Vintage Rohm and Haas Magazine Ads

Many people collect vintage magazine ads. I don't but I worked for 35 years for the company featured in these ads. Rohm and Haas Company was a large chemical company with a 100-year history when it was bought by Dow Chemical in 2009. Although it was a pretty big company, most people did not know if it, unless you lived in it's headquarter city of Philadelphia. The company mainly sold to other industrial companies, not directly to the consumer market. One R&H product you probably know is Plexiglas.

This ad is from the January 1955 edition of "Chain Store Age". Rohm and Haas had invented the plastic it named Plexiglas in the 1930s. The company got a big boost during the Second World War when Plexiglas was the material of choice for aircraft windows. After the war, Plexiglas found a big market in outdoor signage, as the ad above illustrates. Plexiglas would find a lot of other architectural uses such as lighting and skylights.

The above ad is from the October 1959 edition of "Architectural Record". The next ad is from the May 1965 edition of the same magazine.

There is a surprising amount of Rohm and Haas memorabilia available on eBay and I've bought a number of pieces over the years. I've been looking more actively for ads recently and over the next few months I'll feature what I've found.