Ready or not, #WinterWednesday is here. We're doing our best to keep warm with this ca. 1950s photograph from DuPont, which documents the company's industrial research into cold weather clothing.
A caption accompanying this image reads: "At the Haskell Lab, DuPont scientists are constantly probing new fields. Typical of this ever widening interest is the all weather room, where scientists study body reactions at extremely high and low temperatures. By learning what happens at the extremes and by experimenting with new kinds of clothing, they hope to find ways to make people more comfortable under conditions in which they normally work and live. For comfort, they have learned is closely allied with safety."
This item is part of Hagley Library's DuPont Company Product Information Collection (Accession 1972.371). In 1952, the DuPont Company organized a Product Information section within the Public Relations Department. Its main purpose was to create news releases accompanied by photographs that would be run editorially by trade journals and newspapers to create inexpensive publicity and indirect advertising.
To be used, the news releases had to include interesting information about a DuPont product, its development, manufacture, or applications. They could not be direct commercial promotions of a product itself as that would be the work of the Advertising Department. Product Information photographs and their news releases told the reader what DuPont did, why it was important, and sometimes, how it was done.
This collection has not been digitized in its entirety, but a selection of materials from it, mostly photographs taken from the 1930s through the 1950s, are available to view in our Digital Archive. Click here to take a look!