Euclid Paste & Paint

The so-called Paste & Paint Department of the National Lamp Works of GE was established in 1906, within the Euclid Lamp Plant. Its humble beginnings were a 30x75-foot space between two buildings that had previously been roofed over to serve as a carriage shed. Adding a floor, walls and basic services made the space habitable, and the operations were staffed by its sole employee, J. LeRoy Dana, who had been with the company since 1895. In the beginning the Paste & Paint department had just two products. The 'paste' was a mixture of colloidal graphite in water solution of caramel and gum arabic, which forms a refractory and electically conductive adhesive for bonding the ends of carbon filaments to the leading-in wires of the lamp stem. The 'paint' was a getter of finely ground red phosphorus, which was painted ontp the inside of lamp exhaust tubes and vaporised into the bulb just before tipping-off from the vacuum pumps, where it served its purpose of 'getting' any residual moisture and oxygen that would otherwise be deleterious to the performance of the lamp.

By 1920 the Paste & Paint division had grown to six employees, serving General Electric lamp and Radio tube plants around the world with a broad variety of specialised chemical preparations. Its product range grew to include numerous more advanced kinds of getters, the special monogram inks that are burned into the surface of the glass to mark the finished lamp, a broad variety of coloured lacquers for the coating of miniature christmas-tree lamps, and vacuum-grade rubber tubing used on the lampmaking machinery. With the growing product range it moved five times to other locations around the Euclid lamp works site, but in 1920 mvoed to eminently more suitable premises within the company's NELA Park Headquarters. There it ultimately grew to become the company's present Chemical Product Department, and its operations began to expand exponentially, especially following the start of manufacture of phosphors for fluorescent lamps. Its final move was in 1949, to the newly constructed Ivanhoe Road Chemical Plant in Cleveland.