PBA Galleries

Volume 1, No. 1 (all published). 16 pp. 9x6", original pale blue wrappers printed in black.

Very rare, probably the only surviving copy of the only issue of this projected monthly. There is no record of this title in WorldCat, nor is there a copy held by the Shelby Museum which inherited many of the Electric Company’s papers, ephemera and other memorabilia. This booklet includes various articles on electric products, a news note that "The Post Office Department at Washington is considering the advisability of using automobiles for mail-collecting  wagons in the large cities...An electric vehicle can be operated much cheaper [than a horse-drawn wagon]…", and a full-page ad for the “Thomas A. Edison, Jr. Incandescent Lamp Company” in Shelby, a failed enterprise of the great inventor’s 23 year-old eccentric son and namesake. Most significant and ironic is an article titled “Why Lamps Burn Out” - because one of the electric light bulbs produced by Shelby – several models of which are pictured in this booklet – has gone down in history, hailed by the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s longest-lasting light bulb, in continuous use for some 113 years, up to the present day, in a Fire Department in Livermore, California.