Hi, I'm the History Guy. I love history, and if you love history too, this is the channel for
you. The decade following the end of the first world war represented a period of significant
change in the western world, an era of sustained prosperity it represented not just a social and
artistic dynamism but a huge development of new technologies. Women got the vote, houses got
electricity, automobiles replaced horses and jazz music blossomed. Social critics lamented the new
materialism of the age and one company managed to combine two of the new technologies of the
era and become a world leader in both. You might never have heard of the Alexander corporation but
at one time they were at the top of two of the industries that defined the Roaring Twenties and
that is history that deserves to be remembered. Airplanes had come of age in the Great War,
able to carry more weight greater distances more reliably, but the War had not just helped
to develop the technology it had made lots of planes. Prior to the war a few people had even
seen a plane, after, people could actually buy them. In 1920 the English Air Force auctioned
off 10,000 planes and 30,000 aircraft engines. In the United States the army sold off thousands of
the Curtiss JN-4, the legendary Jenny. Surplus aircraft were sometimes sold in their original
packing crates for as little as $50 and the war had produced the pilots who could fly them. These
pilots popularized the new machines with feats of daring in the era of the Barnstormer. Pilots
competed in races and contests, charged $1.00 per minute for rides and tried to outdo each other
performing stunts. Many famous pilots earned their wings in the era notably Charles Lindbergh who
barnstormed under the name daredevil Lindbergh. Pioneering daredevil Bessie Coleman became the
first woman of African American descent to hold a pilot's license, unable to find anyone willing to
train her in the US, she traveled to France to get her training and earned an international pilot's
license in 1921. Barnstorming under the name Queen Bess she became a role model for millions.
In the beginning of Regular Air routes with airmail delivery also offered opportunities.
By 1925 US Post Office airplanes were delivering 14 million letters and packages a year and were
maintaining regular flight schedules. Airmail appealed particularly to bankers and other
businessmen who regularly began to use it to move cheques and financial documents more quickly,
reducing the float on cheques and the length of time that funds were idle and unavailable
for use. In 1925 the US government started contracting air mail routes, helping to spur
any profitable Civil Aeronautics industry. In the same era cinema would take over
entertainment in the Western world. At the beginning of the 1920s cinema was brief,
colorless and quiet, but that would all soon change. Techniques for adding color
to film were patented as early as 1899 but the process made a massive change with the advent
of Technicolor. Technicolor not only produced a greater color vibrancy than earlier colorization
methods like cinema color, it also did not require special projectors. In 1922 the film,
The Toll of the Sea became the first general release film in Technicolor. Technicolor sequences
were then featured in some of the biggest blockbusters of the 1920s. In 1919 genius
inventor Lee de Forest, whose invention of the Audion tube allowed the electronics revolution,
patented a process called Phonofilm, which recorded synchronized sound directly onto film.
In a confluence of new technologies one of the de Forest, first test film for the system was of
a flying Curtiss Jenny. In 1926 Don Juan was the first film released with sound effects and music,
in 1927, the Jazz Singer became the first talkie. By the mid 1920s 50 million Americans
a week the equivalent of half the population went to the movies. By the end of the 1920s
83 cents out of every American dollars spent on entertainment went to the movie industry.
But as cinema and aircraft rose to new heights one company managed to rise to leadership in
both industries. J Don and Don M Alexander were born in Keokuk Iowa and got their career started
early as children in outdoor advertising. They used a French stereoscopic projector to protect
colorful slides and advertisements for local businesses on bedsheets that were fashioned
as movie screens. They turned that into a real business in 1919 when they purchased
a movie studio in Spokane Washington and started to produce film advertising. In film advertising,
you would film a commercial for a local business and then you go pay a movie theater to show that
commercial before or in between features. Don M was technically-minded so he would handle the
production but J Don was a Salesman and he would lead the sales force. It was a new industry,
it took some time to develop according to the company website they made $2.50 in their first
year but the idea eventually caught on and they became very successful. By 1923 they had outgrown
the Spokane facility and they purchased a new much larger facility covering more than two city
blocks and Englewood Colorado near Denver. This new facility allowed them to sell a whole lot
more advertising and J Don had developed a very successful strategy for recruiting salespeople by
using a liberal Commission policy and a good training program to help them be successful,
but he had bigger plans. J Don thought that his salespeople spent too much time
in travel and what he wanted to do was to send his sales force across the nation in airplanes.
