Spark Of A Champion

Albert Champion (1878-1927), was a French-born bicycle racing champion with major wins in Paris in 1889 and 1904. After retiring from competitive cycling in 1905, he incorporated the Albert Champion Company in Boston, Massachusetts to make porcelain spark plugs and import French electrical parts and components made by the Nieuport aircraft company. Two years later, the Champion name was stamped on the side. He incorporated the Champion Ignition Company in Lansing, Michigan in October 1908. General Motors founder, William Durant, was impressed with the spark plugs and persuaded him to move to Flint and supply his spark plugs for Buick automobiles.

In 1922, he changed the name to AC Spark Plug Company, utilizing his initials, to settle out of court with his original partners in the Albert Champion Company. In May of 1927, Charles Lindbergh flew his Spirit of St. Louis nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean to Paris, France, powered by AC Spark Plugs. Champion died in October of that same year while vacationing in Paris. Today, his initials survive as ACDelco (owned by General Motors) and Champion spark plugs sold by the Federal-Mogul Corporation.

Note: In the 1961 advertisement above, a family has just gotten gas for their 1959 Chevrolet when the service station attendant brings out a spark plug. It sounds to him like they need a new one. He will know better once he gets under the hood, but it is best to replace all of them simultaneously. Not happy about the sales pitch, the son throws a 1961 Oldsmobile promotional model at the attendant's head.

Fingers Facilitate Talking

The first classified telephone directory in 1878 consisted of a single piece of paper by the New Haven District Telephone Company in Connecticut. The fifty subscribers paid to have their names and addresses listed in the directory. The legend of how the pages became yellow five years later would seem to stem from a Cheyenne, Wyoming printer who ran out of white paper. Regardless, research indicated that black type on yellow paper was easier to read than black on white. A well-known fact to many subsequent graphic designers. It also served to separate the white residential listings from the yellow business listings. 

R.R. Donnelley & Sons Company was founded in Chicago in 1864 by Richard Robert Donnelley. His son, Reuben H. Donnelley, founded the otherwise unrelated company formerly known as R. H. Donnelley. Reuben established the first official telephone directory in 1886, creating an entire industry that would become known as the Yellow Page Directory. Initially, they were the exclusive monopoly of R. H. Donnelley and the telephone companies. In 1917, the company was incorporated and moved to New York City though they kept their Chicago operations. When Reuben Donnelley died in 1929, the company continued to contract with the Bell System to publish telephone directories nationally. By 1961, R. H. Donnelley became a wholly owned subsidiary of Dun & Bradstreet.

Note: By the turn of the twentieth century, the telephone served as the only technology that could be used to contact anyone in the world in real time and only accessible through the Yellow Page directories. The newest phone books—delivered free—were an indispensable item for home and business owners. The dot com boom meant that the yellow page days were numbered. 2009 marked the death of the yellow page directories with the bankruptcy of R. H. Donnelley.

A thorough history of the Yellow Page directories can be found here.