Old Magazine Ads

In 2020 during the throes of the COVID-19 pandemic, I found myself collecting old astronomy and nature magazines. It was part of a larger effort to research and write about the history of Questar telescopes, a project I completed the following year.

Over these past few days, I’ve been in a mood to clean things out. All that paper I brought into the house was starting to get to me, and I decided to comb through my collection of magazine clippings and thin things out a bit. In the process, I revisited all those other ads that caught my eye and made me smile.

But first, a bit of background on Questar’s magazine advertising campaign itself.

Questar’s founder, Lawrence Braymer, was not only an amateur astronomer and photographer but also a formally-educated commercial artist. With the help of his wife Marguerite, who also had a strong background in the advertising industry, he began running spots in Sky and Telescope in June 1954.

As many older amateur astronomers will tell you, seeing those advertisements drove many to dream about owning one of those wonderful little telescopes one day. Questar’s incredibly effective marketing efforts soon spread to several other magazines with wider readerships.

The copy in Questar ads discussed the unique features of these versatile instruments with a level of panache that one simply doesn’t encounter very much in advertising anymore.

As time went on, the Questar’s magazine advertising evolved to include descriptions about how the photographer could attach his SLR camera directly to the telescope and turn it into a telephoto lens. Other ads associated Questar telescopes with elegance, compactness, and ease of use in a way that needed little if any supporting copy.

In its heyday, Questar’s magazine advertising had a level of sophistication that was largely unmatched by competitors whose ads in comparison looked either cheap or gimmicky. Appearing in conspicuous positions in various periodicals for many years, Unitron ads were not the worst, but they had qualities that often make me chuckle.

In the July 1961 issue of Scientific American magazine, in which Questar advertised for several decades, I came across this Cyanamid ad which featured a lovely hostess making use of a variety of chemically engineered products to solve vexing outdoor party problems.

Today, the term chemical is synonymous with bad, as in, “I don’t want all those chemicals in the food I eat.” But it’s easy to forget that, in midcentury America, chemicals were the accepted and even desired solution for countless problems, and the companies who manufactured them were celebrated. But change was afoot. In 1962, Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, which marked the beginning of a major shift in popular attitudes about the use of chemicals and the state of the natural environment overall.

Along with hosting outdoor parties helped along by the chemical industry, stylish women handled optical gear with deftness. Here, we see an attentive and uniquely bespectacled observer with the requisite bouffant checking something out with her Zeiss Dialyt 8 x 30 binoculars.

Other advertisers added a bit more sexiness. Celestron promos from the late 1970s and early 1980s stand out in this respect. Some were more blatant than others.

It was certainly a different time—and not necessarily in a better way. Unlike today, being a nerd didn’t have positive connotations, and it didn’t mean you had deep and praiseworthy expertise in a niche area. Instead, it meant you were a target for jocks who laughed as they kicked sand in your face at the beach. But maybe all was not that bad. After all, if a beautiful model with hair flowing in the breeze could enjoy a Celestron telescope, why couldn’t you?

And if Leonard Nimoy used one, then maybe you should, too.

Even if he lacked his signature prosthetics on his ears, his message would have been loud and clear especially to enthusiasts of a certain science fiction series that had appeared on TV over a decade earlier.

For me, amateur astronomy was the gateway into taking my photography more seriously. For years, I had aimed a point-and-shoot camera into a telescope eyepiece to capture photos of the Moon and other objects. In 2021, I finally got my first interchangeable lens digital camera to use with my Questar telescope. Roughly around this same time, I also acquired two Questar-modified film cameras, a Praktina FX and a Nikon F. My love affair with film photography took off from there.

Just as my astro gear worked hand in hand with my increasingly sophisticated camera gear, so too did my efforts to collect Questar magazine ads expose me to some interesting camera ads.

Especially during those first few years it was on the market, the Nikon F appeared in magazine advertising with the same kind of classiness that one found in Questar ads.

