Carlisle & Finch is an American manufacturer of nautical equipment, headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio. Founded in 1893 or 1894, the company has focused on searchlights for most of its history, especially for marine applications. Variants of the basic searchlight design have also been used for navigation beacons by airports and lighthouses.
The company is often considered the first in the US to produce electric toy trains, introducing innovations such as using the rails to conduct electrical power to the cars. Although other US companies had produced toy trains, Carlisle & Finch was the first to manufacture and market them in volume, which they did for about the first 20 years of operation. Their sets have become highly prized by model train collectors.
Other early products included electric generators (powered either by water pressure or by gasoline engine). The earliest models were small, intended to power train sets, but they later produced larger units. Gasoline engines for marine use were made under the Clifton Motor Works brand. They also produced electric-powered appliances such as clothes dryers. Since the start of World WarI, Carlisle & Finch has concentrated on high-power lighting.
Corporate history
Carlisle & Finch (C&F) began as a branch office of General Electric (GE) at 182–84 Elm Street in Cincinnati, where electrical engineers Robert Sterett Finch and Morten Carlisle were employed. Finch graduated from the University of Cincinnati in 1890 with a bachelor's degree. Carlisle also received a bachelor's degree, in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the same year.
Work included repairing electrical machinery, such as armatures, transformers, and arc lamps. In 1893 or 1894, C&F purchased the shop from GE for $2,500 (), intending to continue the repair business and branch out into manufacturing. The new company was incorporated on April 15, 1897, and a June 1897 advertisement listed 830 West Sixth Street as their address. The same year, they introduced their first new products, a searchlight based on the carbon arc principle, and a toy train, which also used a carbon arc for its headlight. C&F's 1900 catalog listed sales agents in New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore.
In 1913, C&F protested a ruling by Dudley Field Malone, the Collector of Customs at the Port of New York, that parabolic mirrors imported by the company were subject to a 60% duty as decorated glass. C&F claimed they should be classified as projection lenses which were assessed at 45%. The US Board of General Appraisers upheld the 60% duty. In the years leading up to World WarI, toy train sales fell and the company branched out into other lines of business including gasoline engines.
Carlisle sold his share of the business to Finch on August 3, 1926. Brent S. Finch, Robert's son, was named president, and the company started concentrating entirely on its searchlight business. After World WarII, Brent R. Finch (son of Brent S.) was hired, at which point three generations of Finches were simultaneously employed by the company. , a fourth generation leads the company, with brothers Kurtis B. Finch and Garth S. Finch serving as president and senior vice president, respectively.
Adverse events in the company's history include a 1901 strike, a 1950 fire, and the early 1980s recession. The 1901 strike by 5,000 machinists and allied craftsmen in Cincinnati had only a small effect on C&F. About a dozen workers joined the action, with about 65 men left at work and shop productivity reported to be "slightly handicapped". The 1950 fire destroyed 229 Clifton Avenue, which until shortly before had been their headquarters. C&F had already sold the building to the Cincinnati Board of Education in 1949 and had just moved to a new location at 4562 Mitchell Avenue the previous week. The old building, however, still contained stores of early trains and catalogs which had not yet been removed and these were destroyed in the fire. The 1980s recession severely impacted sales of spotlights for offshore oil rigs (which had previously been their largest market segment) leading to the company's first layoffs.
In a 1962 interview with The Cincinnati Enquirer, Brent R. Finch said that the company "just sort of drifted into the lighting business". Before World WarI, they were producing both marine engines and searchlights but government influence during the war pushed them to concentrate on lighting while other companies built engines. According to Brent, "After the war, the competitors were too far ahead of us in engine manufacturing so we stuck with the lights." At the time of the interview, the company was working on lights that could operate at water pressures of for use on nuclear submarines, and mercury-xenon lamps for coastal lighthouses.
In 2001, Garth Finch told the Cincinnati Business Courier that C&F was starting to use the Internet to improve international sales, which were under pressure from competitors in Europe; he was hoping to reach $1.6 million in overseas sales within three years. Garth also said that they received several inquiries a month from larger companies wanting to buy the business, but that they intended to keep the business private and family-owned. The company had 35 employees at the time. A year earlier, Garth had spoken of expanding into new markets: architectural lighting, smaller ruggedized lighting for use on high-speed boats, and searchlights which could project product images for advertising.
Electric toys
Trains One of C&F's earliest products was electric toy trains. The toy train industry had begun in Europe, with simple designs from British and German toy manufacturers. These were followed in the late 19th century by American companies such as C&F who began manufacturing more substantial models.