In 1923 that idea was downright revolutionary. He sent one of his salesmen to Missouri then a
Center for airplane manufacturing to acquire a plane and learn how to fly. He purchased a
1820 Laird Swallow, a rugged biplane that had room for an instructor and a student in tandem
open cockpits for $2,300. The salesmen took 10 hours of instruction and then flew for Colorado,
but the time he got there he was a veteran and he taught many of the other members of the salesforce
to fly. Sold on the idea of an airborne salesforce which would not only spend less time traveling but
also be able to deliver films faster and attract attention as a bonus, J Don decided to purchase 50
airplanes. But at the time airplane manufacturers were hardly producing a plane a month and no one
took his request for fifty seriously. So J Don asked his company engineers to develop their own
design for a small lightweight airplane that could be operated with a minimum of expense.
First flown in September 1925 that design was called the Eagle Rock, it was a simple rugged
biplane that was easy and inexpensive to operate, it was 25 feet 11 inches long and a wingspan of
36 feet 8 inches and could come a pilot and passenger and could be fitted with a number
of different available airplane engines. Foreseeing a market for the plane for small
businesses and individual owners the brothers incorporated the Alexander Aircraft Company and
then formed Alexander Industries which held both the film company and the aircraft manufacturer.
The plan was to build the airplanes on the Alexander facility there in Englewood Colorado
but a fire there and a lack of ability to expand compelled them to move their operations south of
Denver to Colorado Springs. The Eagle Rock became one of the most popular planes of its era and was
used for air mail and crop dusting but because it was able to fit a number of different engines it
was especially popular for barnstorming and air racing. In a time when airplane manufacturers
regularly collapsed after making just a few planes the Alexander factory in Colorado Springs was able
to manufacture eight airplanes a day and the company had 33 distributors and 143 dealers
throughout the nation nearly 900 Alexander Eagle Rocks were eventually produced. For a brief period
between 1928 and 1929 Alexander Aircraft was the largest manufacturer of an aircraft in the world.
The most spectacular event in aviation history of the era was Charles Lindbergh's 1927 solo
transatlantic flight from New York to Paris, reportedly the Eagle Rock had been one of
the plans considered for his flight but the factory production orders were already full,
eventually he chose his famous Ryan monoplane for his legendary flight.
For a brief period of time one of the world's largest airplane manufacturers and one of the
world's largest film studios were part of the same company, J Don and Don M Alexander
had ridden to the top of the Roaring Twenties. But everything changed for them and for the world with
the stock market crash of 1929, with the Great Depression came the collapse of the market for
small aircraft his orders dried up, the Alexander aircraft company filed for bankruptcy in 1932.
The film advertising company remains successful into the 1950s, by the early 1950s the Alexander
Film Company was producing between 2000 and 3000 films annually and maintained a library
of films covering 8,200 different subjects, but the advent of television and decline of
local theaters put an end to the market for film advertising. They found some success in
television advertising but steadily declined, the company stopped producing films in 1967. J Don
Alexander passed away in 1955 at the age of 70 and Don M Alexander passed away in 1972 at the age of
79, their leadership in both the film and airplane industries perfectly represents, encapsulates
the unique dynamism and optimism of that era we called the Roaring Twenties. It is history that
deserves to be remembered. I'm the History Guy and I hope you enjoyed this this edition of my series,
short snippets of forgotten history about ten minutes long. And if you did enjoy it, please
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