And the Winner is! National Electrical Carbon Once Won an Academy Award
April 21, 1996, article one

PIX#1 - The National Carbon Co., won this Oscar in 1956 for its development yellow flame carbon arc lighting.

“The envelope please.” Each spring since 1929 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has gathered the best, brightest and beautiful of Hollywood together in a great festive conclave to celebrate filmdom’s annual triumphs and to dole out the Academy Awards, commonly known as “the Oscars.”

For most of us the big thrill is to learn who the Best Actor and Best Actress are and what flick copped the Oscar for Best Picture. You’ve got your Brandos, your Nicholsons, your Newmans. Your Streeps, your Hepburns, your Maclaines. Your Gandhi, your Platoon, your Ben-Hur. It’s all faraway, fantasy stuff. Nothing hometown or neighborly about it.

But such was not the case once. There was one time an Oscar was earned right here in good old Fostoria. In fact 1996 is the 40th anniversary because in 1956, March 21 to be exact, an Academy Award was given “To the National Carbon Co. (now National Electrical Carbon Corp.) For the development and production of a high efficiency yellow flame carbon for motion picture photography.”

National Carbon had been involved in motion picture lighting since the 1930's when it helped develop and build white flame carbon arc lights. An arc light is one in which the light source of high intensity is an electric arc, usually between carbon rods. With the advent of wider screen processes such as Cinerama, Vistavision and Cinemascope, more intense lighting was required.

At this point Fostoria entered the scene. Carbon’s Fostoria laboratory worked on experimental white flame carbon lights as well as yellow flame, red flame, blue flame, pearl white flame and other variations of the white flame carbon arc.

Eventually, the Fostoria lab developed a successful yellow flame carbon arc. According to Carbon’s company trade journal, ‘Management,’ of May 1956, the new lamp “virtually doubled the photographically effective light output of the carbon arc lamp.”

According to the Review-Times of March 23, 1956, Merrill Bushong, Manager of Development for National Carbon here in Fostoria at the time, supervised the several years of “intensive research” that went into the new lamp.

Fostoria Plant Manager R.J. Zavesky said, “National Carbon Company is naturally very proud to have been awarded an ‘Oscar’ for technical achievement and is very proud of the cooperation it received from the motion picture industry in making possible this contribution to better studio light.”

On top of that, the new yellow flame lamp accomplished its dramatic improvement in lighting without using additional power and with only marginal additional costs to studios. Furhermore, the new lamps gave off less waste heat on the sets and improved color quality.

Loyal Griggs was the director of photography for Cecille B. DeMille’s epic, The Ten Commandments. “I don’t know how I could have shot The Ten Commandments without the added power of yellow flame carbons. It was necessary to make a perfect match of the power, directional characteristics and brilliance of the Egyptian sunshine. DeMille sets have always been terrific in scope but the sets for The Ten Commandments were beyond the superlatives that might ordinarily describe them. We had to have directional controllable light sources with double the photographic effect of anything in current use. Yellow flame carbons provided the answer.”

The lighting requirements of a movie maker are difficult to picture. Carbon’s Management journal puts it this way.

“Now, the head of a common pin has an area of approximately one square millimeter. Visualize, if you will, 1000 brightly burning birthday candles, then squeeze them down in size until all their light comes from ‘the head of a pin’ and you would have a light source of one square millimeter in size with a brightness of 1000 candles per square millimeter - equal to that of a typical carbon lamp.”

Carbon arc lamps of that day could be made to produce light more intense than that of the sun as seen from here on planet Earth. That’s the intensity of the light needed to film and project a motion picture. Remember that a powerful light source is needed to project an image on the big, silver screen from a frame on a reel of film, said frame being about the size of a postage stamp.

Think of all the wonderful flicks that have been made more enjoyable because of National Carbon’s technological innovation and Fostoria’s part in that - The King and I, Bandit of Sherwood Forest, Samson and Delilah, Bridge on the River Kwai, Ben-Hur and many, many more.

The program of the 28th Annual Academy Awards stated, “This newly developed carbon has effectively doubled the light heretofore available in arc lighting and provides a color distribution to match the sensitivity of present color motion picture negatives. Photography of much greater apparent sharpness and depth is thereby achieved.

“This award was voted by the Academy Board of Governors, upon recommendation of the Scientific or Technical Awards Committee.”

That statement is also inscribed on the base of the Oscar.

The committee was composed of experts qualified to evaluate the merits of technical innovation.. Carbon’s Oscar was the only Class 1 (statuette) scientific or technical award given in 1956.

National Carbon’s Southern California Sales Representative, Charles Handley, accepted the award for National Carbon.

For many years the Oscar’s home was at the national headquarters in Danbury, Conn. In 1986 the Fostoria plant was sold to Morgan Crucible of England and the Oscar was sent here to Fostoria.

In order to see to it that the Oscar was properly displayed, machinist Ben Pratt designed and built a graphite and glass case for the award.

Ben Pratt worked on that project for a month. He spent a week just making the machine tooling for the job. The spindles were machined to identical dimensions. The top is actually eight graphite pieces glued together.

Ben said it isn’t exactly clear whose idea it was to build a case for the Oscar. “We were discussing the Oscar with the plant manager. Someone asked me if I could design something for it. So I designed and built it. It was quite a challenge.”

The graphite used in the case is the same graphite Carbon uses to build control engine nozzles for the NASA space shuttle. Graphite is carbon which has been heated to 3,000 degrees which improved its strength and durability.

Ben Pratt has made many interesting graphite items as retirement gifts or trophies for Carbon employees. He’s fashioned golf trophies, candlesticks, but vases and even a graphite map of Ireland showing all the counties.

Louis Wenzke wrote a bridge column for the Review-Times some years back.

Sale and pepper shakers, a lawyer’s scale and a pirate treasure chest are also among Ben’s unique and skillfully crafted creations.

Now most of us surely know that Oscar statues are gold plated figures 10 inches tall and mounted on a film reel. And some of us probably know that an Oscar weighs around seven pounds. But how many of us know why the Academy Awards are called “Oscars?”

Well, back in 1931 the librarian for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences eyeballed an Academy Award one day and said how much it reminded her of her uncle. You guessed it - her good old Uncle Oscar! (This is a true story. You could look it up.)