Business screen magazine (1946)

Sixty years ago, before the days of the filnistrip projector, the 16mm or 8nim motion picture projector, and 99 per cent i>f the other hardware to be found on dealers" shelves today, Jamison Handy had an idea that people could be persuaded to adopt attitudes and learn new skills through the use of pictures, and more particularly, through a succession of moving pictures. Handy, now president of the Jam Handy Organization, one of the nation's leading visual communications firms, was then a young man serving an apprenticeship in the communications field as an assistant in the editorial and advertising departments of the Chicago Tribune, who had never forgotten his first realization of the magic of pictures dating back to his boyhood, when he often spent much of his allowance for glass slides to show on his stereopticon. One of Handy's projects on the Tribune which had given him the greatest satisfaction was the inauguration of a series of pages of popular science pictures — photographs — which showed how things worked. The illustrated pages, with inspirational articles by Herbert Kaufman, were so successful that they were syndicated throughout the lUnited States and encouraged Handy to leave the Tribune and form a company designed to use pictures in business education and training : — the Herbert Kaufman and Handy Company, predecessor to today's Jam Handy Organization. t In a recent conversation with 'Business Screen's publisher, Bob Seymour, Jam Handy spoke about some of his early experiences in the iaudio-visual world working with his first client, the National Cash Register Company: 1 "We found that John Patterson, •the president of the company, had over 20,000 slides — glass slides. Many were carefully designed in ;elementary attitudes to portray buyjand-sell situations, of presentation and acceptance or rejection, right way and wrong way, simple sketch-^ You could put them together for -ales instruction. It was like a Chinese alphabet with 3,000 characters. Every different facial or bodily attitude, every retail situation could he pantomimed, visualized and il Jamison HandyFounder of Business Audiovisuals His career chronicles the history of audiovisuals in business, yet the man who pioneered slidefilms, industrial films, sound teaching, and several mechanical techniques feels there is much yet to be done. luminated. All the actions and reactions in demonstrating, desirable and undesirable, could at least be suggested, vividly. "Patterson had long used simple devices to focus people's attention on what he was talking about. Long before he had slides, he had used wooden matches on his desk to represent men. In conversation he would take one match as a body, and the head of the match as the head of a man, and other matches for arms and legs. Whether with one man or a group, he would make a visual impression. He had the same basic audio-visual idea that Tom Edison had. I think he may have gotten it from Edison, who had a conviction that pictures were going on at all times in people's minds. Patterson believed that thinking was in terms of vision. You don't know what mental show your prospect is projecting in his own brain. You'd better do something to influence what those pictures are. "You can see that with John Patterson's match men and later his glass slides in 1911, he really had the beginning of a business screen. Our first job at National Cash Register was to inform and enthuse sales people, first with "turnover" charts, which we now call flipcharts. And we also started to train NCR service mechanics with outlines of gears and levers on the charts. John Patterson had one basic idea on those charts which is that no sheet of paper, no matter how big you make it, is big enough for more than one idea, and I've been trying for .SO years to teach that to The Jam Handy Organization and to all its clients." ■'About this time some businesses needed technical education so much that they were ready for in-plant schools," Handy told us. "We had one of our first opportunities of this nature working on the problems of servicing the "nickel snatchcr" coin boxes of the Illinois Bell Telephone Company. We developed in collaboration with them a program to use animated technical drawings and glass slides to show how coin boxes were constructed, how they worked or failed, and how to fix them. "Next we got into training long distance telephone operators with phonograph recordings. At the beginnings of long distance operation, the operators couldn't be allowed Continued on next page FEBRUARY, 1971 33