Fortunately for my wallet, I never began acquiring old copies of Modern Photography magazine, which was yet another outlet for Questar advertising. But if I had, I probably would have amassed several favorite Nikon advertisements that appeared there especially in the early to mid-1960s.

Seeing old telescope and camera ads often makes me smile. But other science-oriented advertising from the 1950s and 60s is just bizarre. Near the top of the list is one advertisement that appeared toward the front of Natural History for August-September 1959.

With a Geniac, it seemed one could learn “the basic ideas of cybernetics, boolean algebra [sic], symbolic logic, and computer circuitry.”

The ad claimed that several universities and corporations made use of it including Allis-Chalmers, a Milwaukee-area producer of industrial machinery. Having grown up in the Rust Belt, I have first-hand experience living around blue collar folk. I have an exceedingly hard time envisioning how workers at a company like Allis-Chalmers—even the white-collar ones sitting behind desks—would have made serious use of an electric brain machine.

And then there is “The Visible Head.”

I can just imagine how a doctor would be sitting with a patient using The Visible Head to explain how Camel cigarettes smell and taste great in your T-zone.

A quick internet search tells me that Renwal of Mineola, New York, was the producer of all manner of educational model kits. “The Visible Head,” creepy as it may have been, was merely one example. If I had one sitting on my shelf as a kid, I think I would have had nightmares.

Questar sold their telescopes not only as precision instruments of science but also as highly portable travel companions. It was appropriate, then, that their advertisements would appear in magazines who were read not only by astronomy and science enthusiasts but also by aspiring or active travelers.

Appearing in the same issue of Natural History as “The Visible Head,” one ad for a language-learning kit headlined with a testimonial quote: “They took me for a Russian!”

Along with speaking Russian like a pro, a close haircut, narrow tie, and tweed sport jacket were also no doubt required if you found yourself wandering around the Kremlin.

If your pockets were a bit deeper, you had other options. For years, I’ve known that Volvo offered (and may still offer?) a program whereby, if you purchased one of their cars in Sweden and drove it around there while you were on vacation, you could ship it to the United States as a used car—as your property, in other words—and avoid import taxes. But apparently Volvo was not the only company to offer this.

Once in a blue moon, I see old Citroëns being driven around town. Perhaps this was how many of them ended up in the United States.

If you wanted a bit of home on the road—indeed, if you wanted to pull up to a quaint Mediterranean village, the Eiffel Tower, ancient temples, or the Leaning Tower of Pisa with your home right behind you—perhaps the purchase of an Airstream was in order.

After all, how could one resist the appeal of “land yachting”?

Today, it’s easy to think of advertising from the mid-twentieth century as being crude and the prospective buyers it was targeted at as being naïve rubes. But I don’t think much has changed.

Consider those super-junky ads that I see most often on the websites of local newspapers owned by big media conglomerates. You know the ones. These are the ads that suggest holding the end of a plastic water bottle against one’s ear is an effective treatment for tinnitus. Or that spraying WD-40 up your faucet spigot every night can have a positive effect. (I highly doubt that poisoning one’s water lines can do any good, and I’ve never clicked the ad to find out how I might be wrong.) Or that attractive blondes dressed as judges have the lowdown about obscure laws with unexpected benefits for retirees or purchasers of auto insurance. Or that X does Y for Z (with “do this” or “it’s genius” following in parentheses).

All of it is true garbage that I would never intentionally click or tap on. If I inadvertently fat-finger one of these ads, my browser gets redirected several times to weirdo URLs, and I ultimately land on lord-knows-what. Irritated, I suddenly feel the urge to clear my browser’s cache.

Someone has to be making money on these things. Indeed, there are probably just as many naïve rubes out there now as there were then.

No, nothing has really changed except for the channels in which ads appear. It used to be magazines, and now it’s websites. If anything, advertising in its modern online form and at its most base level has become truly sleazy. It makes electric brain machines or language-learning kits that will make others mistake you for a Russian look downright innocent.