected second act after Lee approached
him to work on a new form of animated advertisement.
Mesmer was perfectly suited for the job, as the main
requirement was to think up silent visual gags for black,
silhouetted characters to act out. He had plenty of experience
in that department from his years of working on the

(04:30):
Felix shorts, and while technical advances such as synchronized sound
and color had made his cartoons seem too antiquated for
the movie screen, his high contrast black and white imagery
looked cutting edge on an electronic sign. As a result,
Auto Mesmer got to continue working in his classic style
for another thirty five years, all the way up to

(04:52):
his retirement. As for Douglas Lee, he continued dreaming up
new interactive features for his signs, many of which became
fixed of times Square and of City centers outside of
New York. One of his most famous creations was a
camel cigarette ad that hung on the Clarage Hotel on
the southeast corner of forty fourth Street and Broadway from

(05:13):
nineteen forty one to nineteen sixty six. The smiling man
on that enormous sign would puff out real five foot
wide smoke rings every four seconds. The chain smoking effect
was achieved by a piston driven diaphragm the collected steam
from the hotel and forced it out through a small
hole in the front of the billboard. The design was

(05:34):
so popular that it was reproduced in twenty two other cities.
But if smoking wasn't your thing, which was unlikely in
those days, Lee had other mechanical marvels to draw your eye,
like the sign he created for Super Sud's detergent. It
pumped out three thousand giant soap bubbles every minute. People
genuinely looked forward to seeing what kind of dazzling new

(05:58):
display Lee would come up with neck next. Even though
they were meant as advertisements, many people saw Lee's signs
as their own form of entertainment, with the product on
offer playing second fiddle to the medium itself. Some even
viewed Lee's ads as an equalizing force in a capitalist society,
a way to inject some glitz and whimsy into the

(06:18):
lives of folks who couldn't afford to go to the
movies or see a Broadway show. For example. Here's how
Robert Selmer described Lee's work in a nineteen forty six
article for Time magazine. Everybody talks about the man on
the street, he wrote, but nobody does anything about him. Nobody,
that is, except Douglas Lee, who dazzles him with neon lights,

(06:40):
showers him with soap bubbles, fascinates him with animated cartoons,
blows smoke rings over his head, and belabors him with
candle power. Lee's creative talents continue to find an outlet
in advertising all through the nineteen fifties and sixties. By
the nineteen seventies, though, he had moved on to lighting
the entire exteriors of buildings rather than just the signs

(07:03):
that adorned them. One of his specialties was designing dramatic
lighting displays for the summits of skyscrapers, including the Empire
State Building. In nineteen seventy six, he convinced the landmark's owner,
Harry Helmsley to go all out for the nation's bicentennial
celebration by displaying red, white, and blue lights all along

(07:23):
the top of the tower. The stunt was so well
received that the Empire State Building continued to use multicolored
lighting displays to mark all sorts of occasions, a tradition
that still carried on today. Over the years, Douglas Lee's
signs have slowly disappeared from city skylines, replaced by a
sea of led screens and vinyl billboards. That new generation

(07:47):
of sign spectaculars may not seem as charming or inventive
as Lee's pioneering displays, but in the best cases, they
still serve the same purpose, providing illumination and entertainment to
whom whatever happens to look their way. As Douglas Lee
once said, quote from the beginning of time, darkness has
brought on fear, lighting lifts the spirits. I'm Gay, Bluesier

(08:14):
and hopefully you now know a little more about history
today than you did yesterday. You can learn even more
about history by following us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram
at TDI HC Show, and if you have any comments
or suggestions, feel free to pass them along by writing
to this day at iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler

(08:37):
Mays and Ben Hackett for producing the show, and thanks
to you for listening. I'll see you back here again
soon for another day in History class