Deploying ‘all[-]important moments’: seeing time in Duke University’s collections of early North American advertisements

When the Colgate Company began advertising its roll-on shaving soap dispenser in 1914, its advertisers experimented with a narrative form as novel as the ‘Magic Shaving Stick’ itself. Over the course of three dozen sequential panels of image and text, the protagonist of “A MOVING PICTURE: The Conversion of Mr. Prejudice” (Figure 1) decides to abandon his old-fashioned shaving brush for Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The use of an invented character as an avatar for the consumer was a bold if not entirely original move. The potential of the gimmick had been proven a decade earlier, by the successful licensing of comic strip star Buster Brown’s name and image to countless businesses across the nation (see Gordon 1995, 58–61). Mr. Prejudice and Buster Brown joined a large cast of trademarked characters who began to appear in American advertising in the 1890s (see Strasser 1989, 115–121). The truer breakthrough of “A MOVING PICTURE” lay in its manipulation of narrative time. Along with its close-up panels, the advertisement used cinematic intertitles to transition through time and space, moving the action forward, for instance, through its twenty-first panel: ‘Next day after shaving Mr. Prejudice sees much lather left in his mug’. The Colgate Shaving Stick advertisement, through the juxtaposition in its opening sequences of two scenes unfolding at the same time, gestures toward simultaneity. After eleven panels reveal Mr. Prejudice’s old-fashioned shaving routine, a second sequence of only five panels shows his son Tom’s similar but faster routine with Colgate’s Shaving Stick. The unequal number of panels devoted to the shaving routines of father and son implicitly demonstrates the Shaving Stick’s time-saving properties. A freshly shaven Tom arrives at the family breakfast table in panel fifteen; when the next panel shows his father lumbering in, the hands on the mantle clock have leapt forward fifteen minutes. The quasi-jump-cut between panels, precisely indexed to the clock image, was itself pioneered only a few years earlier by films such as D.W. Griffith’s The Fatal Hour (1908). “A MOVING PICTURE” offers an early instance of an advertisement narrating two simultaneous actions, while indicating their differing speeds with a moving clock. Although somewhat novel in its form, “A MOVING PICTURE” is but one of many early twentieth-century advertisements to make pitches related to the multilayered time consciousness of North American consumers. This archive feature offers a brief tour of