Salesman's Glow

In a darkened room at Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria Hotel this week, newsmen watched a large, opaque, glass ceiling-panel suddenly light up, flood the room with a mellow glow. There was no bulb or fluorescent tube behind the glass panel, yet its whole surface glowed evenly.

Thus Don G. Mitchell, 46-year-old president of Sylvania Electric Products Inc., showed off "Electro-Luminescence," a radically new method of producing light entirely different from either incandescent or fluorescent light. Instead of filaments or gases, the source of the light is a chemical sprayed on the inner side of the glass. When "excited" by an electric current, the chemical becomes luminescent. It is the longest-lasting source of light yet made, said Mitchell. "For the first time, lighting can now be literally built into the architecture of a room in large, glowing panels."

With his new system, Don Mitchell hopes to make as big a hit as Sylvania did with fluorescent lighting in 1938. General Electric had developed fluorescence, which uses only one-third as much power as ordinary bulbs, but had not pushed it. (Trustbusters later charged, in a suit still pending, that G.E. dragged its feet under pressure from utilities.) Sylvania, by jumping into the market with its own fluorescent tubes, made such lighting commonplace. Though G.E. filed a patent suit against Sylvania (still pending), the fluorescent tube started Sylvania on its own fast growth from an $8,000,000-a-year gross to one of $162 million last year.

How to Sell. Much of that growth has come since New Jersey-born Don Mitchell, a smooth-talking man in a hurry, stepped into Sylvania's vice presidency in 1942, at the age of 37. Even then he had a name among U.S. merchandisers as sales manager of Chicago's Marshall Field and as the man who had first persuaded dairies to put milk in paper containers. As marketing chief of American Can, he was the first to plug beer in cans. As sales manager of Pepsi-Cola, he sparked soft-drink sales with take-home cartons.

Mitchell steered Sylvania through a wartime expansion in which its plants grew from seven to 28, its employees from just under 6,000 to 30,000, its sales to $125 million in 1945. At World War II's end, when Mitchell moved into the presidency, he figured he would be lucky to keep as much as $33 million of Sylvania's overgrown sales. Instead, he chalked up $69 million in the first postwar year, $95 million in the next, kept boosting sales until last year they passed the wartime peak. To Sylvania's original lines--incandescent bulbs, radio tubes, photoflash bulbs and radios--he added television sets and tubes.

How to Manage. Don Mitchell has put $39 million into expansion since war's end. He has a $75 million backlog of military orders for everything from proximity fuses to radar sets. He is building a new $5,000,000 plant at Burlington, Iowa to make radio tubes for defense, more than doubling Sylvania's Long Island physics laboratory to handle work for the Atomic Energy Commission, and building or expanding six more plants.

In growing big, Mitchell has kept his plants small, usually under 1,000 employees. He wants to restore the personal touch between management and workers, be sure that a plant manager can get to know his employees, spot up & coming young men. Said Mitchell: "People feel good when the boss claps them on the back. I'm not being maudlin or sentimental--the system pays off."

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