Other American companies had made toy trains before C&F. Ives Manufacturing Company, founded by Edward Ives, opened a factory in Plymouth, Connecticut, in 1868. These other makers used wind-up clockworks, steam, electric batteries, or overhead wires to power the cars. According to model railroad historian George E. Hoffer, C&F's 1896 advancement was to use the two rails as electrical conductors. Hoffer called this a "striking innovation" although this technology had been demonstrated as early as 1851 by Thomas Hall. Toy encyclopedist Sharon M. Scott writes that C&F's 1897 train set, which she describes as "revolutionary in its day", was driven by a dry-cell battery enclosed in the locomotive body. The Train Collectors Association, considers C&F to have invented the electric toy train since they were the first to produce them in volume. In his 2007 essay about the company, Cincinnati historian David Conzett takes the same track, describing C&F's electric trains as "the world's first mass-produced and marketed".
C&F's wood and metal trains entered the marketplace around 1897. They were approximately tall and ran on metal track with rails apart, known as 2 gauge. In 1897, C&F made a train set with a 4-wheel coal mining locomotive, three coal cars, two zinc-carbon elements, and a can of chromite. The locomotive included a switch for starting and reversing, and was powerful enough to pull the three loaded cars up a grade. That same year, they also made an "electric railway with double truck car" set, with a car running on two 4-wheel trucks. It was long, high, and wide, and made of polished brass with iron wheels. It had two motors and could run at . Both sets included of gauge track.
In his 1998 New York Times exploration of the history of toy trains, Les Line speculated that an early C&F train set may have been the inspiration which led Joshua Lionel Cowen to start building toy trains. He eventually founded Lionel Corporation, a leading manufacturer of toy trains for most of the 20th century.
Other toys
Although best known for their toy trains, C&F also produced some electric toys of other types. Two battery-powered models were introduced in 1899; an automobile and a torpedo boat probably based on those used in the Spanish–American War. This entire line of business was discontinued at the onset of World WarI.
The long automobile sold for $3.50 . It had wheels, weighed in its wooden box, and could run for up to an hour on its rechargeable bichromate battery. The front wheels could pivot, controlled by a steering lever. The 1900 catalog listing proclaimed that "Electricity will undoubtedly be the universal method of propulsion for all vehicles in the near future" and that the model was "an exact reproduction of the large electric automobiles which may be seen in such numbers at the present day".
The torpedo boat sold for $6.00 . Constructed from copper, it included two watertight compartments to make it unsinkable and could run for two hours on its one-cell bichromate battery. The boat with battery weighed and included an adjustable rudder which could be set to make it run straight ahead or in a circle.
Miniature Electric Railway Construction
In 1906, C&F published a 58-page booklet titled Miniature Electric Railway Construction. The introduction stated that the book was intended for "wide-awake boys" who are interested in the study of electricity, that model railroads were "undoubtedly the best means of studying the practical workings of electricity", and that it would be useful to readers looking to purchase electrical toys as Christmas presents. The book consisted of seven chapters, each of which concentrated on a particular aspect of model railroading. Topics included track construction, banked curves, signalling, direct current motor theory, and switches, with a discussion of which components could be home-built or should be purchased as finished items. Several chapters were devoted to aspects of delivering electrical power to the cars, how power was routed within the cars themselves, and construction of battery systems.
The book garnered some literary attention. Brookline, Massachusetts librarian Harriet Stanley included it in her 1908 Something to Read for Boys and Girls under "Occupations for Boys". In 1913, the New York Public Library placed it on A Selected List of Books on Engineering, Industrial Arts and Trades and the San Francisco Public Library included it in their 1910 List of Books on Electricity under "Experiments and Amateur Apparatus".
1910 catalog
C&F's catalog included three train sets ranging from one car and a circle of track for $3.50 to a coal train with four cars and of configurable track for $5.00 . All of these included components to build a three-cell battery with customer-supplied glass jars for the chromite wet cells.
For $7.00 , one set could be ordered with motors wound to run from a 110 volt direct current lighting circuit for continuous use in a show window. Available options included additional non-powered cars, an inclined plane railway, a brass truss bridge, a cross-over track fixture for building a figure-8 layout, a rail switch, and railway station with automatic signals. A hand-cranked or belt-driven dynamo and a water-driven generator were also available.
The tall inclined plane model was patterned after Cincinnati's Price Hill incline, located near the C&F factory. The $4.00 model had two platforms which rode on inclined rails with one going up as the other came down, driven by a small electric motor. Conzett writes that only 120 of these were ever produced and none are believed to still exist.
Collectability By 1991, C&F train sets had become rare collectables. W. Graham Claytor Jr, who was president of Amtrak at the time, was reported by the Train Collector Quarterly to have "one of the finest collections anywhere of trains by Carlisle & Finch". Claytor noted that the trains were not exact scale models, but were proportionally shorter, fatter, and taller than full-sized trains. The shortness helped the models negotiate curves better.