Early Aviation Logos

[Ian Curtis]

Did early aviation companies have logos? For example, I know "Curtiss" is always written in a script, but the script always seems different. What about some of the others, like Bleriot, Anzani, the Wright company, the AEA, the Antionette Motor Company, etc? If so, does anyone have any scans of them?

[Rod_Filan]

Absolutely. And wonderful creative ones at that.

Looking over your list, I'm pretty sure because the AEA wasn't a commercial concern that it didn't. But certainly all the rest did. I'll post images into this thread as I run across them.
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Cheers
Rod

[Rod_Filan]

Here's one I thought of right away because I redrew it from the original that Kees had posted at one time. Maybe not early-early aviation but at least it's a start.
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Cheers

[Varese2002]

To add a beautiful one, this one is from the French firm Voisin, one of the very first aircraft companies



Then as now these logos were legally registered. French registers still exist and can be searched online, but are hideously difficult to search. Till now I have not found nothing of the old (pre-1914) times.

Cheers

Kees

[Rod_Filan]

Morane-Saulnier emblem



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[Rod_Filan]

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[Rod_Filan]

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[Aquilius]

As said before, apart from the "one-man-companies" most of them had a (often registered) trademark.

Here are a few of them from here and there:



It is not a surprise that many of them contained stylised wings or birds, some of them propellers. Others were mainly a typical lettering.

Interestingly the swedish Thulin company and the danish Nielsen & Winther had almost the same brand logo.


Rod, since you posted a few advertisements, this New Zealand website (The Vintage Aviator | Constructors Of Military Aircraft) has a whole bunch of company posters as decoration of the site at left hand. You can also obtain them there, a few british ones but dominating are the colorful german posters.

Does anyone know where one can find similar advertisements of french and US companies?


Cheers

Aquilius

[Aquilius]

Hi Ian,

I haven't red your request carefully and I haven't sorted my company files...


Here is at least how the Blériot logo looked:




... and two Antoinette advertisements I really like:





Cheers

Aquilius

[Rod_Filan]

Originally Posted by Aquilius

...dominating are the colorful german posters

German printers were always the best IMO. If you find an American colour postcard of fine quality of the era, undoubtedly it will have been printed in Germany. The lithography technology to that degree didn't exist in the US at that time and Germans were very good at preventing "trade secrets" from leaving the country.

I'm a printer by trade, and a boss I had during the 80's was from Germany. During the time of the 3rd Reich he worked for the government when Germany was developing the photographic screen-printing process using carbon and bi-chromate etc. He told me it was so secretive that he only knew the part of the process he was involved in. Between the workshops and laboratories there were separating areas with guards -- for example, the person preparing the sensitized emulsions would place these in a room for the person preparing the silkscreens -- then once done, that person would put the prepared screens in a separating area and the person exposing the screens would take them from there and do their task with them -- from there the screens would go into another separate area for the next person.... and so it would go all down the line until they reached the men that would do the actual printing. Eventually, as you can imagine, because everyone talks to each other outside of work, the process was pretty much figured out by the workers and the shops became less secured inside but still guarded carefully outside -- yet at the outset it was pretty much run like a top-secret military weapons facility.

Anyways, I always thought that was interesting and figured I'd mention it.
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Cheers