150 Extra Engineers (IBM advertisement, Fortune, December 1951)
IBM ran this full-page advertisement in the December 1951 issue of Fortune; the Commons record credits it to the agency Cecile & Presbrey. A painted engineer holds a slide rule while the same man repeats to the edges of the page behind him, each copy holding a slide rule at the same angle, and the machine itself sits small in the lower corner with its cabinet doors open.
An IBM electronic calculator "speeds through thousands of intricate computations so quickly that on many complex problems it's like having 150 EXTRA Engineers," and the artist has drawn exactly that: one engineer, then a hundred and fifty of him. The advertisement never names the model.
The second paragraph of copy explains the need for 150 more engineers. "No longer must valuable engineering personnel . . . now in critical shortage . . . spend priceless creative time at routine repetitive figuring." This is December 1951, eighteen months into Korea. The closing paragraph puts machines "vital to our nation's defense" into laboratories, factories and offices, "helping to meet urgent demands for greater production." Beneath the copy, an atom's orbits are drawn around the IBM logotype.
Provenance
- Original source
- https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:IBM_150_Extra_Engineers_1951.jpg
- Collected
- This copy
- 1.5 MB · 3063 × 3933 pixels · archived here
- Rights
- Public domain, per the file's own licence record on Wikimedia Commons.
- SHA-256
06caefcc64507f4659a14bb156c311a3f50774330220bbf1178d41b600739c3e
Accession № 0018. If you hold rights in this and would rather the copy did not exist, say so and it comes down.