The video of the month for September is an industrial film from 1949 produced by Caravel Films for the Towmotor Corporation of Cleveland, Ohio.
Towmotor was founded in 1919 and specialized in tractors and forklifts for materials handling. In 1933, they produced a gasoline-powered forklift that became standard equipment in manufacturing and distribution facilities. While the original Towmotor Corp. no longer exists, the term "tow motor" is still used today as a generic term to describe forklifts and similar freight moving equipment.
The film, titled the "One Man Gang," solved a problem for salesmen trying to land customers for Towmotor. In a 1949 article from Business Screen Magazine by the company’s advertising manager A.H. Roth wrote:
"Fork lift trucks are not an over the counter item. After all, you can’t drive one into a customer’s office. The product posed a problem, all right, but Towmotor Corporation...found a way to lick the sales bottleneck and really sell.
With Caravel Films behind the cameras, they turned out a thirty-minute motion picture that visualized their line of products, discussed the economics of material handling and carried the customer into factories across the nation to show him how other manufacturers were using fork lift trucks."
The article goes on to describe how Towmotor successfully distributed the film to potential customers all starting with its premiere at the Materials Handling Exposition in Philadelphia with an audience of over 700 people. Read the full article in Hagley’s Digital Archives
Kevin J. Martin is the Andrew W. Mellon Curator of Audiovisual and Digital Collections at Hagley Museum and Library.